{"id":1354,"date":"2009-04-02T18:30:38","date_gmt":"2009-04-03T01:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/2009\/04\/02\/said-daniel-hannan-to-gordon-brown\/"},"modified":"2009-04-03T10:23:20","modified_gmt":"2009-04-03T17:23:20","slug":"said-daniel-hannan-to-gordon-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/2009\/04\/said-daniel-hannan-to-gordon-brown\/","title":{"rendered":"…said Daniel Hannan"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Prime Minister, I see you\u2019ve already mastered the essential craft of the European politician, namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate. You\u2019ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that. Who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase \u2018British jobs for British workers\u2019 and that you have subsidised, where you have not nationalised outright, swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks? Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words? Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around \u00a320,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child. Now, once again today you try to spread the blame around; you spoke about an international recession, international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squalls. But not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging; in other words \u2013 to pay off debt. But you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line under the accumulated weight of your debt We are now running a deficit that touches 10% of GDP, an almost unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary; countries where the IMF have already been called in. Now, it\u2019s not that you\u2019re not apologising; like everyone else I have long accepted that you\u2019re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things. It\u2019s that you\u2019re carrying on, wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year – in the last twelve months \u2013 a hundred thousand private sector jobs have been lost and yet you created thirty thousand public sector jobs.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister, you cannot carry on for ever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit. You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we\u2019re \u2018well-placed to weather the storm\u2019, I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it\u2019s nonsense! Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so; the European Commission has said so; the markets have said so \u2013 which is why our currency has devalued by thirty percent. And soon the voters too will get their chance to say so. They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.<\/p>\n

U.K. MEP Daniel Hannan Transcript <\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Prime Minister, I see you\u2019ve already mastered the essential craft of the European politician, namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1354","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-economics","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}