MEP Daniel Hannan Stripping the Bark Off PM Gordon Brown

MEP Daniel Hannan

By now you may have heard of the highly charged speech given by Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Daniel Hannan of South East England.

Hannan gave this speech during British Prime Minister Gordon Brown´s visit to the European Parliament two days ago.  To use the words of James Pethokoukis at US News, Hannan “stripp[ed] the bark off ” PM Gordon.  No kidding!

But it was sadly accurate and true.

If you listen to this as an American as I am, you will likely be struck by how closely the British situation follows our situation here in the United States…and how the daft and irresponsible socialist policies of President Barack Obama are mirroring those of PM Brown.

Great Britain has in many ways for many years been ahead of the United States…in the descent down the self-destructive road of socialism. Even though the United States has for decades had rolling footage telling us exactly what not to do, liberals in the US insist that we are somehow smarter than the British (and every other country that has tried socialism), that somehow we can succeed where they have failed.

The arrogance and insanity of such a notion!!!

Below is a transcript from Free Republic of the riveting words of MEP Hannan, and below that, a video of his speech.

Prime Minister, I see you’ve 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’ve 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 ‘British jobs for British workers’ 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?

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 £20,000. 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 – 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’s not that you’re not apologising; like everyone else I have long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things. It’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year – in the last twelve months – a hundred thousand private sector jobs have been lost and yet you created thirty thousand public sector jobs.

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’re ‘well-placed to weather the storm’, 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’s 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 – 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.

Britain, the EU, and the United States could use more people like Hannan. Perhaps on April 15, the day of the nationwide Tax Day Tea Parties, we’ll see some of those folks more prominently, working for a return to sanity for the United States.

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