Two days before the referendum in 2016 Daniel Hannan, the urbane, if slightly dotty MEP and advocate of Brexit wrote a forward looking article (HERE) for a website called Reaction about the land of milk and honey that Britain, freed from the malevolent grip of Brussels, would become by 2025. It's one of those articles that would normally cause the writer to emigrate to a remote island, grow a long beard and disappear from view altogether - out of sheer embarrassment.
It will go down as the famous last words of a man unable to differentiate between his a**e and his elbow. A man who has probably read a lot of victoriana with a highly romanticised version of the British empire - and believed it all! In faraway Hannan world, wealthy aristocrat men investigate scientific subjects or invest in manufactories to bring cheap goods to skilled artisans toiling happily in light, modern factories surrounded by bucolic green fields where contented animals graze under cloudless blue skies.
Hannan is such a man, steeped in fantasy, writing hopelessly unrealistic scenarios of the kind big brother might pump out in Orwell's 1984 to keep the masses happy. The Utopia he describes is just seven years away. The reality of a century of slow decline that we experienced up to 1973 is totally ignored as if it never happened and for Hannan, it probably didn't.
The article is certainly an insight into the Hannan grey matter. Here are some buttock clenching examples but you can easily pick your own, like overripe strawberries:-
The United Kingdom is now the region’s foremost knowledge-based economy. We lead the world in biotech, law, education, the audio-visual sector, financial services and software.
[Withdrawal] Terms were agreed easily enough. Britain withdrew from the EU’s political structures and institutions, but kept its tariff-free arrangements in place.
During the first 12 months after the vote, Britain confirmed with the various countries that have trade deals with the EU that the same deals would continue.
Unsurprisingly, several other European countries have opted to copy Britain’s deal with the EU, based as it is upon a common market rather than a common government.
Some [countries] followed us out of the EU (Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands).
They [the EU] now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
We saw that there were great opportunities across the oceans, beyond the enervated eurozone. We knew that our song had not yet been sung.
Support for the EU has now reached an all time high of 92% in Ireland and has risen generally across Europe since the Brexit referendum. It is as if in a blind panic, we have jumped into a leaky lifeboat, and are now watching the great liner sail serenely onward without any trouble whatsoever as the sea around us begins to turn distinctly stormy. Passengers line the rails and look back at us in puzzlement.
Hannan is a keen student of English poets, occasionally quoting G K Chesterton's poem The Secret People and others. But he might like to reflect on Rudyard Kipling's poem: A Dead Statesman:-
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
His lies are now coming back to haunt him.
