‘Snake Oil’: LBC Host Rips Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Brexit ‘Lies’ In Interview Throwback
LBC host James O’Brien revisited an old interview Tuesday with Brexiteer Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who denied leaving the European Union would impact Northern Ireland’s peace agreement, blasting the “weird new television stations” like GB News as designed to “keep these lies alive.”
O’Brien played a clip from five year old interview with Rees-Mogg in which they discussed where Brexit negotiations left the free movement of goods across the Irish border, the UK’s only land border with the EU which lies between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
“Talking about the withdrawal agreement,” Rees-Mogg said, “it is a Remainers’ Brexit… it’s shadowing membership of the European Union. It’s half in, half out. That it would tie us into the Common External Tariff. It would tie us in via Northern Ireland to the EU’s rulebook in vast swathes of activity.”
O’Brien tested Rees-Mogg on whether the Good Friday Agreement would necessitate regulatory alignment on both sides of the Irish border. The Good Friday Agreement was the peace deal that ended decades of conflict on the island which, among other administrative rules, facilitates unhindered travel and trade.
The Brexiteer staunchly responded: “No, it doesn’t [require regulatory alignment].”
Despite O’Brien’s assertions to the contrary, Rees-Mogg held firm: “It’s not a matter of the Good Friday Agreement. The Good Friday Agreement wasn’t considering those sorts of issues.”
Insisting that it does, the host ended the old clip.
Fast forward to the present, O’Brien reflected on this interview with a tone of incredulity: “Eight years after Brexit… resolution of the problem he just denied existed,” he commented.
He continued: “It is literally like arguing that the world is going to end on Tuesday, and it’s now Wednesday. So what do you do with your loyalty to the person who told you that the world was going to end yesterday?”
Criticising right-leaning opinion-led networks like billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV and GB News, which employs Rees-Mogg as a commentator, O’Brien said: “He’s still getting, you know, paid by one of these weird new television stations. I can’t remember which one. I think it’s the Rupert Murdoch one, is it? Or is it the other one? Anyway, it doesn’t matter, does it? Because they exist to keep these lies going.”
