Daniel Hannan

If people are determined to be outraged, they will be outraged.

Daniel John Hannan, Baron Hannan of Kingsclere (born 1 September 1971) is a British writer, journalist and former politician serving as an adviser to the Board of Trade since 2020. He is the founding president of the Initiative for Free Trade. A member of the Conservative Party, he was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 to 2020.

Quotes

[W]e are so habituated to Russian flouting of international law that we barely notice any more.

2009

• You cannot spend your way out of a recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev era apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it's nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by thirty percent. And soon, the voters too will get their chance to say so. They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government
  • Speech to Gordon Brown in the European Parliament (24 March 2009). As reproduced on YouTube

• We have lived through this mistake for 60 years now.
  • Speaking about the NHS, during an interview with Fox News (2 April 2009)

• The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude.
  • Spoken by Daniel Hannan on Judge Andrew Napolitano's online streaming FOX News programme, Freedom Watch (29 April 2009)

2010s

• That idea that car manufacturers might disinvest after we leave the EU? It's a - what's the word? - oh yes. Lie.
  • Tweet from verified account (17 September 2015)

• The EU's single market is a single regulatory regime. Membership of it doesn’t mean that you can sell your products into it: pretty much the whole world can do that. Membership means, rather, that you accept a common set of technical standards, and that you submit yourself to the ultimate jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.
  • "Remain campaign is misleading voters on the Single Market" CapX (9 May 2016)

• Britain, as a relatively large economy which exports more to non-EU than to EU markets, would be better off trading freely with the single market than belonging to it.
  • Column in Conservative Home (1 September 2016)

• Back in 2014, when no one else was planning how to win the referendum, @DouglasCarswell talked tactics at the @Tate. He said: "We can win in one of two circumstances: a visible failure of the renegotiation, or one of the two main party leaders being neutral." In the event, we got both. Thanks @jeremycorbyn.
  • Series of tweets following Jeremy Corbyn's sacking of shadow ministers who defied a Labour whip not to support an amendment calling for the UK to stay in the single market after Brexit (30 June 2017)

• I love Turkey. I first traveled there in my early twenties, when I was obsessed by the 1915 Dardanelles campaign. I immediately liked the people — brave, stoical, generous, hospitable and patriotic, if a little inclined to conspiracy theories. I saw Turkey as a model for the region, a successful, Western-oriented Muslim democracy.
  • "The republic will survive Trump, but will the Republicans?" (3 September 2018), The Washington Examiner
• What is happening to this country, for the love of God?
  • Twitter post (12 September 2018)

Fascism and Political Left (2013)

"So total is the Left's cultural ascendancy that no one likes to mention the socialist roots of fascism" The Telegraph (16 February 2013)

• History is reinterpreted, and it is taken as axiomatic that fascism must have been Right-wing, the logic seemingly being that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists were nasty.
• Whenever anyone points to the socialist roots of fascism, there are howls of outrage. Yet the people howling the loudest are often the first to claim some ideological link between fascism and conservatism.

Nazism (2014)

"Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism" The Telegraph (February 25, 2014)

• On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars.
• Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.
• Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers' Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.
• Marx's error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity - to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order.
• What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists.
• The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture.
• Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the "racial trash" - the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism.
• Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.

Nazi-Soviet Pact (2014)

"The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact" The Telegraph (September 17, 2014)

• The two armies [Red Army and Nazi Army] met at the town of Brest, where the 1918 peace treaty between the Kaiser’s government and Lenin’s revolutionary state had been signed. Soldiers fraternised, exchanging food and tobacco – pre-rolled German cigarettes contrasting favourably against rough Russian papirosi. A joint military parade was staged, the Wehrmacht’s field grey uniforms alongside the olive green of the shoddier Soviets. The two generals, Guderian and Krivoshein, had a slap-up lunch and, as they bade each other farewell, the Soviet commander invited German reporters to visit him in Moscow “after the victory over capitalist Albion”.
• It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.
• The two totalitarian systems [USSR Communism and German National-Socialism] traded in all the necessary commodities of war: not just oil and vital chemicals, but arms and ships. They exhibited each other’s cultural achievements, performed each other’s music and films, stressed their joint hostility to Western capitalism.
• The idea that there was an unbridgeable gap between Soviet Communism and National Socialism, which is nowadays so widespread, would have seemed curious at the time. To be sure, there were some in Moscow, and a few more in Berlin, who believed that there must eventually come a reckoning with their “real” enemy. But theirs were minority voices. Many more gladly went along with the idea that the two socialist systems were joined in battle against “decadent Anglo-Saxon liberalism”.
• The coincidence in doctrine between the Nazis and the Soviets was obvious to the “decadent” Anglo-Saxons, too. The day after the Soviet invasion of Poland, a Times editorial observed that “Only those can be disappointed who clung to the ingenuous belief that Russia was to be distinguished from her Nazi neighbour, despite the identity of their institutions and political idiom, by her foreign policy”.
• Hayek, writing in 1944, devoted the greater part of his Road to Serfdom to refuting the idea that Nazism and Communism were opposed ideologies, well aware of how fervently this idea was being promoted.
• While Nazism is well understood as the monstrosity it was, there is often a lingering sense that Communism was well-intentioned, even though it went wrong. The merest connection with fascism bars a politician from office; yet those who actively supported the USSRare allowed to become ministers and European Commissioners. Wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt is not regarded in the same light as wearing an Adolf Hitler tee-shirt; but it should be.
• Don’t get me wrong. Every atrocity is unique in its own terrible way. The Nazi Holocaust haunts us for good reasons. Years after I saw it, I still find this image rising, unbidden, in my mind. Happily, though, no one, beyond a deranged fringe, denies the nature of Nazism. The same is not true of the Soviet tyranny.

Russian aggression (2018)

"Dan Hannnan: Russian aggression keeps happening because it keeps working" The Washington Examiner (13 August 2018)

• Here is Russia, blatantly threatening a neighboring state with war if it seeks to pursue an independent foreign policy, yet we are so habituated to Russian flouting of international law that we barely notice any more.

• Georgia, like Ukraine and Moldova, is a sovereign state. If we accept, in practice, that Russia can alter borders by force, we signal to Moscow that it can violate international norms with impunity. We can hardly then complain if the Kremlin meddles in American elections, or orders murders on British soil.

• We threaten to rain fire upon North Korea and Iran, yet we quail before an elderly, impoverished and decrepit Russia. How diminished we are as a civilization.

Identity politics (2018)

"Daniel Hannan: Identity politics. It becomes impossible to avoid giving offence, because the offended keep changing the rules" Conservative Home (22 August 2018)

• If people are determined to be outraged, they will be outraged.

• In an atmosphere when anyone can close down the conversation by saying “I feel uncomfortable”, rational discussion becomes impossible. The empirical method, the basis of Enlightenment civilization, no longer applies.

• Race is said to be non-existent, yet our cultural elites rarely seem to think of anything else.

• Surely the liberal ideal one is where, instead of obsessing about the ethnic backgrounds of actors, we treat their skin-colour as just one more attribute, like hair-colour or the ability to speak the appropriate accent for the production.

2020s

• Detaining people for shouting republican slogans, even if they do so in a deliberately coarse and provocative way, is utterly un-British [...] I worry that our police are becoming more authoritarian and — worse — that a section of the public is cheering them on.
  • Cited in "Police arrest anti-monarchy protesters at royal events in England, Scotland" The Washington Post (13 September 2022)
  • In the week after Queen Elizabeth II died.

• The bureaucracy has ballooned since Brexit – in other words, at precisely the moment when we could be opting out of the needlessly intrusive bits of the EU’s Money Laundering Directive.
• The only serious attempt to prioritise growth came from Liz Truss, and prompted outrage from civil servants, commentators and MPs, including many Tories.
  • "Britain is now a poor nation. This is the number one issue we face – yet our leaders ignore it", The Telegraph (22 July 2023)

Quotes about Hannan

• If you don't know who Daniel Hannan is, he is of course a boggle-eyed, slap-headed, unpleasant, revolting, heartless, shit-brained, attention-grabbing, fetid excuse for a prick. Sorry, um, sorry, no, no, no, I think I misread that, could you just scroll the autocue back up a bit, I meant he to say Daniel Hannan is of course a boggle-eyed, slap-headed, unpleasant, revolting, heartless, shit-brained, attention-grabbing, fetid excuse for a prick. Oh no, it turns out I got it right the first time.
  • Charlie Brooker, during an opening monologue of his You Have Been Watching TV show (18 August 2009)