Daniel Hannan

Politician

1971-09-01

Quotes by Daniel Hannan

• The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.

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• On any measure, Spain's bank rescue has been a disaster. A hundred million euros have been added to the national debt, ten-year bonds are at a record high and the country's credit rating has been downgraded three notches.

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• A minister is supposed to be there to remind his permanent officials that they work for the rest of us. If, instead, he becomes the cabinet champion and public spokesman for his department, democracy is vitiated.

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• I am not the Conservative Party's health care spokesman. I'm fond of Andrew Lansley, and I strongly support David Cameron as party leader.

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• Whenever the debate moves on to hard numbers - our deficit with Europe, our surplus with the rest of the world, our Brussels budget contributions, the tiny part of our economy dependent on sales to the EU, the vast part subjected to EU regulation - Euro-enthusiasts quickly shift their ground and start harrumphing about influence.

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• The complexity of a tax system is every bit as damaging to competitiveness as the overall tax rate. The more convoluted the tax code becomes, the more time we have to take off work to comply with it.

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• One way to think of the tax system is as a massive Swiss cheese. Each hole is an exemption created by a chancellor in pursuit of good headlines - a hole waiting to be filled by the clever accountants who work for Starbucks or Jimmy Carr.

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• European pantywaists might keep voting for high-spending governments, but the U.S. was founded on a popular revolt against taxation.

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• The Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement were both, in a sense, complaining about the same thing, namely the use of public money to rescue failed banks.

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• That's the problem with very high taxes - they don't redistribute wealth; they redistribute people.

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• Political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting. If enough of them are tickled then, bingo, you're news.

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• Foreign writers - especially Germans - often feel that Shakespeare is really one of them, that he was somehow accidentally born in the wrong country. In much the same way, leftists sense in their bones that he was a radical, rightists that he was a Tory.

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• The idea seems to be to use the next treaty talks to strike a grand bargain: Britain will be helpful to those states wishing to establish a fiscal union among themselves if, in exchange, we can amicably derogate from the aspects of the EU which we dislike.

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• After Margaret Thatcher's funeral, I spoke at a tribute meeting organised by her supporters in a pub next to St Paul's.

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• A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

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• The further left you are, the more your concern for the underdog crowds out everything else, leading you to overlook inconsistencies. You might, for example, argue for immigration and multiculturalism in the UK, but not in the Amazon. You might demand equality before the law and, at the same time, gender quotas.

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• New fathers, political prisoners, traumatised presidential aides, resolute schoolboys, MEPs addressing unfriendly chambers - we all find that Shakespeare has magically anticipated our precise circumstances. How he was possible, I still don't understand; but there isn't a day I'm not grateful that he speaks to me in my own language.

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• You cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.

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• The statistics might have a Eurosceptic cast, but they are not exactly a fun read. Few of us want to wade through ONS graphs or European Commission tables.

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• The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare.

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