How they Broke Britain, by James O’Brien

This is a righteously angry account of the past 15 years of politics in the UK, under Conservative (mis)rule. O’Brien ends with the disastrous mini-budget announced on 23 September 2022 by Kwasi Kwarteng, Chancellor the Exchequer to Prime Minister Liz Truss. The book is about the cascade of errors and bad-faith actions that, over more than a decade, got us to that point.

It’s divided into chapters covering, in turn, Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, Andrew Neil, Matthew Elliott, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss (with an afterword in my paperback edition written in February 2024 about Rishi Sunak). It is necessarily wide-ranging to cover the myriad interconnections between politicians, think-tanks and allies in the media, and between politicians in the UK with movements and cabals abroad. It is densely packed with evidence. The result is engrossing (due to the author) and intensely infuriating (due to what he describes).

One example will give the flavour:

“In August 2019, Thiemo Fetzer, a professor in economics at the University of Warwick, went further:

‘I gathered data from all electoral contests that took place in the UK since 2000, and assembled a detailed individual-led panel data set covering almost 40,000 households since 2009. Through these data, I studied to what extent an individual’s or region’s exposure to welfare cuts since 2010 was associated with increased political support for UKIP in the run up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. The analysis suggests that this association was so strong that the 2016 EU referendum would have resulted in a clear victory for Remain (or the referendum might never have happened) had it not been for austerity measures such as extensive cuts to public spending.’ [Quotation from Thiemo Fetzer, ‘Did Austerity in the UK Lead to the Brexit Crisis?’, Harvard Business Review, 23 August 2019]

In other words, David Cameron and George Osborne created the dissatisfaction and distress that would prompt many people to vote for Brexit. Into this space sashayed the deliberate and deceitful demonisation of workers from other EU countries, perpetrated by Nigel Farage and co., and the unkeepable promises about prosperity punted by the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, drawing on erroneous economic modelling.” (p. 242)

O’Brien is good at making these connections: the way one misguided policy or deliberately cynical action has had far-reaching negative effects. The incidents he describes are usually well known — they were often leading stories on the news — but he shows how they are symptoms of a wider culture of privilege and personal connection. He shows how each headline is an incremental steps towards that mini-budget.

In some ways, I think this book picks up the baton from The Blunders of Our Governments (2013), by Anthony King & Ivor Crewe, but whereas that largely describes a bunch of well-meaning professionals whose fault is unconscious bias, O’Brien digs into something much more pernicious: a protection racket, effectively, to line the pockets of the haves by preying on the have-nots. 

But it is also about the fantasies of those involved: their actions, their supporters, driven by beliefs that fly in the face of reality. The perceived threat of immigration or of public spending, the perceived bias of the media if it is not wholly supportive, a whole pack of straw dogs. Worst of all is the lofty disdain when it all goes wrong, the certainty — despite all evidence — that they will yet be vindicated.

Not delusions of grandeur but delusions of the grand.