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.
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 only had to play with 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.
The resignation of Tristram Hunt as MP for Stoke-on-Central has triggered a by-election in the safe Labour seat, which has Westminster speculating about the possibility of a victory for Ukip in the seat, with Paul Nuttall, the Ukip leader, being urged to throw his hat in the ring.
Are they right?
Ukip finished second in 2015, a little over 5,000 votes behind Labour, but just 33 votes ahead of the Conservatives in third place. It’s always more instructive to talk about percentages than raw vote totals, particularly in by-elections. Labour starts with a 16 per cent lead, with the parties of the right effectively tied.
There are reasons for Labour to be more nervous than they’d like. Stoke was one of the seats where a significant Labour-to-Ukip swing was masked by a Liberal Democrat to Labour swing. It’s now pretty clear that the Liberal Democrats are enjoying a revival in England though we still don’t know the extent to which that varies region-by-region.
They also have the problem that as the seat is due to be abolished in the next boundary review, they may find it hard to attract a strong candidate field. One of the unremarked features of the Corbyn era so far is that even though the selected parliamentary candidates have all, thus far, been Corbynsceptics of varying degrees, the talent pool has been exceptionally strong and drawn from outside the usual suspects: Jim McMahon, widely seen locally and nationally as an exemplary council leader, Tracy Brabin a former actress, Rosena Allin-Khan who could almost have been grown in a lab to win Tooting for Labour, while Rachel Holliday, the leadership’s preferred candidate in Copeland, was named as Cumbria’s Woman of the Year in 2015.
The good news, however, is although there is a great deal of anger on Twitter about Hunt “walking away” from his constituents, I can find no evidence in parliamentary by-elections triggered in similar circumstances where the holding party has been punished for the sitting MP quitting. There is a surprisingly large dataset for this: as well as the string of by-elections triggered by people taking jobs at the European Union or the United Nations, there are the resignations of David Miliband, David Cameron, Tony Blair, Louise Mensch in the last decade, all of which resulted in by-elections where the result was as you’d expect. (Though Labour did gain Corby on a big swing, that came at the high watermark of Ed Miliband’s popularity and preceded a wave of gains across the country in the locasl elections.)
But just as clear as the Liberal Democrat revival is Ukip’s collapse, which has been pretty consistent in every by-election – both at a council and a parliamentary level – since the referendum.
