This is LBC from Global, leading Britain's conversation with James O'Brien.

Three minutes after ten is the time.

You are listening to James O'Brien on LBC, where we will be turning our attention in a moment to

the astonishing events in play that unfolded on Clapham Common on Saturday night.

It is, I mean, so much going on at the moment that you can't quite believe it's happening in Britain,

can you, or the United Kingdom.

The idea of introducing laws that offer more protections to statues

than perhaps humans currently enjoy when they're assaulted in the vilest of ways,

it is actually unbelievable, but it's not, of course.

If we do anything together on this programme, we do at least sometimes come a little

closer to making sense of things than perhaps we would do without each other in the morning.

And it doesn't unfortunately solve any problems, looking at what's happening in Ireland now,

despite knowing if you listen to this program without having ears full of fluff,

then you will be supremely unsurprised that the British government is pretty much reduced

to either breaking international law or begging America to try to boss island about.

It was all inevitable and we understood that.

But understanding it and explaining it has not made the

blindest bit of difference to actually preventing the madness from unfolding. And so it is

with so many other issues. We may come to a better understanding of it together, but oddly,

while politics is dominated by people who refuse to either try to understand things or acknowledge simple truths

and simple realities, it can some days feel a bit futile. So today, we once again try to walk

the tightrope between explaining and excusing the indefensible. It's a weird little thing. One of the first lessons I learned on this show was that if, and obviously, I'm not complaining as such, because it goes with the territory. But if you try to understand something indefensible, as in why did it happen, I always thought it was a given that you will never prevent something from happening again if you don't understand why it happened the last time. I always thought that was an uncontroversial observation. And then of course we got caught up in the horrors of Islamist terrorism and any attempt to try to understand or explain why things had happened was greeted in some

...