Book Review: "How They Broke Britain" by James O'Brien

There are times when you find a really good book and think to yourself 'I'm going to savour this one'. Then there are books like this where it is still really good but instead you think 'ah, let's relive this trauma...' The showboating carousel of politics in the UK has definitely been in shambles since 2010 but the efforts of the kangaroo cabinet of the Pandemic Era definitely took the biscuit as quite possibly the worst case scenario. Brexit had not been delivered properly, a global virus was spreading quickly and the folks of the United Kingdom were trapped in their homes being led by a bumbling fool of a Prime Minister and his horrific attempts at government which mainly involved him covering up lies he'd told the previous day. In an era that will definitely turn into a case study, this book doesn't just teach us about the things we didn't know, but makes us realise how what we did know was just ridiculous.

We may have realised at the time that it would have an immediately bad impact, but we are only just beginning to see that we will continue to feel this negativity for years after the dismantling (and shady reassembling) of the Johnson parliament. This book investigates what led up to, what created and what permitted the worst case scenario in the history of the British Government.

One of the things I thoroughly enjoyed about this book is how James O'Brien basically took our collective trauma and structured it in a way which made it easier to revisit. Each person was to blame and so a lot of the chapters are dedicated to specific people, their political timelines and how they had a hand in bringing down Britain. For example: the irony of the existence of Dominic Cummings is probably one of the things I have regarded with much contempt and even though James O'Brien turns him into a more understandable figure that does not mean he had no blame. A man who basically dealt in statistics and then not taking his own government's advice when it came to the pandemic statistics is bewildering but at best it is expected when we look at the stupidity of the cabinet as a whole. Just because we understand why he did things it does not mean that he has a lesser share of the blame.

James O'Brien does this with figures that some (though I don't understand why) would regard higher than your regular Pandemic Era Tory - for example: Jeremy Corbyn. Now, I personally think Corbyn is a bit of a wet paper bag, but O'Brien investigates and pulls apart the various contradictions of a man I have been comparing to a communist for a fair while now. An anti-semite, a terrible public speaker and a flake on social issues, Corbyn may not have had much blame in what happened during the Brexit era but he sure did permit it to happen. It was not so much of what he did say than what he was found to be doing and saying.

But by far the best part of the book was when we all relive that circus era of British politics: the Johnson Cabinet. A narcissistic Prime Minister and his cult of personality seems to have really done us all in and, at the time we were experiencing it - that became more and more clear by the day. After the fact, to revisit it with clarity we begin to realise that we were way off and things are actually much worse than we thought.

Whilst we had a liar and a fool standing in front of us, standing behind him were other liars and fools: Sunak, Raab, Hancock, Patel, Rees-Mogg, Gove, Cummings and many more are all put to shame in this book. From Brexit where Johnson infamously teamed up with serial racist clown Nigel Farage all the way to the sheer stupidity of the handling of the pandemic, the era from when Cameron stepped down to when Johnson took up the mantle is probably by far the most laughable and most harmful part to our livelihoods. It primed everything for this new office of absolute fools - most of whom are still working today.

All in all, this book takes apart the most shocking section of British politics and explores basically not only how these people broke Britain but why they even bothered. Thinktanks, scams, conspiracies, dealings behind closed doors and not being able to answer or deliver on things that they had promised are only some of the shady things that went on to leave the country in the dust. Racial politics, stirring islamophobia, anti-semitism, the demonisation of the working class and so much more are factors in the jigsaw puzzle of why these people need to be backed into a jail cell.