Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy…
People out there in the big wide world are often helpful enough to point me towards Daniel Hannan’s latest brainfarts. He’s pretty prolific, but some of his work seems so boneheaded that I’ll get the same link sent to me by two, three, or, on one occasion, five different people.
This week it was this particular tweet – a retweet from last September; it’s all repeats on the internet these days – that everyone seemed keen to point me towards.
It’s like Ayn Rand has been reincarnated in the form of 15 year old hoping to study PPE at Oxford, isn’t it? That tweet suggests a world view so comfortingly simple that nobody actually needs money, and if you try to tax anyone anything they might decide to stop earning any in a fit of pique. (At time of writing, incidentally, Daniel Hannan has yet to resign his job as a Member of the European Parliament.)
If I get too far into this one, though, there’s a danger I’ll find myself attempting to disprove the assumptions of classical economics through the medium of sarcasm, and while I’m not shy about my own abilities to bullshit, I think that may be a bit beyond me. So instead I’m just going to leave it there for everyone to marvel at while we talk about flags.
Daniel Hannan’s header has been annoying me for months now, because it clearly takes place in a parallel universe in which the Anglosphere is a real thing rather than just the masturbatory fantasies of a certain type of free market ideologue. It combines the flags of the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, into a single red, white and blue monstrosity: the fact that one of Britain’s best known Eurosceptics uses this as his banner pic implies, at least to me, that he thinks this is what we should have instead of the EU.
At first glance, the assumption here seems to be that Britain’s natural allies are all the other countries who speak English. Except it clearly isn’t that, because a lot of other countries also speak English – Ireland, India, South Africa, to name but three – yet are mysteriously missing from the flag.
A better definition might be that it’s the bits of the British Empire where our forefathers planted their own colonies and attempted to wipe out the natives, rather than simply lording it over them through a combination of divide-and-rule and Maxim guns. More charitably, it’s the places that have a slightly misty-eyed relationship to the same stuff – free markets, Magna Carta, the notion that Britain invented freedom – that Dan himself does.
The notion of the Anglosphere is not entirely without foundation: these five countries constitute the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which implies a certain degree of closeness, and there’s a fair amount of military co-operation too. In the event of a nuclear holocaust, indeed, one of the instructions British prime ministers can leave for their nuclear subs is, basically, “You are now Australian. ”
But nonetheless oh my god, mate, are you actually high? The Anglosphere is not a political unit – outside the world of George Smiley and GI JOE, it might as well not exist – and the idea of a US that is increasingly a) diverse but b) protectionist going anywhere near that kind of thing is just delusional. Dan is basically just saying he’d be happier if Britain’s primary allies were countries which we founded, which speak English, and which contain depressingly high concentrations of people who agree with him.
I was going to end with a crack about how the Anglosphere flag was such a work of science fiction that Dan might as well employ the flag of Star Trek ’s United Federation of Planets or, if that was too lefty, the Terran Federation from Blake’s 7 (at least everyone there speaks English). But I’ve had a better idea. There is another rainy, sea-faring kingdom in a popular work of fantasy that recently took advantage of continent-wide chaos to break away from a larger political unit. In what may or may not a foretaste of things to come, it later used it as an excuse to attack its former allies.
I am talking, of course, about the Iron Islands from Game of Thrones .
What is dead may never die.
As Donald Trump took the podium on a cold Washington day to deliver his inauguration speech, the world held its breath. Viewers hunched over televisions or internet streaming services watched Trump mouth “thank you” to the camera, no doubt wondering how he could possibly live up to his deranged late-night Twitter persona. In newsrooms across America, reporters unsure when they might next get access to a president who seems to delight in denying them the right to ask questions got ready to parse his words for any clue as to what was to come. Some, deciding they couldn’t bear to watch, studiously busied themselves with other things.
But when the moment came, Trump’s speech was uncharacteristically professional – at least compared to his previous performances. The fractured, repetitive grammar that marks many of his off-the-cuff statements was missing, and so, too, were most of his most controversial policy ideas.
Trump told the crowd that his presidency would “determine the course of America, and the world, for many, many years to come” before expressing his gratefulness to President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for their “gracious aid” during the transition. “They have been magnificent,” Trump said, before leading applause of thanks from the crowd.
If this opening was innocent enough, however, it all changed in the next breath. The new president moved quickly to the “historic movement”, “the likes of which the world has never seen before”, that elected him President. Following the small-state rhetoric of his campaign, Trump promised to take power from the “establishment” and restore it to the American people. “This moment,” he told them, “Is your moment. It belongs to you.”
A good deal of the speech was given over to re-iterating his nationalist positions while also making repeated references to the key issues – “Islamic terrorism” and families – that remain points of commonality within the fractured Republican GOP.
The loss of business to overseas producers was blamed for “destroying our jobs”. “Protection,” Trump said, “Will lead to great strength. ” He promised to end what he called the “American carnage” caused by drugs and crime.
“From this day forward,” Trump said, “It’s going to be only America first. ”
There was plenty in the speech, then, that should worry viewers, particularly if you read Trump’s promises to make America “unstoppable” so it can “win” again in light of his recent tweets about China.
But it was the things Trump didn’t mention that should worry us most. Trump, we know, doesn’t use official channels to communicate his most troubling ideas.
