Over a million view speech by Tory MEP Daniel Hannan on web

[Albus]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/28/daniel-hannan-tory-mep

There was no link yesterday from the official Conservative party website to the internet sensation of the week: a speech by the 37-year-old Tory MEP Daniel Hannan denouncing Gordon Brown as a "Brezhnev-era apparatchik".

By yesterday the speech - which Brown had to sit through after his own address to the European parliament - had passed 1.1m views.

For Hannan, it was a triumph. For David Cameron, a headache - proof that not all parts of his party have changed.

Opinions vary as to why the speech was a hit. Hannan says it shows how the internet is changing politics, since it was ignored by the press and TV.

At just over three minutes it was perfect for the web, and its tone caught the outrage of the right on both sides of the Atlantic, convinced that it must stop the big spending Brown-Obama juggernaut. Hannan's speech was linked to on the US Drudge Report website and he was quickly interviewed on Fox News.

He has not arrived out of the blue. Elected to the European parliament a decade ago, he irritated top Tories from the start by speaking out critically at a joint meeting of MPs and MEPs - "Who is this Hannan man?" one former cabinet minister asked angrily afterwards.

At Oxford in the early 1990s his fierce anti-Europeanism was influential. When a bust of Ted Heath was due to be unveiled at the Oxford Union, Eurosceptics hid it, and Heath was enraged.

"He's a free market nationalist and issue-for-issue agrees more with Ukip than Conservative policies," says Mark Littlewood, an Oxford contemporary who, like Hannan, now blogs for the Telegraph. The MEP was once also a leader writer there.

Hannan is no typical little Englander. Born in Peru, he is multi-lingual. Some find his style absurd: for a while he ended speeches in Latin calling for a vote on the Lisbon treaty: "Pactio Olisipiensis censenda est."

Others may dislike him quoting Enoch Powell last year - "we were a nation once; we are not now."

It is certainly a long way from Cameron's compassionate Conservatism.

[Albus]

1. The speech

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Yeah, Hannan is just the man to take advice from on the current Economic Crisis

I mean, he read the situation in Iceland so well:

Icelanders are rolling in it, says Daniel Hannan. Why? Because they understand that small is beautiful — and have stayed out of the EU

...
Today, Icelanders are absolutely rolling in it. A people two generations away from subsistence farming have become international tycoons. Like blue-eyed sheikhs, they buy houses in Chelsea that lie unoccupied between their visits to London. For Icelanders, in general, are Anglophiles of the most touching kind. They don’t have any romantic notions about the Brits. Rather, they see us as we are, gross and full of bread, with all our crimes broad blown, as flush as May; and yet, for the most part, they like us anyway. Indeed, huge numbers of them will be reading these words, for I have never come across such a high density of Spectator readers as in Reykjavik.

Eurofanatics dismiss Iceland’s prosperity as being based wholly on fisheries, and it is true that an ingenious quota system has turned Icelandic fish stocks into a massive renewable resource. But there is far more to it than that. Being outside the EU, Iceland has been able to cut taxes and regulation, and to open up its economy. For 70 years the Althing has been dominated by the splendidly named Independence party, which has pursued the kind of Thatcherite agenda that is off limits to EU members because of the Social Chapter, the euro, the 48-hour week and all the rest of it. Unsurprisingly, the Independence party is quite happy for things to carry on as they are, and resolutely opposes accession talks.

Not that the EEA is perfect. Iceland, like Norway and Liechtenstein — and, to a lesser extent, Switzerland, which is outside the EEA but linked to the other three through Efta — has to accept regulations which it has played no part in shaping. But such regulations affect only a small and clearly delineated part of Icelandic life; they do not, as in Britain, curl their tendrils through every government department. And EU laws do not have a direct effect in Iceland as they do in Britain; they must be specifically approved by the Althing.
...
Iceland’s most famous novelist, Halldór Laxness, won the Nobel Prize with a book called Independent People. That phrase — Sjalfstætt Folk — has a resonance on the island that is difficult for foreigners to grasp. Icelanders believe that self-government is the natural condition for a sturdy, free-standing citizenry. They understand that there is a connection between living in an independent state and living independently from the state. They have no more desire to submit to international than to national regulation. That attitude has made them the happiest, freest and wealthiest people on earth. Long may they remain so.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/print/the-magazine/cartoons/12658/blueeyed-sheikhs.thtml

Yeah, with much less regulation, the world would never have had these problems ...

[non sociopath skin]

3. Nice one, Mu.

The Skin