Words matter. These are the best Daniel Hannan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Most British people are keen to remain in a European free trade zone; and most EU states are keen to keep us there, because we buy from them more than we sell to them to the tune of £40 million per day.
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.
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.
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.
That’s the problem with very high taxes – they don’t redistribute wealth; they redistribute people.
There comes a point when threats become so overblown that they serve to irk rather than to frighten.
I’ve absolutely no idea where Culoiseau is, but I’d imagine La Poularde de Culoiseau is some kind of chicken.
The populists always fail in their own terms. Let me be more specific, the protectionists always fail. They always end up delivering the sharpest fall in living standards to the people who are their biggest supporters.
You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.
Nobody likes a smart alec. Which is why it’s always better for your career to be wrong and in company rather than right and on your own.
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.
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.
I’m going to devote myself full time to securing and then winning a referendum on leaving the E.U.
A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Every human on the planet is descended from both slaves and slave owners. What makes Britain unusual is not that we engaged in the disgusting trade, but that we eliminated it. Our political institutions led us, earlier than many, to the conclusion that freedom was the highest virtue.
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 pounds. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.
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.
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.
European pantywaists might keep voting for high-spending governments, but the U.S. was founded on a popular revolt against taxation.
It’s irresponsible to scare E.U. nationals in the U.K. by hinting that their status might change after Brexit.
Progressives and conservatives alike lean, unconsciously, towards particular conclusions, and then scrabble around to rationalise those conclusions to themselves.
I just think there is so much irrational pessimism in the world.
The U.S. states that allow for citizens’ initiatives tend to have fewer laws and lower taxes than the ones that don’t. But the beauty of the system is that it encourages the spread of best practice.
After Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, I spoke at a tribute meeting organised by her supporters in a pub next to St Paul’s.
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.
