How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

by James O'Brien

hardly anyone is asked to explain their opinions these days; to outline not just what they believe, but why.

only helps to excuse the employers who aren’t paying decent wages, the politicians who are underfunding the public sector and the property developers who aren’t building houses.

The idea that ‘freedom of speech’ somehow equates with a freedom to spout undiluted, often inflammatory nonsense without being contradicted or called out is currently more popular on both sides of the Atlantic than at any other point in living memory.

When the former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, elected to compare these human beings to ‘bank robbers’ and ‘letterboxes’ in August 2018fn2 , he was feeding the anger and confusion of people like Martin. It’s hard to imagine what good he thought might come of it.

You just don’t understand the readers, do you, eh? He’s the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff (serious news).

it is refreshing, in an age of increasingly reductionist and binary debate, to recognise the importance of sometimes saying the three most undervalued words in the English language: I don’t know.

And where ‘mainstream media’ leads, social media follows, with even less policing of facts.

many apparently straight, unmistakably white men believe that they are the real victims of discrimination in the twenty-first-century West. Gays, ethnic minorities, Muslims, transgender activists and, most of all, women are apparently favoured by modern society’s structures to an unbearable degree.

He was telling me, whether he realised it or not, that he had imagined me naked, or at least in just my knickers, and he wanted to tell me how much he’d enjoyed the mental images.

The philosopher John Rawls’ famous ‘veil of ignorance’ posits the idea that a just system can only be constructed by people completely ignorant of their position within it. In other words, you’re not going to endorse a system of law (or, by extension, of tax or government) that unfairly discriminates against a section of society you could conceivably be in yourself.

The choice of whether to buy something or not cannot be really ‘free’ if on one side a multinational conglomerate is spending millions upon millions of pounds persuading parents to pour it down their children’s throats, while on the other, if we’re lucky, a tiny not-for-profit campaign group is trying to be heard.

Research in 2016 by the Resolution Foundation, for example, found that Britain’s millennials earned £8,000 less during their twenties than the previous generation.

James: So just under £950 a year. That puts him on just above the average income for that period and the house was just under. The big point is that the house cost about three and a half times what he earned in a year. It was the same for me and my wife 34 years later, though our first flat cost £180,000. And we didn’t need a deposit. Today, the average house price is just shy of £230,000 and the average salary is about £27,000. In other words, the average house now costs about eight and a half times the average salary. It doesn’t matter how hard they work, Doris, their experience is never going to be remotely comparable to the ones you and your husband and me and my wife enjoyed.

The myth of the feckless unemployed ensures that people who should theoretically be in favour of tax rises for, say, the top 5 per cent of earners will, in fact, be opposed to them.

Take an angry person, tell them you feel their pain, give them a target for their anger and help them to switch off their brain.

pretty much every diehard Trump supporter I’ve encountered will just carry on blithely insisting that the emperor is most definitely not naked, even as his bare buttocks quiver on national television.

Brexit was supposed to have been delivered on 29 March 2019.

these people now talk of a Brexit reversal as somehow betraying the ‘will of the people’, without once mentioning that it was the ‘will’ of ‘people’ to believe things that have turned out not to be true.