Edinburgh International Book Festival reviews: holding the 'disgusting' architects of Brexit to account

Radio host James O’Brien discussed the ‘generational shame’ of Brexit while Olivia Laing suggested gardens allowed us to imagine a different, better world – just two of the highlights in our latest round-up of EIBF events. Words by David Robinson

How They Broke Britain author James O'Brien | Contributed

To all of those whose only image of James O’Brien is of a radio talkshow host with his head in his hands sighing in despair at as yet another Brexiteer tries to put him right in the face of a tidal wave of facts flowing in the opposite direction, the man who walked onto the McEwan Hall stage comes as a mild surprise.

For one thing, he has legs and occasionally smiles. For another, he says he’s an optimist (the young, you know, surely they’ll be able to see through lies). The overall message, though, remains the same. Whether through deceit, delusion or dimwittedness, the ten “disgusting” people he most blames for Brexit in his new book How They Broke Britain – Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, Andrew Neil, think tank boss Matthew Elliott, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – “have done damage to our society which is a matter of generational shame”.

O’Brien is a powerful debater, illustrating each point with flair, comic timing and sarcasm. I’d hate to have to argue against him, even if I believed such a case could be made in the first place. Having spent over 10 hours listening to his truly depressing audiobook, I don’t think it’s possible. Yesterday’s event, chaired by BBC Radio Scotland’s Gary Robertson, would have saved me at least nine hours. 

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In view of so much gloom, I really should try to find a cheerier subject. Gardening, for example. If you think that’s still too stolid, you haven’t yet heard Olivia Laing talking about how her own Suffolk garden isn’t just a lovesome thing but a) a portal to another world (as in Tom’s Midnight Garden); b) “a method of fighting climate change”; and c) “a rebel state”, a place where we can imagine a different, better world.

Option c) is a natural fit for Laing, who has long been committed to environmental activism, including living in a tree in a protest against road building. I had to check this because I watched her event online and when she spoke about “my years as an activist” the screen caption referred to “my years as an octopus”.

Asked by chair JC Niala (herself a radical poet and allotmenteer) how different the world would look in 200 years if her utopian gardening dreams came true, she replied that it would be very much like the vision of London in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, where Trafalgar Square would be an apricot orchard and nearby streets would be full of roses and well-trained apprentices. Laing’s own favourite garden? Great Dixter, near Rye, “the most sensory overloading place in the world”.

By the year 2100, the population of Africa will, said Zeinab Badawi, have quadrupled to the point where 40 per cent of the world’s population is from the continent. That doesn’t sound like a particularly cheering statistic in view of what we know about climate change, but her book An African History of Africa, allows a sliver of optimism.

Underdevelopment does at least, she suggested, offer the potential of technological leapfrogging, just as Africa skipped landlines and went straight to mobile phones. And lessons about exploitation have been learnt: countries like Congo and Namibia are already hanging tough about their cobalt and lithium riches. Colonial rule, she pointed out, lasted a relatively short time in Africa: for many countries only about 70-odd years. Some have already taken back control for longer.