YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Hannan

lines on the record: 30
first: 2017-12-01
most recent: 2017-12-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In every generation, it's a difficult argument to win because free trade is counterintuitive. It runs up against our Paleolithic instincts and intuitions. We want to provide against famine, to hoard food. The idea of being dependent on people that you can't see is running up against a million years of evolution. But it works every time it's been tried. The countries that have done it, you know, the Hong Kongs, the Singapores, the New Zealands more recently Australia, they don't look back. And once you do this, people will wonder what all the fuss was about.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that, I think, is Britain's particular vocation at the moment, as it was historically. In fact, this is what I'm spending most of my time on now. I'm president of something called the Institute for Free Trade that just launched in September.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why would anyone want to be an elected politician? I understand why somebody would want to ban GM foods or get us out of NATO or whatever. I understand that. And that elected politics may be a vehicle to do that. But who would be such a mug as to choose the life just for its own sake?”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm probably done in politics. It's not often that you get to leave this game on your own terms, having done what you came for. And that is a precious thing. So my current inclination is to go and do something completely different.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the EU is not a settled dispensation. It's evolving all the time. And the way I see it, we've stepped off a conveyor belt. So stepping off the conveyor belt, you're literally moving, but actually it's the conveyor belt that's moving faster and in a direction that you didn't want to go. And if you've just come from there, you'll know that 80 plus percent of Swiss don't want to join the EU. They reckon they've got a good, happy deal. They can do their own trade agreements with the Chinese and the Philippines and the Indonesians and whatever. But they have a close and friendly relationship with the EU that covers an awful lot of policy. I think that's not a bad deal.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You like Norway. Yeah, what she actually said. What she actually said in the Florence speech was something that would be closer than Canada, but not so near as Norway. Now, between those two options, the only extant model out there actually is Switzerland. So that seems to me something not far off where we are going to end up.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fair to quote the sentences immediately before and after that, right? It was absolutely clear what I was talking about, which was a Swiss type arrangement. So the phrase single market there was being used to mean access for trade. And I picked up that phrase in the interview. But no one could have watched that interview and not realized that I was proposing a Swiss type model. I was quite explicit about that.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it probably will, in the sense that one of the things that I hope we will decide is that we will no longer subsidize low-paid workers here from overseas. If you haven't paid anything into the pot, you can't start claiming. So if you simply made that change of not paying in-work benefits to new arrivals, I think that will change the calculus for a lot of people. And I think the numbers will then fall. But I think we should also encourage skilled workers and students to come here and take up places. And I don't think that that is a sort of fringe position that the Leave campaign try to sneak out in the small print. You'll remember that during the campaign, on all the big set piece occasions, when Michael Gove was interviewed on TV, when Boris did his big Wembley Arena debate, they said we want to have people coming to work here. We want legal migration from the EU. So this is not something we can be accused of having sort of kept Stum about during the campaign.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that was promised was control. And control, in my mind, can only possibly have one meaning, which is that no overseas court will tell us who can come into the country or stay. So we'll decide that for ourselves. Parliament will take the decision.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hordes are coming. Okay, let me say it again it was An Isunic, right? It was not the issue and I will go further. Anyone who tells you that Brexit vote was all about immigration, I guarantee as a remainer, I've never ever come across a lever who says that.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but not for a majority of leave voters. And you can measure this empirically. And it was, there were qualitative and quantitative polls. There was a huge exit poll on the day that said, what's your top issue? And it showed what every other poll shows, which is that the top issue for people was democracy.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's nothing in this world that's completely perfect. So, yes, I mean, there are things that I think could have been done differently.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In philosophical terms or specific policy Well, when Thatcher was still Prime Minister, for example, I backed her in her centralization of power, which I think looking back now was disastrous. I wish I had seen then what I can see now, that rate capping and reducing the power of the GLC and so on was calamitous. And what we should have done is gone in the other direction. In a similar way, I would have voted no, no, because there were two questions in the Scottish devolution referendum in 1998. I now think that actually we should go further and have a lot more decentralization of power both to Edinburgh and within Scotland. You change on the basis of having seen that you got things wrong.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've changed my mind about lots of things over the years, we all do, either because, well, I mean, I used to be in my Oxford days much more of a kind of high Tory. I was much more conventional church and queen Tory. And I've now become much more of a kind of Jeffersonian radical. And that would”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, faith is the wrong word because faith implies that you're doing it out of dogma rather than on the basis of analysis. I think political views are something that you form empirically. You form them on the basis of experience and you can change them.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But any conservative student is unfashionable. That's always been true. You will remember, Nick, having been a conservative in your student days, it is an unfashionable and difficult thing to do. I was very manage? I'm sure you were fashionable in other ways. But if you think that something matters, then you don't mind the censure of people who don't know you.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The bills that you're paying are for things that you couldn't have dreamed of in 1997. I wish that the economists who say things have got no better could go back in a time machine and spend three days living the way we did and then come back and tell me that nothing has improved.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“20 years ago. There were four channels on TV. There was no Wi Fi, no wiki. Incredibly, there were no Starbucks. You'll remember the predecessor called Seattle Coffee that had just opened. There were no cheap flights. EasyJet in 1997 was operating one route from Luton to Amsterdam. Now, how do you quantify the improvement in our lives of being able to go on holiday cheaply to drink decent coffee, to have all of the extraordinary information that our phones now bring us in our hands?”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say it's almost exactly the other way around. I think you can put Britain in context because you can compare it to other places and you can see what opportunities there are here. You can see why the NQ is so much longer than the out queue, why so many people would rather live here than in other countries. And the one thing that you get with that perspective is you can see how irrational it is to be complaining about small things, which I'm afraid is one of our national characteristics. Not just the weather. Not just the web, but this may sound like it's so trivial, but it's something that really bugs me. How many times do you hear people, you've, I'm sure had them on the Today program saying, well, living standards in the West have stagnated for 20 years that you can't understand Trump or Brexit until you grasp that for most people, they're no better off than they were 20. Oh, come on. Remember how life was.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it was just I thought what an extraordinary thing that you come here, you know, to me, this amazing country where you've turned the switch and the light actually comes on and you can drink the tap water and everything works and everyone's so gloomy about it.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so Peru in the early 70s had a dictatorship and private property and the rule of law were seen as contingent and fragile. Assumed that. I can remember, though, just about my very, very earliest political memories. Go back to the 1979 election, and I can just dimly recall the mood that preceded it, the total sort of despair in the late 70s. And I can remember being really shocked as a small boy hearing people, adults here saying, you know, Britain's gone to the dogs, we're finished as a country, it's all about managing decline and so on, because no one in Peru spoke like that about Britain. In fact, very few people abroad really think of Britain in those terms.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could hardly not have done, right? I mean, I spent my childhood at school here, but going back to Peru most holidays as part of a large British diaspora. And I'm very fond of South America and its people, but you couldn't fail to notice the difference.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went up with a car seat anyway. If it were only that, but it's one thing after another. And I think a lot of people were quite shocked when they were looking into this and saying, why is this an issue? Why are we having this referendum to find that you couldn't scrap the tampon tax or whatever, that all of these things had been cumulatively handed away without really anyone noticing?”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a dispersal of hundreds of different things, you know, what you're allowed to buy and sell, what you're allowed to plant in the ground, what you're allowed to fish from the sea whom you can work for, on what terms, with what noise level, with what hours. I mean, in a way, it's not one particular obnoxious decision. It's the accumulation of lots and lots of things that are no business of anybody else's. You know, you are required to drive kids around in car seats, for example, until they reach a minimum height or minimum age. I've been looking forward to discarding the wretched yogurt encrusted blobs at a much earlier stage than I could. I speak obviously of the car sees. Rather. You might agree or disagree with that, but how on earth is that a cross-border issue? Why isn't it something we can determine through our own proper democratic mechanisms? How did this get to be something that had to be imposed on half a billion people?”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there was a moment that I really do remember. It was when the Soviet Union was breaking apart and the Constituent Republics were kind of gradually recovering sovereignty. And the Latvian foreign minister was asked, are you truly a sovereign country now? Because in phases they were getting their own currency and so on. And not trying to be clever or make a point. You said, oh, we're now more independent than the United Kingdom, which of course was true because they weren't accepting a superior legal system. And I remember thinking then, he's right. You know, we fought all these wars to save the independence of other countries around Europe. And when did we ever decide to throw it all away like this? And that was when I realized that this was not just one among a series of foreign policy issues, that it was affecting all domestic as well as foreign policy because it was about the location of power. It was about whether you could hire and fire the people who pass your laws or whether supreme power was wielded somewhere further away.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, all of this was happening around about 1991 with astonishing rapidity. Europe was just a total non-issue in the 80s, you know, and the first glimmer that it was going to become an issue was Margaret Thatcher's Bruges speech, which was as late as September 1988. And so everything after that, between then and when she was kicked out two years later, that was a period of very, very hectic change. And I think a lot of people looking up and noticing politics for the first time in our late teens couldn't help being drawn into this question because it was this maelstrom of an issue.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So remember how the European debate was unfolding. You know, it had been a non-issue after the 1975 referendum. That was a two-to-one vote to stay in. It was off the agenda. And I think things really changed with Maastricht. That was when the EU stopped being a club of countries that were basically about trade and cooperation and became much more overtly a political union. It's when it stopped being the European economic community and changed its name to European Union and extended its jurisdiction into culture and foreign affairs and immigration and defense and so on. And at that stage, it became impossible to deny that this was primarily a political project. It was about creating a country called Europe, if you like. And of course had been there all along. But until Maastricht it was one among a series of competing futures and at that point it became orthodox and official.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it's true that I persuaded Matt to do it, which by the way was a very brave decision of his, because no one at the time thought we were going to win. And it was an act of real kind of principle and patriotism to take on that job of what looked like a campaign that couldn't be won. So I did do that. But I don't know. You know, Ronald Reagan was always a great believer in saying just always let other people push in and get the credit for anything and then you can achieve whatever you like.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, in the sense that I decided this was a big issue when I was 19. But, I mean, it wasn't called Brexit then. And I think for most of my intervening adult years right up until the referendum, I'd have settled for a deal where we just pulled out of the political stuff and kept most of the market. And it was only really when David Cameron came back with nothing that I thought there's no alternative now.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one of those things that happens occasionally. I've got to pick you up on it. It's very flattering to be described as the guy who brought Brexit, but there were 17.4 million of us.”
2017-12-01 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Dan Hannan One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source