James O’Brien Interview
Published in En Vague issue two
“I don’t know who pushes back against the perception that there is something wrong with feminism, something wrong with homosexuality, something wrong with foreigners. I mean I do but I’m just one man with a microphone.”
You’ll probably know James O’Brien from your facebook feed. Freeze-frame images of the radio host, arms aloft in frustration, have become a ubiquitous feature of social media use, such is the frequency with which clips from his daily radio show on LBC go viral.
As the political landscape has become more and more surreal, James’
acclaimed monologues have become highly charged and sometimes more
closely resemble Peter Finch’s character Howard Beale in The Network,
than any more famous left wing orators.
After the EU referendum, his phone lines buckled under the weight of wave
after wave of slogan spouting leave supporters, all convinced they’d
discovered a new impenetrable logical attack, only to get their arguments
systematically dismantled.
Against the backdrop of an increasingly far right media, his 10–1 midday
slot feels like one of the final bastions of compassionate political
reporting.
Over a cup of tea at LBC’s London studios, I gathered his thoughts on;
the Brexit campaign, Rupert Murdoch, Political Correctness, the rise of
fascism… you know, all that fun stuff.
Political Correctness
“I’m a big fan of political correctness, I prefer to refer to it as “manners”. Look what happens when political correctness is removed- we elect Donald Trump and we vote to jump off a cliff because of myths and lies about the European Union.
“I think it has a lot to do with parents, oddly, if your dad or your granddad held views that you thought were pretty repellent, you love your dad, you love your grandad so you don’t want to think of them as evil or vicious (which was kind of the downside of political correctness) then no wonder you have this groundswell of resentment against it .
“A bloke who grew up in the 40’s or 50’s who has ripe feelings towards the Irish or Pakistanis is very much a product of his time and to apply our moral code to him is a little bit unfair. I think it was not ‘oh I can’t be publically bigotted anymore’ but more people saying ‘yeah alright I understand that we have moved on but can you not call those who haven’t such rude names please’ and I was probably guilty of that.
“But it’s been hijacked by people who are bigots and homophobes and they’ve used these cries of protest very cynically to bring their bigotry and their chauvinism into the mainstream and they’ve done it very successfully and it’s worked.
“There was a small window when you couldn’t say bigoted things and you can now.”
‘legitimate concerns about immigration’
“The problem is that you tell me that you think immigration means your child won’t have a school place — then I ask you how much you know about the provision of school places in your area. I ask you if you know anyone whose child hasn’t got a school place because of immigration. I ask you how much you know about how taxation supports the tax base of this country and how much of that money is spent on building schools. At the end of which you should say, `yeah maybe it’s not that simple’.
“But ‘legitimate concerns about immigration’, I mean there are some but if you live in an area with low immigration, and all the data show that those people are most likely to be spooked by immigrants, and you’re complaining then there is something going on that is not statistical and is not fact based. What are you going to call that feeling? You call it xenophobia — a fear of foreigners-but then it’s ‘political correctness gone made, stop calling people racist’.”
Rubert Murdoch:
“I don’t believe Rupert Murdoch is a fascist, I think he’s a man who is motivated solely by money and power and there is more money and power in peddling the toxic right-wing line.
“His business success was built on breaking the unions so what is his line on unions going to be? But what is the only way that the working people of Britain have to protect themselves against mechanisation, globalisation and exploitation? Trade unions.
“But the best selling newspaper in the United Kingdom was built on the breaking of trade unions so if you’re getting your information from there you’re probably not getting a clear picture of the role a trade union could play in your life and that scares me.”
Why Vote Leave won
“The Remain side turned up to a knife fight with a pair of boxing gloves and a copy of the Queensberry rules. I think that’s where liberalism is now at, it’s reading the Queensberry rules while their enemies have guns and knives and shivs and I don’t know what happens next. You can’t beat a liar with the truth.
“They said ‘take back our country’ so how do you even address that? The premise is that we’ve had something taken away from us but that’s not true. So you fight it by saying ‘that’s nonsense’, but [Remain] fought it by saying ‘yeah, but…’. Thinking about it, it’s a miracle that so many voted Remain.”
Fake News
“Social media has provided the absurd with a credible camouflage because the sites look like real news sites. Social media has made it very hard for some people to distinguish between propaganda and journalism and so some people dine on that and say; ‘well propaganda is journalism, they are the ones peddling the bile and hatred’. But people who are comfortable wth political correctness need to be charitable towards those people falling into the trap, but not those who are peddling it.
“Now you get people who proudly say that they get all their news from Breitbart and Info Wars even though what they publish is demonstrably bollocks. But people are proud of it.”
The Rise of Far-Right Populism
“There’s a kind of alignment of planets; economic difficulties and globalisation make people feel like their lives haven’t gone quite how they’d like them too and they are looking for something to blame which is slightly simpler than reality. So then if someone says to blame it on foreigners that’s very seductive. I think even more so if you lean towards the right you don’t want to think that you’ve actually voted for the system which has robbed you of your future and you’re a bit uncomfortable with all these women and brown people being treated with the same level of respect as you have been.
“Then the refugee crisis came at the perfect time because it added to the economic uncertainty; ‘they are coming to get what you’ve got’.
“It’s very tempting to be able to blame your whole life on someone else, and the person who is probably responsible for you being poor, or you be depressed, or you being left behind is probably someone with loads and loads of money. And the people with loads and loads of money make the news at the moment.
“….but now I don’t know who pushes back against that perception that there is something wrong with feminism, some wrong with homosexuality something wrong with foreigners. I mean I do but I’m just one man with a microphone.”
It’s at this point, reportedly for the sake of the piece, but more for my own sanity I ask James if he sees a positive way out of this:
“We’re supposed to be more educated and more informed than ever before and you have to think that when people realise that Trump and Brexit won’t deliver anything like what they promise we might start getting nostalgic for the days when it was just about manipulating figures and political correctness, and we weren’t screaming at each other.
“It might be that we’re living in a time of neo-fascism or it might be that we’re having a howl of protest against the way things were and we’ve just picked on the wrong way to fix it.”
