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James O'Brien's message after Brexit reset deal | LBC
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May 20, 2025
A landmark deal has been struck between the UK and the European Union after both sides agreed a last minute breakthrough in Keir Starmer's Brexit reset talks. The 12 year deal will give EU fishing boats access to UK waters and secures improves trading rights for food and agricultural products. British firms also will have access to a 150 billion euro (£125 billion) EU defence fund, and Brits no longer have to queue for long periods at EU airports and ports. James O'Brien said in response to the deal: "If I stay on the radio for another 50 years there will never be another issue where I’ve been proved so spectacularly right." "The EU don't want to go much further than they have today... how are the EU going to sign up to something more complicated when you’ve got Farage the arsonist sitting in the corner?" 'Suddenly Brexiteers rediscover their fetishistic interest in the fishing industry.' 'Even I'm surprised by the brass neck of your Farages and your Patels.' Listen to the full show on the all-new LBC App: https://app.af.lbc.co.uk/btnc/thenewlbcapp #jamesobrien #brexit #keirstarmer #eu #europeanunion #tradedeal #ukpolitics #nigelfarage #LBC LBC is the home of live debate around news and current affairs in the UK.
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0:00
The UK-EU summit currently taking place in London appears to have delivered a deal
0:05
It's rather more than a trade deal in many ways. And yet, of course, much of the coverage in this country, this curious country
0:14
will still focus upon failure to understand anything. I mean, if you're going to quote Suella Braverman or Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage
0:23
they should be forced to wear around their neck little placards containing some of the words that they contributed to this debate last time round
0:30
some of the promises that they made. Front page of the Daily Express this morning has the word freedoms on it
0:37
PM is hell-bent on selling out our Brexit freedoms, quoting Priti Patel without actually asking her to identify what those freedoms are
0:46
Freedom to be poorer, freedom to have more red tape, freedom to have more regulations and restrictions imposed upon British exporters
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freedom not to move. Is that a thing? I mean, we're having a freedom removed
0:59
What about the freedom of movement that was abolished? We're having our freedom not to be free
1:05
We're losing our freedom not to be free. They're taking away our absence of freedom
1:11
Well, they're not, actually. It looks as if a youth mobility scheme may kick in, which will allow young people to do what they have, of course
1:17
done for many, many times, many years, or did do for many, many years
1:21
which is to move relatively fluidly between allies and countries. So how do we do this now
1:33
Already you're going to have people turning up in Thurrock with a microphone
1:37
sticking it in front of somebody who still believes in unicorns, who has still clung to the idea because people keep telling him
1:44
oh, there is a brilliant Brexit. Remember all those people who loved Boris Johnson? Do you remember all the Boris Johnson fetishists
1:50
all the people who thought Boris Johnson was the best thing since sliced bread, all the journalists who left their integrity at the door
1:57
and invited him into their studios for a massive exercise in protracted toe tickling
2:01
Do you remember Boris Johnson? You remember Boris Johnson, right? All we could talk about at one point was Boris Johnson
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Theresa May couldn't get a deal because she was, insert whatever pejorative you prefer, a woman, a bit wet
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She wasn't a proper leaver. She was a Remainer in wolf's clothes. So poor old Theresa May couldn't get a deal for love nor money
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But along came Boris Johnson, who promised the earth to everybody, promised to have his cake and to eat it
2:25
swore blind that there wouldn't be any trouble aligning Northern Ireland with both the United Kingdom and the European Union
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even as the United Kingdom left the European Union. Absolute bonker. And what did he sign
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He signed a dog's dinner. He signed a deal that made everything worse
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And not to defend Boris Johnson, but there wasn't a great deal else on offer
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Because once you'd promised the impossible, whatever you were left with, however improbable or undesirable, had to be the only thing left on
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the table. And you come now to this morning of mild rapprochement. You come now to a deal that
3:05
will undo some of the damage. Most obviously, it will make it easier for British businesses to
3:12
export to the european union it that is very good for business and it is also it seems likely to give
3:19
us access to a 150 billion pound military fund and i listen it's not my area of expertise
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brexit is but not that specific bit um we're pretty well placed on that i'd have thought with
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bae and and other arms manufacturers you might not like it but putin's invasion of ukraine has
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sort of change the arithmetic on European military matters. And if we were not able to put in for
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those contracts, we'd have been on a hiding to nothing because we want to be part of the
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resistance But we also quite like a piece of the action for arming the resistance to Russian imperial ambition So that a good thing as well There stuff that good for business stuff that good for Britain
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good for our young people. Fishing industry, how many people following the news think that the
4:09
fishing industry has been let down or has somehow been betrayed? The situation that fishermen will
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find themselves in for the next few years is exactly the same as the one that they've been
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in for the last few years. Absolutely nothing there has changed. Except for the fact
4:22
that because of the agri-food deal and the fact that the egress of goods, of
4:28
edibles, including fish, from the United Kingdom to Europe, that will actually get
4:32
easier. So they're going to have exactly the same fishing arrangements that they had in place
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previously. They're just going to have their ability to sell fish into the European Union
4:40
made easier. I'm still awaiting the fine detail, but it will be easier
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How much easier? We will see. and so why does it feel so weird today as the inevitable undoing of some of the damage
4:54
begins and as the usual suspects who didn't understand it then and don't understand it now
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return to their ludicrous sloganeering and their talk of betrayal and freedom without ever being
5:07
required to pin down precisely what they mean suddenly they rediscover their fetishistic interest
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in the fishing industry. Remember we talked on Thursday about why they all went absolutely silent
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on the question of fishing the minute that they got the win that they wanted
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You know why. It's because the minute you're actually trying to explain things in detail
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or trying to explain things with reference to evidence, everything falls apart
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The fishing industry, for good or for ill, employs about the same number of people
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as the tattooing industry in this country. Its contribution to GDP is relatively negligible
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But more important than any of that, they are in a better situation tomorrow than they were in yesterday or they're in a better situation the day after the deal is signed than they would be on the day before
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and then you've got this strange scenario where i now find myself and i do allow myself moments of
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self-indulgence on this issue because if i stay on the radio for 50 years there's never going to
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be another issue where um some of us have been proved so spectacularly right despite being a
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tiny tiny proportion of media voices all of those explaining why brexit would be ridiculous and
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why you were trusting people who frankly couldn't run a bath uh why that would turn out to be a
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disaster there's never going to be another moment like that in our time together and we're still
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there still being proved right on a daily basis so why does it feel so weird well partly because
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the ecosystem we inhabit is still defined by i struggle sometimes with what words to use
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because i don't think these people are idiots the people that edit newspapers like the um
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Daily Mail or The Sun or The Express. I think The Times is edited by a Brexiter now
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It wasn't at the time of the actual referendum. They're not idiots, these people
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Getting a newspaper out is hard. They're not idiots. So what is the correct word to use
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I don't like words like traitor in those kind of contexts. We'll leave that sort of language to the far right
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But what is the word you'd use to describe people who insist on telling the UK public
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to punch themselves in the face, fiscally, economically? in terms of mobility. What's the word you'd use? We used to cling. We clung very hard
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or I did at least, clung very, very hard to the idea of contempt for the con men and compassion
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for the con. Okay. Contempt for the con men, compassion for the con. And that was pretty simple
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actually And I felt at the time very important because if you had even a cursory appreciation of how the UK media works you would know that the voices lining up to tell people that we had to leave because dot dot dot dot dot and you never examine the dots
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the voices lining up to tell people that we had to leave, that we'd be better off if we did
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that immigration would somehow miraculously come down, that economic growth would go up
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people making promise after promise after promise. The disproportionate ratio of those people
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to the people telling the truth was absolutely ridiculous. I mean, it should not have come as a surprise to me
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given what I do for a living and what I have done for a living for some time, but it came as an incredible surprise to me
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because the more I worked to understand what was going on, the more I realised how wrong I was to think that everybody in journalism
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had the same central approach. How naive does that sound now? What's your job
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My job is to tell people the truth. My job is to give people evidence-based ysis of situations so that they can make a decision in possession of the most information available
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No, no, no, no, no. Your job is to whip up hatred against immigrants for clicks and giggles, for short-term gain, commercial enhancement, selling a little bit of hatred
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And then if, as a consequence of that, we vote to leave the European Union, then how so what
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It won't affect me anyway because I'm rich. That's the attitude that an awful lot of people in my line of work seem to have taken
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Remember the faces of Johnson and Gove on the morning after it happened? Looked like two little boys with their fingers caught in the cookie jar
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They couldn't believe it, but immediately in that moment, the tone was set for the future
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Immediately in that moment, they had to pretend, A, that they wanted it badly, maybe Gove did, Johnson didn't
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B, that it was all going to be brilliant, and C, they could never, ever, ever, ever, ever admit
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that they'd made a mistake. Ever. And I'd written a book about this
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I don't know whether I've ever mentioned that to you. I've written a book about this, actually, about how the ecosystem in which such craziness could occur has been created
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How carefully that ecosystem has been curated to encourage people to smash themselves over their head with a frying pan when they walk into a voting booth
10:02
And that's why content for the con men, compassion for the conned was such a powerful phrase
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the simple idea that if that much effort is being put into conning you to do something
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then i am not going to hold it against you when you do it even the bbc was broken by this process
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people in senior positions one of them went off to work for theresa may actually running the
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politics output much of the politics output of the station while everyone's claiming it's bias
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to the left or it's pro remain utterly laughable worthy of joseph goebbels himself to have the
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population screaming about how biased the bbc is against them when in fact it was moving fairly
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rapidly to being fully in favor of them the the times when you couldn't invite an economist into
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the studio without having to pretend that it was a 50 50 split among economists so half of them
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thought it was going to go great and half of them thought it was going to go badly it was a split of 99 to 1 if that 99 99.9 of economists explaining that it was going to be bad for britain and then
11:05
a tiny, tiny little proportion of them claiming, and the most famous
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one of all, Patrick Minford, explaining that it's going to decimate British industry and British
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agriculture, but we'll be better off. So people never even joined those dots together. The only economist anyone
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could find to book for a programme was an economist who predicted the decimation
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of agriculture and fishing. That was the price you would pay for a good Brexit
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That was it. Ah, man, it's all coming back. This must be what Tom Jones feels like when he
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starts singing Delilah. I had no idea where all this stuff was filed away in the back of my mind
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But what good is it to us? You've now got problems on both sides
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You've got the unicornists who believe there is a brilliant Brexit, it just goes to a different school
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and they still dominate public discourse they still edit most newspapers they still get treated as if they know what they talking about despite having been proved completely wrong about everything they said last time round
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And then on the other side, you've got people who think that Starmer could have gone further
12:01
that we should be rejoining, that we should be getting back into the customs union. And they're almost as wrong as each other
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Puts me in a very lonely furrow. But they're almost as wrong as each other for one very, very simple reason
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It's that the EU don't want to go much further than they've gone today yet
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You've got Nigel Farage ahead in some opinion polls, most opinion polls. How on earth are they going to sign up to something complicated and important
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when you've got an arsonist sitting around the corner with his Zippo lighter
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It is just nonsensical to suggest that they could go further. The betrayal narrative that is greeting Keir Starmer
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it's more than nibbling at the edges, but it is by no means a reversal or a return
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The betrayal narrative is so loud today. people like Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and the rest of them
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screaming from the rooftops about betrayal. Imagine what the context, what the environment would be like
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if he had actually made really, really deep incursions into undoing the damage that Brexit has done
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So there we go. There we go. Keir Starmer has negotiated something pretty special
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about as good as he could have expected. It will be misrepresented in many, many quarters
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But among those of us who actually understand most of the issues involved, you are seeing a massive improvement to British exporters and you are seeing crucially important access to huge sums of European arms, military spending
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you have seen a retention of the status quo for our fishing fleet which largely because we catch
13:35
mostly mackerel and don't eat it has been in a fairly anomalous position for generations not that
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anybody bothers to explain that to you and no doubt if we sent someone to thurrock with a
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microphone now they'd be explaining how they still don't feel that brexit has been properly delivered
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because it was the poorest parts of this country who were most successfully persuaded to vote to
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make themselves poorer and the people that set fire to our house are still there with their
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metaphorical molotov cocktails promising that if you just set one more blaze then everything will
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just be dandy it's 10 18 i should really ask you a question shouldn't i i suppose i can't think of
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one at the moment i i mean it's an it's it it's such a strange situation to be in there's the
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intellectual appreciation of the inevitability of what is happening and the certain knowledge
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that the emotional response to it is likely to be as daft and as toxic as it was last time
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It's as if having burned down a house, the man charged with rebuilding it is now being accused
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of somehow betraying the owners because he's using bricks and not magic beans to build the
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thing with. I haven't felt particular admiration for Keir Starmer for a while now
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particularly last week. But goodness me, you wouldn't wish this on anybody
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Having to fix the mess that somebody else made while the people who made the mess are spitting venom at you
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is absolutely extraordinary. And they're doing it with such abandonment. Even I'm surprised by the brass neck of your Farage's
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and your Patel's, your Braverman's and the rest of them. And, of course, the client journalists
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who still haven't made the blindest bit of effort to understand the actual facts of the matter
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You've burnt something down. this man's trying to rebuild it and all you've got is brickbats and abuse from the sidelines
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and and ludicrous claims that by trying to rebuild the thing that you burnt down you're
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somehow betraying the people that you rendered homeless i like this metaphor and i'm running
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with it because that's farage isn't it that's where he comes into it one of the key arsonists
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now claiming that he's the man to rebuild the house that he burnt down
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