How They Broke Britain

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O'Brien distinguishes between "winning" an argument and having a more honest, productive exchange, and he lays out his own shortcomings over the years as an LBC broadcaster to provide evidence and context. The book has eight chapters, each of which dives into a singular issue or issues and shows transcripts of O'Brien fumbling the ball when talking to people on his program about issues he says he is "well meaning but ill informed" about. Probably I was most interested in the chapters on attitudes concerning traditional marriage because I too am susceptible to some of society's prejudices about wedded vs. nonwedded couples (though I didn't realize it until I read the book), and O'Brien's admission of his own hypocrisy concerning meat eating is one I share as well. (Like him, my diet is a "work in progress.") The one issue, I think, he is careful to point out he's not completely sold upon is transgender rights, and his admission that he holds two contradictory points of view on the subject, and therefore must be wrong somehow (he isn't sure how yet) is fascinating to look at. (It's summarized a bit in the midst of this exchange he had with Piers Morgan last October, when the book came out.) There's no point in having a mind if you're not going to change it," LBC broadcaster James O'Brien says at the very end of this excellent rumination on how to examine what we think and shift it when necessary. Hear hear. Most of the arguments are trendy ones, such as 'how to punish children', 'white priveldge' and 'vegetarianism'. Some of the arguments were ok, like the punishing of children, it seems the author had a lot of quotes for that, however , often the sides are ill-represented , probably to allow the author to win his argument easily.

The book works on the mistakes of the Conservative government and there are some good points to debate here but it’s all a little one way and predictable. I was disappointed. James O'Brien pledează pentru importanța schimbării opiniilor, insistând că degeaba ai o minte dacă nu ești dispus să o folosești pentru a-ți reconsidera propriile convingeri. Iain Duncan Smith: Remembering the time former Work and Pensions Secretary clashed with James O'Brien". The Independent. 19 March 2016 . Retrieved 9 February 2018. O’Brien: ‘Both sides will find it very hard to forgive me for being right.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The GuardianEveryone here is “awful” or “stupid”. Jeremy Corbyn is “pitiful”, Liz Truss merely “over-promoted”. Intriguingly, he seems almost fond of Dominic Cummings. “He’s clearly mad as a box of frogs, but I think he is driven by demons rather than defined by them.” I went on a bit of a journey with this book. At first it made me sad and to be honest a little depressed. In 2015, O'Brien presented a chat show for ITV called O'Brien, which aired for ten episodes. [36] Podcast [ edit ]

James O’Brien: ‘relies almost entirely for his text on the hard labour – the investigations, and the thinking – of others’. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian He tends to write like some kind of prophet of doom and is blinkered to the history he doesn’t want to discuss if it means he is to admit his mistakes in judgement. Notably the ‘Carl Beech’ fiasco among many.Oppenheim, Maya (11 July 2017). "James O'Brien demolishes Leave voter in farcical on-air standoff". The Independent . Retrieved 27 November 2018. These are the people at whom the book is primarily aimed – not Westminster anoraks but the politically curious who realise something has gone badly wrong in this country but haven’t fully joined the dots. “Something’s broken in Britain, and what it is is the fundamental relationship with objective truth,” says O’Brien. “So I hope this book becomes some sort of Rosetta Stone, or at least a compass to navigate the oceans of bullshit.” All the topics discussed by the author are extremely interesting and relevant to the society in which we live, but the most interesting part is the way James O'Brien explains the mechanism by which people form certain beliefs, beliefs which are hard to change, most of these beliefs being based on emotional problems or even traumas rooted in childhood. a b "Frank Lampard's call to LBC: The full transcript". The Independent. 24 April 2009 . Retrieved 25 April 2009. It wasn’t like I went into that voting booth going, ‘Yay, Boris!’” he says. “I went into that voting booth, probably 52/48, and went the wrong way.” He flashes a smile at this – an unbelievably impish one. “So, again, it’s an odd thing to drag up 15 years later.”

As a keen enjoyer of James O’Brien’s previous book ‘How To Be Right’, it was unlikely that outside of a shift in personality for either of us, I would find this book anything short of interesting. The fact that it challenged me and the way I have gone about certain interactions in my professional and personal life was a troublesome, but ultimately excellent bonus.

The start of the book got me interested then it wandered off to his troubled mind and became a little tedious.

Towards the end, he assesses how Johnson was priming himself for a return to Number 10 in the wake of Liz Truss’s disastrous stint as PM, entirely confident he’d have his party’s full support despite – well, despite everything. “The detachment from reality was complete.” The more comprehension there is, ideally, the less incoherent anger there will be’ … O’Brien at LBC. O'Brien was an anti-Brexit campaigner and was part of the People's Vote campaign for a second Brexit referendum. He gave a speech at a People's Vote March "Put It to the People" on 23 March 2019 and at the People's Vote rally on 9 April 2019. [42] Personal life [ edit ]

Bland, Archie (24 March 2015). "LBC's James O'Brien: 'You have to be a bit more sledgehammer than scalpel on TV' ". theguardian.com . Retrieved 26 March 2015. O'Brien has stated that he voted for Boris Johnson in the 2008 London mayoral election, though he now regrets his vote. [41] During that tumultuous time his show became an oasis of sanity for many on the remain-voting left – here was someone, often with his head in his hands, pointing out the damage we were about to inflict on ourselves, in a way that other media outlets seemed bizarrely afraid to do. His forensic 2014 interview with a clearly unprepared Farage was a masterclass in how to dismantle a phony persona in under 20 minutes. “I get thanked out and about, and people can get emotional,” O’Brien says. “Sometimes they say, ‘Your show was the only place where what I could see as reality was being accurately described.’ And that’s what I’ve tried to do in the book.” How James O'Brien became the conscience of liberal Britain". www.newstatesman.com. 3 February 2017 . Retrieved 2 August 2018.