Book Review: “How They Broke Britain” by James O’Brien (2023)

The problem with the Bad Vibes Theory of Governance

Books are usually reviewed when they are either brand new, or when they are so old that they count as historical testimonies which one can reinterpret in a new light today (like the IEA’s own ‘Classics Revisited’ series). It is rare to find reviews of books that came out two or three years ago.

I think there should be more of those, though, especially for hyper-topical books. After two to three years, you can sift a lot of the chaff from the wheat. You can see which books were purely catering to the mood of the moment, and which made a more lasting contribution.

James O’Brien’s book How They Broke Britain was released as a paperback almost exactly two years ago, with the hardcover version half a year earlier. Reading it now, I think even someone sympathetic to Mr O’Brien’s view of the world, such as it is, will have to admit that this book is all chaff, and no wheat.

When I say that How They Broke Britain is a bad book, this is not simply my way of saying ‘I don’t agree with it’. I don’t judge books primarily on that basis (although the temptation is admittedly sometimes hard to resist). I have, for example, previously recommended the book Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson on the IEA Blog, despite the fact that it is clearly an attempt to rehabilitate the Marxist ‘Williams Thesis’. Since the Williams Thesis – the idea that Britain’s Industrial Revolution was financed by profits from the slave trade – is wrong, the attempt to rehabilitate it is also wrong. But this is a book which you can judge by criteria other than ‘Is the book’s central thesis correct?’, such as ‘Did I learn things from this book that I did not previously know?’, or ‘Can I use this as a source of factual information, even if I draw very different conclusions from that information?’

How They Broke Britain is very much not that kind of book. It is more like a written version of one of James O’Brien trademark angry monologues on his LBC show.

Let’s start with the ‘broken Britain’ diagnosis. Left-wing commentators are often good at identifying problems, even if I’m rarely convinced by their solutions. James O’Brien cannot even get that right. He cannot even properly explain what he means when he says that Britain is ‘broken’. Is this about the British economy? Is it about social indicators? Is it about the state of our public services? Is it about social cohesion? It seems to be a bit of all of the above: in the introduction, O’Brien runs us through what looks like a collection of negative news stories. But this everything-is-awful kitchen sink approach doesn’t add up to an assessment of the state of the country. In what way is Britain ‘broken’? Broken compared to what? Broken compared to when? Broken compared to whom? What would an un-broken Britain look like? What would be a better alternative?

These are not minor details. Bear in mind that the political mood in 2023 and 2024 was one of relentless pessimism and negativity. I couldn’t name a single commentator, of whatever political persuasion, who would have argued that Britain was in good shape at the time, and that we should just keep doing what we were doing then. When everyone thinks things are bad, publishing another book which says ‘Things Are Bad’ is not much of a contribution. In such a context, you need to be more specific. You are not arguing against someone who thinks everything is fine, because no such person existed in Britain in 2023 or 2024.

Photo by Lucas Davies on Unsplash

Not even the then government’s few remaining supporters (the Conservative Party was hovering around 20% in the polls) would have said that. When a political party has been in government for an extended period, what usually happens is that one wing of the party gets its way more often than others, and then at least that wing of the party is happy with the results, even if the others are not. The Thatcherite wing of the Tory Party is generally happy to defend their party’s record in government from 1979 to 1997, because they identify with it, and ‘own’ it. Ditto the Blairite wing of the Labour Party, with regard to party’s record in government from 1997 to 2010. What is unusual about the 2010–2024 Tory government is that towards the end, every faction within the Tory Party seemed unhappy with it for a different reason. Those on the Right of the party were unhappy, because immigration had shot up to the highest levels ever recorded. Those on the Left of the party, meanwhile, were unhappy because they thought the party was becoming too ‘Faragist’ in rhetoric. Social conservatives were unhappy, because the party had done nothing to stop the ‘Great Awokening’. The socially liberal wing, meanwhile, didn’t like the ‘Culture War’ rhetoric that the party had adopted in response. The Thatcherite wing was unhappy, because neither public spending nor the tax burden nor public debt had come down, and there had been no notable economic liberalisations in those 14 years. But the ‘Mayite-Timothyite’, communitarian wing wasn’t happy either, because neither had there been a complete break with liberalism. And so on. This is what’s remarkable about Late-Stage Tory Britain: no particular political camp felt ‘ownership’ of Britain’s overall socioeconomic model. No particular political camp identified with the way things were going. Even East Germany still had a few defenders in 1990, who identified with the system, and who stood by it. Britain, in 2023/24, had no equivalent of that.

I was expecting James O’Brien to argue that Britain was in a bad place, because it had been hijacked by a bunch of small-state neoliberal/libertarian extremists such as the IEA, and yes, there is a bit of that in the book, but that’s not really his argument. A full-throttled attack on free-market economics would at least have given me something to work with. But O’Brien’s argument isn’t really that the state is too small, or that it doesn’t regulate enough. No: the book is mostly a criticism of the personalities and perceived character flaws of the people who were in government from 2010 to 2024, as well as the people in the media, the think tank sector etc who O’Brien perceives to be close to them. This is not a book about bad policies (other than, obviously, Brexit), it is a book about bad people. I’m sure O’Brien would protest against that characterisation: he would say that his book is not just about individual bad actors, but also about an ‘ecosystem’ that enables them. But by ‘ecosystem’, he also means ‘bad people’. So that’s really all this is: a book about bad people, surrounded by other bad people, who enable them to do bad-people things.

That’s James O’Brien’s entire theory of governance: when you have Bad People in charge, bad things happen. Not because Bad People do specific, identifiable bad things that can be shown to have specific, identifiable negative impacts. No – the Bad People just sit there, and emit bad vibes. And then everything is bad.

The problem with the Bad Vibes Theory of Governance is that countries have often done quite well, in important respects, despite having Bad People with Bad Vibes in charge. Donald Trump, I think it’s safe to say, has all the negative characteristics which O’Brien attributes to British politicians on the Right and their imagined ‘ecosystem’, and in spades. Yet despite all that, the US has been doing quite well on measures that policy could realistically influence. For example, between 2015 and 2024, US real median household incomes grew by 15%, compared to a mere 6% in the UK. Poverty in the US fell by three percentage points over the same period. Even the number of people without health insurance, one of America’s long-standing problems, fell by 1.5m. Would these numbers have looked even better under a Clinton-style Democrat or a more Romney-style Republican? Probably, yes. Trump did not ‘cause’ these improvements – but neither did he stop them with his Bad Vibes, that’s my point. In the second half of the 20^th century, there were plenty of unsavoury governments in the world that I would not have wanted to live under, but which nonetheless oversaw remarkable economic progress, and all the benefits that flow from that. If you tried to build an economic model around the Good Vibes Theory, the empirical results would not be kind to it.

Conversely, Britain now has a government that O’Brien would broadly approve of, vibe-wise. In terms of measurable outcomes, remarkably little has changed, and if the OBR forecasts are to be believed, not much is going to.

Fine, O’Brien is not an economist, so maybe I’m looking at this in the wrong way. But as an account of recent political history, the book is just as worthless. Even bad people usually have something that motivates them. They don’t just get out of bed in the morning, thinking, ‘Today, I want to be double-extra-super-über-bad.’ They do things which make sense from their perspective, and on their terms. So what are those? Sure, O’Brien thinks a lot of our political figures are simply stupid, so he thinks there isn’t much going on between their ears that needs explaining. But even a person who isn’t particularly bright can still have a worldview which they get instinctively, and they will have smarter thinkers behind them which have influenced them. It is possible to explain where people are coming from even if you thoroughly disapprove. People have done this writing about the motivations of Hitler, Stalin and Osama Bin Laden, so I’m sure it’s possible to try to imagine why someone might support Brexit. (In case it matters: I’m not a Brexiteer myself.)

The only chapter which does a little bit of that is the one on Dominic Cummings. O’Brien is clearly intrigued by Cummings. He sees him as neither stupid, nor obviously evil, and that puzzles him: how can a non-stupid, non-evil man support stupid, evil things? Why isn’t he on James O’Brien’s side, like all the smart and good people in the world?

But those passages are very much the exception, and even they remain at a fairly superficial level. James O’Brien has zero intellectual curiosity, which is not a good starting point for a book like this. While we can probably all agree that 2010–2024 was not Britain’s finest period, it was nonetheless a fascinating period, a period of real ideological clashes and realignments. In order to write insightfully about such a period, you need some intellectual inquisitiveness; you need to be the sort of person who wants to know why people think the way they think, no matter how wrong they may be.

James O’Brien has none of those qualities. All he has is a lot of rage, and a strong sense of moral and intellectual superiority. Where he is getting that sense from, I’d really like to know, because there is nothing in the pages of this book which would justify it.