Speaking truth to the prime minister

Editor’s note: Daniel Hannan’s fiery speech addressing Gordon Brown at the European Parliament electrified the Internet when it was broadcast on YouTube last week. Vox Day interviewed the iconoclastic Englishman about Brown, Britain, and the global economic crisis on March 26, 2009.

Your speech criticizing Gordon Brown’s incompetent stewardship of the UK economy was extraordinarily well received, not just in Britain, but around the world. Meanwhile, the leader of the opposition party, David Cameron, has been rather quiet on that front. Why has Mr. Cameron been so reluctant to say the things you said to Mr. Brown?

Because in the British system, there’s this great thing about the loyal opposition. And when you get a crisis like this, that comes out of a clear blue sky, nobody wants to risk looking unpatriotic, so you have to be measured and tempered in how you respond, which is completely understandable. The result of it, unfortunately, is that a lot of people are left with saying, wait a minute, hang on, nobody is saying what I would like them to say. All the politicians seem to be in this together. A lot of people felt that a cartel of politicians and bankers were setting policy in defiance of public opinion. Those were the people I was trying to speak for.

It’s interesting to hear you say “coming out of a blue sky,” because at least in the states, there was definitely a group of contrarians such as Roubini and me who were on record as far back as 2002 saying that the housing crash was going to affect the financial system. Did no one in England see that?

There were a few people who saw it, but not anywhere in the mainstream. Certainly none of the three big parties were warning about this except in very general terms about house prices being a bit too much and that sort of thing. Nobody was expecting a run on the banks; we haven’t had one of those since the early 19th century. Certainly no one was expecting nationalizing our banks. Even at their most socialist, the Labour Party barely dreamed of doing that.

The European Union is described as everything from a free-trade union to the EUSSR. How do you, as a European member of Parliament, see the EU today?

The EU is a racket: a mechanism for taking money from the taxpayer and handing it to Eurocrats. … The EU’s equivalent of the Prague Spring was the “No” votes of 2004 and 2005. Nobody believes anymore that if only the question could be fairly put, then all the people would come around to it. They’ve lost whatever ideological impetus they had, but they understand that their position in society depends upon their maintaining the status quo. Since the “No” votes across the EU, Eurocrats have given up on the idea that their system will ever win approval. That’s what makes them so tetchy.

Given the authoritarian behavior of the EU bureaucracy, why has the Tory Party been so reluctant to embrace popular euroskepticism?

It’s not that they actually believe in a European super state. It’s that they have this Burkeian instinct to try to work with the status quo, to prefer evolution to revolution. … No one would have gone from first principles into this ridiculous racket where we’re run by an unelected bureaucracy that passes 84 percent of our laws. But, they don’t want to break the whole thing up. They haven’t yet gotten into the mindset that the whole thing is beyond reform and that you need to just cut loose. But I think we’ll get there in the end.

Do you think an ongoing period of economic contraction will see the British people demand to leave the European Union?

They already do! The latest opinion poll was conducted by the BBC a week ago, and showed that 55 percent of voters want to leave the EU. It’s true that this position isn’t yet shared by any major political party, but that moment will come: Politicians cannot swim forever against the current of public opinion.

Which do you believe will be the first nation to attempt to leave the European Union? And will it be successful?

I think it will be us. Because we have a different political system, because we, like you, have a majoritarian system rather than a party list system, which means that politicians cannot so easily disregard their voters as happens under a proportional system. … My guess is that it will probably happen in Britain first, and we will go for some kind of EFTA-type deal, some kind of associate membership where we’re in a free market but outside all the rest of it. And I think once we do that, once we set that precedent, a whole bunch of countries will be queuing up to copy. … [I]t may well be that the euro will fracture. Really quite mainstream, serious people are now saying that it’s when, rather than if, a country leaves the single currency.

In your speech, you mentioned that one cannot spend one’s way out of a recession. This would appear to contradict the neo-Keynesian approach of Alastair Darling and the U.S. fiscal authorities. Do you subscribe to a different economic model?

Yes, certainly! We saw where the Keynesian model led! We pursued it from the ’30s to the ’70s. And it ended up in recession, stagnation, inflation and debt. It’s much easier to begin a government program under the guise of counter-cyclical spending than it is to terminate it, so you end up with the state becoming more and more bloated. It’s a measure of how panicked people are, that they’ve forgotten all of the lessons of that unhappy period.

The U.S. president recently gave the prime minister a gift that consisted of 25 region-one DVDs that don’t work in Britain. How was this regarded there?

Badly. The guy is a complete idiot, Brown. But he’s our complete idiot, and we don’t like to see him being slapped around like this. That’s for us to do.

Speaking of Obama, you’ve expressed some sympathies for President Obama on your blog in the past. What is your perception of his performance to date? How has his stewardship of the economy been any different than Gordon Brown’s?

I think his stewardship of the economy has been bad. I think the Republican Party had been pretty bad in the run-up to this. One of the reasons why I had gone off the GOP, which I’m normally very loyal to, is because I could see them losing touch with all the things that used to make them so successful. They had become the party of steel tariffs, and the party of trampling over states rights, particularly with the marriage amendment. They’d become the party of big spending and federal deficits, and in the end they became the party of bailouts and nationalizations. One of the reasons I was in favor of Obama winning – without any great enthusiasm, I might add – is that I thought the Republicans would benefit from a period out of office where they could go back and remember what used to make them successful. And so far, so good! It is striking that an immediate consequence of the Obama presidency is that a lot of Republican congressmen who voted for the first spraying-around of money under Bush unanimously voted against the second one.

Have you given any thought to eventually running for parliament in the UK?

No, not for the moment, anyway. … We have a very, very weak parliament. We have a much weaker legislature than you have, and it’s weaker than it’s ever been. A measure of how weak it is is that we didn’t even have a vote on our bailouts, on our stimulus package. It was just decreed by the executive. … One of the beauties of your system is that you have a proper separation of powers, so a legislator can make an honorable career for himself without wanting to join the executive. As things stand, that can’t happen in the British system. I’m very keen to import the most successful elements of your system – open primaries, elected sheriffs, a local sales tax, local referendums, the direct election of public officials – and I’ve written a book about how to do it called “The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain.”

In Britain, we are run by a massive bureaucracy, and the position of the elected person is incredibly weak and is getting weaker every day. One of the reasons we are in this financial mess is that the budgets are set by members of the executive who are personal beneficiaries of state spending, rather than by the members of the legislature who are champions of the taxpayer.

This column is an abridged version of Vox Day’s interview with Daniel Hannan. The complete transcript of the interview is available at Vox Popoli.