Daniel Hannan To Gordon Brown

Perhaps you’ve seen the YouTube video on the web. That is, the video of Daniel Hannan, Member of the European Parlaiment (MEP) for South East England, giving a speech during Gordon Brown´s visit to the European Parliament on Tuesday, 24th March, 2009. Video is here.

In this speech Mr Hannan takes Prime Minister Gordon Brown to task in the precise way that our Mr Obama should likewise be excoriated and not praised.

And as you won’t readily find the text of the speech anywhere else in the Blogosphere, I reproduce it here in full; every other blog simply reproduces the video. It clearly deserves a reprint:

Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of this Parliament – that being to say one thing in this chamber, and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that; who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, and that you have subsidised – where you have not nationalised outright – swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.

Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.

Now once again today you tried to spread the blame around, you spoke about an international recession; an international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squall – but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear up their rigging – in other words, to pay off debt – but you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line, under the accumulated weight of your debt. We are now running a deficit that touches almost 10% of GDP – an unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary – countries where the IMF has already been called in.

Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising – like everyone else, I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things these things – it’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening the situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year, in the last twelve months, 125,000 private sector jobs have been lost – and yet you’ve created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister you cannot go on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorging of the unproductive bit.

You cannot spend your way out of 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’re well place 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 the worst placed to 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 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.

They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are a devalued Prime Minister, of a devalued Government.

Where are our Realists in this government? Where can any real journalist be located to ask Mr Obama these pertinent questions?

That’s right: they’re so completely invested in Mr Obama now, as far as they’re concerned; HE is “too big to fail.”
Others writing today about this: Maggie’s Notebook; Conservatism With Heart.

BZ

P.S.
Even the rest of the EU can see that the US economy is on “the road to hell.”
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11 thoughts on “Daniel Hannan To Gordon Brown

  1. I’m with blogger Chris here..we need him HERE!!!

    L&O is so right: WHY would the left be in SUCH a panic over Palin if she didn’t scare them to death? Especially if she’s just the moronic lowly governor of a nothing state, as they implied day after day after day, right?

    She’s a person of faith, she’s a woman, she knows our history and learned from it, she’s got charisma, she’s real, she’s bright and engaging…she’d take no guff from ANY foreign country. She’d fight to get our country back to its roots. .WHAT A THREAT, huh? :0)
    Had this emailed to me ten minutes ago: seems appropriate here:

    “If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.” Daniel Webster,

  2. At one point I was going to hunt for the transcript of the speech but I never got around to it. I’ll add your link for the transcript since I don’t think I’m going to get a new post up for tomorrow. Thanks!!

    Hannan had truth and passion on his side, a winning combination, plus guts!

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