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\u2019s latest brainfarts. He\u2019s pretty prolific, but some of his work seems so boneheaded that I\u2019ll get the same link sent to me by two, three, or, on one occasion, five different people.
This week it was this particular tweet \u2013 a retweet from last September; it\u2019s all repeats on the internet these days \u2013 that everyone seemed keen to point me towards.
It\u2019s like Ayn Rand has been reincarnated in the form of 15 year old hoping to study PPE at Oxford, isn\u2019t 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\u2019s a danger I\u2019ll find myself attempting to disprove the assumptions of classical economics through the medium of sarcasm, and while I\u2019m not shy about my own abilities to bullshit, I think that may be a bit beyond me. So instead I\u2019m just going to leave it there for everyone to marvel at while we talk about flags.
Daniel Hannan\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s natural allies are all the other countries who speak English. Except it clearly isn\u2019t that, because a lot of other countries also speak English \u2013 Ireland, India, South Africa, to name but three \u2013 yet are mysteriously missing from the flag.
A better definition might be that it\u2019s 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 \u2013 free markets, Magna Carta, the notion that Britain invented freedom \u2013 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\u2019s 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, \u201cYou are now Australian. \u00a0\u00bb
But nonetheless oh my god, mate, are you actually high? The Anglosphere is not a political unit \u2013 outside the world of George Smiley and GI JOE, it might as well not exist \u2013 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\u2019d 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 \u2019s United Federation of Planets or, if that was too lefty, the Terran Federation from Blake\u2019s 7 (at least everyone there speaks English). But I\u2019ve 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 row over Donald Trump and that dossier rumbles on.
Nothing puts legs on a story like a domestic angle, and that the retired spy who compiled the file is a one of our own has excited Britain\u2019s headline writers. The man in question, Christopher Steele, has gone to ground having told his neighbour to look after his cats before vanishing.
Although the dossier contains known errors, Steele is regarded in the intelligence community as a serious operator not known for passing on unsubstantiated rumours, which is one reason why American intelligence is investigating the claims.
\u201cBritain’s role in Trump dossier\u201d is the Telegraph \u2019s splash, \u201cThe \u2018credible\u2019 ex-MI6 man behind Trump Russia report\u201d is the Guardian \u2019s angle, \u201cBritish spy in hiding\u201d is the i \u2019s splash.
But it\u2019s not only British headline writers who are exercised by Mr Steele; the Russian government is too. \u201cMI6 officers are never ex,\u201d the Russian Embassy tweeted , accusing the UK of \u201cbriefing both ways – against Russia and US President\u201d. \u201cKremlin blames Britain for Trump sex storm\u201d is the Mail \u2019s splash.
Elsewhere, Crispin Blunt, the chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, warns that relations between the United Kingdom and Russia are as \u201cbad as they can get\u201d in peacetime.
Though much of the coverage of the Trump dossier has focused on the eyecatching claims about whether or not the President-Elect was caught in a Russian honeytrap, the important thing, as I said yesterday, is that the man who is seven days from becoming President of the United States, whether through inclination or intimidation, is not going to be a reliable friend of the United Kingdom against Russia.
Though Emanuel Macron might just sneak into the second round of the French presidency, it still looks likely that the final choice for French voters will be an all-Russia affair, between Francois Fillon and Marine Le Pen.
For one reason or another, Britain\u2019s stand against Russia looks likely to be very lonely indeed.<\/p>\n

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