When Traitors Say it’s not a Betrayal. James O’Brien’s EU fetish. Jupplandia Jun 28

For those of you in the blessedly fortunate position of being outside the UK and unaware of who he is, James O’Brien is one of the UK’s highest paid and most well known radio personalities, who has had a regular show on LBC, the most popular London radio station, for years.

O’Brien is of Irish immigrant descent, and his speciality has been to develop a politics focused debate show that mainly consists of him endlessly berating the alleged stupidity of people who don’t have the same leftist progressive politics that he has. His show will either feature extended ranting monologues from O’Brien or exchanges with callers in which the policy seems to be to select the worst and least articulate advocates of positions he doesn’t like and then remorselessly beat up on these hapless individuals while snorting, sneering, gurning, sarcastically belittling, interrupting and insulting them. All facilitated of course by O’Brien’s assistants controlling the call and cutting off people when he scores a point or even more swiftly when it starts to look like they might.

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Upgrade to paid Opposing callers are rarely given an opportunity to reply to O’Brien’s most insulting comments, and the whole thing is run in the manner that a corrupt Irish police sergeant would administer a beating to a suspect held by two colleagues. Indeed, in many ways O’Brien seems to fit a racist caricature of the worst qualities of the Irish. He has an expressive, blunt face, like an especially angry and belligerent leprechaun, or the kind of look that might be cast as a thug in a Boston bar. He makes full use of it, twisting through more expressions of loathing, malice and hatred than one would witness in an amateur portrayal of a staked vampire. The heavy duty gurning goes with gestures like throwing his hands up or shaking his head in disbelief (a particular favourite) as if to say he is not only bewildered by someone having a different opinion, but confused as to why they are allowed to live.

The rants and exchanges are filmed as well as audio recorded, so that they can do the rounds on media and social media while leftists chortle about how clever they are and how intellectually challenged anyone conservative, patriotic or rightwing is. It’s a diet of confirmation porn for the most determinedly smug leftists out there. It might be fair to say that the Right has had such figures as well, but you really have to experience an O’Brien performance to realise how much angry smugness can be contained within a single form.

It’s near infinite.

One of O’Brien’s chief obsessions, along with (of course) white racism, Donald Trump and Gaza, was Britain’s vote to leave the EU. James has been in an incandescent rage over Brexit for 10 years with a fury that makes Mark Levin at his most passionate look restrained, and which makes Alex Jones at his vaudeville angriest seem Zen like and calm. For 10 years he’s been repeating the exact same points with the exact same volcanic disgust, especially centred on the notion that worthless, stupid Little Englanders and ‘Gammons’ were deceived into Brexit because they are evil, ignorant racists with a pathetic and risible understanding of their own identity and history.

For James O’Brien, people voted for Brexit because Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson lied to them and they were too stupid to perceive it, and because they secretly all want to lynch black people or beat up Muslim women. He has a view of the English that comes straight from the most racist left wing cartoons-we are all either shaven headed thugs with hairy knuckles trying to ram an England flag down the throat of a terrified ethnic minority granny, or we are Jacob Rees-Mogg on a psychopathic rampage, drinking cups of tea from china cups while conducting a fox hunt where the foxes are weeping girls from County Clare.

Centuries of resentment and propaganda and unaware hypocritical bigotry go into James O’Brien’s every comment on modern affairs.

His latest offering is a return to his greatest obsession, the sheer nerve of the white working class of Britain in rejecting the beneficent and glorious rule of Brussels. In a recent episode of his long-running rants James casts an enraged bovine eye towards pro Brexit responses to the 10th anniversary Remain demands to fully reverse the vote of 2016.

James is very protective of the notion that it is perfectly acceptable to ignore the largest democratic mandate in British history because, after all, the wrong people were allowed to vote. He was keen to explain to his listeners that calling such a reversal of the vote a betrayal is a tired and ridiculous lie. The contorted logic for this position is based on three things:

The innate worthlessness of people who voted to Leave (racists, gammons, xenophobes, uneducated Neanderthals).

The idea that the Leave campaign only won by ‘cheating’ (lying to people, or for even more extreme Remainers, it was all a Russian plot).

The idea that in the 10 years since Brexit has delivered the economic Armageddon that Remain campaigners said would occur the minute Brexit was initiated.

All of these points represent fantasy based on a highly developed, completely emotive, ideologically driven set of prejudices. None of them are true or even rational.

For much of the British Establishment and affluent middle class, of which O’Brien is very firmly a part despite his pretensions to being a plucky Oirish rebel fighting the same good fight that proto-IRA houseburners waged in the 19th century, the attachment to the EU is founded on a curious combination of fanaticism and snobbery. The vast bulk of Remainers know far less about the EU and how it operates than the average Leave voter does, which is why they can be firmly convinced for example that the EU is more democratic than a national government. The surface pretence, which is also a firm self delusion they sincerely hold, is that being pro EU is the adult, rational, scientific position held by the educated, informed and economically aware. But underneath that is a very obvious and far more powerful purely emotional hatred of the idea of Brirish exceptionalism, sovereignty and liberty.

The Remain voter, and O’Brien is a prime exemplar rather than any exception, is caught in a never ending self created psychodrama where other British voters, the majority of British voters, betrayed the Remainer’s future. Everything negative no matter what it is since Brexit becomes the fault of Brexit, a harm follwing from the crime of leaving the EU. This is because the Remainer never looked at the EU in real terms as a thing to be questioned, but rather considered it axiomatic that the EU was good and that good people know that (the same class have similar conceptions regarding NATO and the UN).

The Remainer will tell you that it is about trade and opportunity and that being outside a market like the EU is an act of ludicrously stupid self-harm. They might also express a lot of passionate but vague declarations about the EU maintaining peace in Europe (confusing it for NATO) or about the EU representing friendship, alliance, respect and co-operation with others. But point out that historically Europe maintained a long peace of a century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the start of World War One and historic fact becomes irrelevant, while pointing out that Britain was a very successful nation for centuries without the wise guidance of Belgian bureaucrats is equally treated as completely irrelevant. Similarly economic realities of the current era, like the Eurozone actually being a failing economic area whose share of our trade has steadily declined for decades, are ignored.

Frequently, the Remainer will very firmly hold to things that have already been debunked or are purely an expression of another dearly held prejudice, such as the idea that Russia interfered in the vote and altered the outcome. Or they will declare things that were used by the Leave campaign as examples to have been promises which, if they didn’t emerge subsequently, must be lies. A classic example of that is the Leave bus declaration:

You can clearly see that the message was ‘we send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund NHS instead…”. Remainers are still using the example of the Leave bus as a blatant lie. But actually it’s astonishing that they get away with that claim, which is itself a lie. The figure quoted was a slight underestimate of what Britain was paying to the EU. No lie there. Let’s is a suggestion, not a promise. You have to ignore the meaning of the word let’s to call this a lie. The reason it was merely a suggestion is because it was giving an example of where the money could go instead, and only a government controls the spending budget, not the people running a referendum campaign. You have to be a complete moron or totally dishonest to consider this a promise that wasn’t met rather than an example that was correct.

I’ve never met a Remainer, or spoken to one online, in ten years who will admit that the bus message was an example rather than a lie. Basic awareness of what a sentence means must be ignored. What’s even more ironic? Government spending in the last ten years on the NHS actually has increased by more than £350 million a week.

Yet this same obvious, language defying interpretation is firmly held in the mind of every EU enthusiast. This is the lie that ‘manipulators’ used to con the British public….Remainers decided it was a lie, and they now insist it is a lie, even though the meaning of the actual sentence makes it impossible to accurately consider it a lie.

When they aren’t pretending that suggestions and examples were promises that were not kept, and if they ever move beyond a purely sneering declaration that ‘Brexshitters’ are low IQ voters or wicked racists, Remainers are conveniently stricken with amnesia when it comes to the campaign of fear they wages and the non appearance of an immediate recession, or vast supply chain difficulties, that they used as predictions and threats. In 10 years they have never acknowledged that THEY made extreme claims that didn’t come true.

We were told we would have an immediate recession. This did not happen. We were told that imports and exports would be delayed for weeks or months, that food would spoil, that thousands of businesses would go bust. None of this happened. We were told in an especially disgusting fear mongering threat that cancer treatments would be unavailable. That too was a Remain lie.

Bit worse than all this is the kind of message delivered almost everywhere on the 10th anniversary of Brexit and featured in James O’Brien’s propaganda declarations. This is the Remain declaration that there were no good reasons for Brexit, that Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster, and that people who voted for Brexit had no reason (beyond hatred of foreigners) to vote for it.

In reality every one of the reasons to vote Leave still apply today, and apply more strongly than ever against the reversal of Brexit. There were in fact 6 very strong and well articulated reasons to reject membership in the EU:

The moral argument is that it is fundamentally wrong for British people to be ruled from abroad because that betrays the whole purpose of a nation state and the contract betwen the nation state and it’s people whereby the nation state is supposed to protect us from foreign rule or tyranny.

No foreign person has the right to rule me against my will in my own nation.

The democratic argument is that the structure of the EU is fundamentally undemocratic because any British vote can be outvoted by others, because the EU parliament is a talking shop with far less power than the bureaucracy, and because voters cannot directly remove those with the most power. EU behaviour (forcing revotes or denying the results of votes on the rare occasions when the people are allowed a direct say) confirms this undemocratic nature (as does the behaviour of Remainers following the vote to Leave).

The trade argument is that the EU represents an economic area of declining significance and that most future trade opportunities and growth will come from outside the EU.

The wider economic argument is that the favoured model of the EU as a high regulatory bureaucracy cripples economic growth within the member states. Comparison of EU and US success story major companies, particularly innovative major companies, confirms this argument.

The false friends argument is the recognition that the other EU nations and the EU bureaucracy have never acted in good faith towards the UK but rather have sought solely to obtain power over us and demand ever increasing contributions from us, while not valuing us or heeding our unique circumstances. EU contempt for Cameron’s attempts to negotiate a fairer dispensation confirmed this, as did EU belligerence, intransigence and determination to inflict a punishing deal rather than a mutually beneficial and amicable split in the Brexit negotiations.

General points cited greater flexibility and ability to trade elsewhere, and the opportunity to regain control of our territorial waters and borders. These might both be termed the independent action argument.

On those last points, those negotiating conceded our waters again and agreed our exit without exiting any of the international asylum and human rights accords with European and international bodies (plus acceptance of these in British law) really needed to swiftly block and deport illegal entrants. We favoured instead negotiated reliance on paying France to prevent arrivals, which has been completely ineffective.

To say that Brexit failed to deliver stronger borders is to ignore that a full Brexit would have removed us from asylum accords and European agreements on accepting refugees or aligning with EU law on human rights. But we chose, under Remain and EU pressure, to keep following their rules after leaving their club. It is also to ignore that there was nothing in Brexit telling British governments not to deal with a dinghy invasion, telling them they must supply asylum hotels, or telling them to criminalise those who protest against open borders. There was nothing in Brexit that said ‘Boris, you must open a route to tens or hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans to come to the UK’, and there was nothing in Brexit that told Labour after that to welcome Ukrainians, or to be so extraordinarily feeble and complicit when people got in small craft and landed on the beaches of Kent.

In fact, each migration surge was a fresh choice to double down on failed pre-Brexit attitudes and policies, including believing that paying France money to do something to prevent arrivals would be more effective than us refusing to accept arrivals, deporting arrivals swiftly, and leaving any agreement or law that prevented this. If anything, it’s been shown that co-operation with France is completely ineffective, not that Brexit caused an increase in immigration.

So all of the reasons to leave still stand, and if anything EU and Remain actions have confirmed them more and more, especially in the refusal to respect the vote to leave and the deep dishonesty of every attack on Brexit they have offered, that voting to Leave was an eminently sensible choice.