Imagine if David Cameron actually meant it. Imagine if he really did follow through with his implied threat to campaign for Brexit in the absence of better terms from Brussels. You can picture the televised address. An oak-panelled background with a large union flag hanging sedately in the corner, the PM with that furrowed house-captain
Daniel Hannan wrote in the Spectator earlier this year about the pirate parties of Europe I once shared a car to the airport with a French MEP, a member of the Front National (FN). He spoke that very correct French which, across the Channel, serves in place of accent as a social signifier. He casually mentioned that
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson and Angus Robertson debate the shared values of the English and Scots” startat=32] Listen [/audioplayer]‘What country, friends, is this?’ We’ve been wrestling with Viola’s question almost from the moment she asked it. It was barely a year after Shakespeare had scribbled out those words, in the first Act of Twelfth Night,
I once shared a car to the airport with a French MEP, a member of the Front National (FN). He spoke that very correct French which, across the Channel, serves in place of accent as a social signifier. He casually mentioned that the Holocaust couldn’t have happened, at least not on the scale claimed: the volume of the
The single most common reaction I get from Americans when they learn that we’re placing our newspapers under our politicians is: ‘Y’all need a Bill of Rights’. You can see their point. Absolute freedom of expression used to distinguish the English-speaking peoples from the run of nations. The restrictions which even other western democracies applied
Spain was always going to be where the doom of the euro would be determined. Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus amount, together, to less than 5 per cent of the EU’s economy. They can be rescued without emptying the bailout fund. Alternatively, their defaults can be managed as controlled explosions. Spain is in a different
To what problem is the statutory regulation of herbalists a solution? Are the tiny bits of bark and sap and leaf peddled by contemporary wisewomen deleterious to human health? Are we at risk of being sterilised by St John’s wort, paralysed by pau d’arco, maddened by meadowsweet? Hardly. Herbal remedies might be inert placebos or
Why is Britain committing £7 billion to a bailout which will trap Ireland in its present discontents? Would you trust an economic forecaster who had recently said this? The euro has done more to enforce budgetary discipline in the rest of Europe than any number of exhortations from the IMF or the OECD. If we remain outside
The figures have now become literally unimaginable. Britain will borrow £175 billion this year, £173 billion the year after—a higher total in two years than in the entirety of the 316 years since King William introduced the national debt. It’s hardly surprising, in the circumstances, that people snatch at the more comprehensible numbers, notably the hikes in
It’s dawning on me that the Prime Minister can’t listen to criticism. It’s dawning on me that the Prime Minister can’t listen to criticism. I don’t just mean that he can’t respond to criticism; I mean that he literally can’t listen to it. When he came to the European Parliament to drum up support for
Perhaps now you’ll understand what we’ve been banging on about, we localists. For the better part of a decade, we’ve campaigned to place the police under elected sheriffs. Some of our chief constables, we contended, had cast off the cables that once attached them to public opinion. They were concentrating on speed cameras and hate
In theory, Europeans find American elections vulgar and plutocratic. In practice, they find them utterly gripping. This is partly because the US is wealthy and powerful, but mainly because American campaigns, being more participatory than European ones, are more interesting. All organisations grow according to the DNA encoded at the time of their conception. The
Daniel Hannan, who predicted the Irish ‘No’ vote in this magazine, now says that the EU will simply implement the Lisbon Treaty and never risk a referendum again By ten o’clock on Friday morning, it was clear that the ‘No’s had it. Ireland’s Europhiles were struggling even in their affluent strongholds within the Pale. In
Like, I suspect, most Spectator readers, I saw no need for Lords reform in the first place. The old chamber functioned perfectly well, as even Labour was forced to admit. But the party took the view that, while it might work in practice, it didn’t work in theory. The hereditary principle, Tony Blair declared, had
Amid fresh reports that Fidel Castro is at death’s door, Daniel Hannan says that the Cuban dictator was the beneficiary of Western hypocrisy about left-wing tyrants, and of the strategic errors of the 44-year US blockade Sola mors tyrannicida est, wrote Thomas More: death is the only way to get rid of tyrants. And so
On Sunday, Venezuela goes to the polls. The likely triumph of Hugo Chávez, writes Daniel Hannan, reflects a phenomenon sweeping Latin America that feeds not on hope but on hatred There aren’t really any proper dictators left in South America, but Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez is getting close. His first attempt at power was through an
You’d be surprised how many champions Sir Ian Blair has. Ken Livingstone thinks he’s terrific. So does his Oxford contemporary and namesake, Tony Blair. The Guardian has devoted a huge amount of space to telling us what a good job he is doing. According to one of its columnists, the clamour against the Metropolitan Police
Rocco Buttiglione talks to Daniel Hannan about homosexuality, homophobia and ‘the morbid totalitarianism of the Left’ Martyrdom often seems to bring, at the end, a sense of elation. Thomas More was plainly on a high as he was led to the block, getting off a couple of memorable quips to the headsman. Rocco Buttiglione is
Join me in a little thought experiment. For several months now, Tony Blair has been insisting that the European constitution would be a defeat for Euro-federalism. Within hours of appending his name to it, he announced that, far from creating a superstate, the constitution was about ‘sovereign nation-states co-operating together’. Let us play along with
President Karimov is a ruthless tyrant, says Daniel Hannan, but he supports the war on terror and is backed by the West. He shouldn’t be A strange little row has been bubbling away over the past two months concerning our ambassador to Tashkent. You may have seen the odd headline about it in the inside