I make no apology for writing about Lord Hannan again. He is a fool par excellence. The idiots idiot. A man so profoundly wrong about virtually everything he has ever said that he ought to get some sort of award - and perhaps medical help. He has plumbed the deepest depths of ignorance and then some more. At the beginning of the pandemic 'Dr Hannan' said that covid 19 wouldn’t kill anyone, no comfort to the 5.2 million who have died worldwide since.
Frankly, if I was high profile and had written something which turned out so wrong I would have withdrawn from public life and become a hermit. Not so Hannan he carries on as before.
And so we find him writing various fantasies like the one I posted about on Sunday. This time it’s a fanciful article for The Washington Examiner, an American conservative news website and weekly magazine: A vengeful EU is forcing a crisis in Northern Ireland. If he was deliberately trying to create the impression he didn’t understand Brexit he couldn’t have done better.
I am not convinced his piece will go down well in America. First of all, back here Lord Frost is talking about ‘global’ Britain negotiating as an ‘equal’ of the EU. Building us up like some sort of superpower. Meanwhile Hannan pictures us as a weakling having sand kicked in our face by bullies in Brussels and running off crying.
Plus, on the east coast of the US there is a significant contingent of Irish extraction who are well aware what’s been happening and that Brexiteers like Hannan were warned about the Irish border problem by all three former living UK prime ministers but insisted on Brexit all the same. Hannan dismissed the border issue and thought it was easily solvable.
One of the things he (and Shanker Singham) argued for was Mutual Recognition Agreements. He does so again in his Washington Examiner piece.
"London argued that an ambitious trade deal including mutual recognition would make that issue redundant. But Eurocrats wanted the U.K. to be seen to suffer."
He sits on various trade bodies and must know this is out of the question. No country on earth sub contracts its right to regulate to another country.
He still misunderstands Mutual Recognition of Conformity Assessment which is quite different. And the EU have offered an SPS agreement on food standards which we object to anyway. I assume Hannan wants the 27 member states to accept whatever standards we decide to come up with. The whole thing is a non starter and the Americans know this.
What about this:
"At first, Britain and Ireland began to work on technical solutions that would render the border invisible. But in 2017, a year after the Brexit referendum, a general election in Britain returned an anti-Brexit majority. Europhile members of Parliament encouraged Brussels to offer terms so harsh that Britain might drop the whole idea of Brexit. In the most shocking abuse of parliamentary procedure since the 17th century, they paralyzed the government while simultaneously refusing to allow a general election."
I don't believe Ireland and the UK were ever working on 'technical solutions' or that democratically elected MPs conspired with Brussels to offer harsh terms. MPs voting according to their conscience and judgement is hardly an abuse of parliamentary procedure. It's democracy. What about this
"Now Johnson has a majority, and he could tear the treaty up. Yet, contrary to the impression given in most media, he has no intention of doing so."
Is it the sort of thing a member of the UN security council ought to be saying? Does global Britain tear up treaties? Of course not. Next:
"Earlier this year, Brussels invoked Article 16 from no higher motive than pique at the relative success of Britain’s vaccination program. True, it backed down, but the fact remains that Brussels wanted to impose a border in Ireland — something the U.K. has never contemplated."
This is an inversion of the truth that Goebbels would have been proud of.
And...
"The idea of a populist and irresponsible Johnson versus a dull and bureaucratic EU is impossible to remove from one’s head, but facts are facts."
Facts are facts. Hannan and facts are like the opposing poles of a magnet
Hannan is like Lord Henry Wootton in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde describes Lord Henry’s way of thinking about something while extemporising on it, “He played with the idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.” Hannan's ideas are often weighed down with paradox.
He charms people out of themselves, and they follow his pipe laughing. Facts "flee before him like frightened forest things" to quote Wilde again. Unfortunately, beautifully crafted as it is, it contains barely a word of truth.
It’s difficult to know if he believes what he says or not. It was as if he had been in a coma for the last five years and suddenly woken up
My worry is this. How are we going to get out of the mess we're in while men like Hannan are elevated to the peerage and continue to pump out such nonsense?
