{"id":210117,"date":"2025-06-24T10:21:08","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T10:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/210117\/"},"modified":"2025-06-24T10:21:08","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T10:21:08","slug":"has-lord-hannan-forgotten-his-2016-vision-of-post-brexit-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/210117\/","title":{"rendered":"Has Lord Hannan forgotten his 2016 vision of post-Brexit Britain?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The date that Daniel Hannan chose for his now infamous Newsnight <\/strong>video<\/strong><\/a> and <\/strong>Reaction Life article<\/strong><\/a>, published two days before voters went to the polls in the 2016 referendum, has finally arrived. Yes, it\u2019s 24 June 2025 and Britain has certainly left the EU, exactly as Hannan urged, but unfortunately life in Britain is unrecognisable from the one he predicted nine years ago with all the misplaced confidence of the anti-EU zealot.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Brexit Independence Day<\/strong><\/p>\n

Britain isn\u2019t celebrating its Independence Day with fireworks. Older industries like steel, cement, paper, plastics and ceramics haven\u2019t \u201crevived as energy prices have fallen back to global levels\u201d. Or at least if they have, it will come as a surprise to those working in them. London, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow haven\u2019t \u201cboomed\u201d and neither has shale oil and gas \u201ccome on tap\u201d. Our universities aren\u2019t \u201cflourishing\u201d, and their revenues aren\u2019t \u201crising\u201d. Fuel bills for UK consumers haven\u2019t \u201ctumbled\u201d either.<\/p>\n

The EU hasn\u2019t \u201cturned inward\u201d and no, \u201cDenmark, the Netherlands and Ireland\u201d didn\u2019t \u201cfollow us out\u201d as he forecast. Plans to harmonise income tax and social security across the bloc never materialised and therefore didn\u2019t \u201cprompt referendums in three other EU states\u201d. And unfortunately for Hannan, Britain doesn\u2019t \u201clead a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU\u201d.<\/p>\n

They were all figments of his imagination.<\/p>\n

I could go on. Essentially, none of his Utopian vision of post-Brexit Britain has actually come to pass. Quite the opposite in fact. Trade in goods both with the EU and the rest of the world is substantially down since Brexit. Predictions of a \u00a340bn annual hit to the UK\u2019s GDP have proven to be substantially \u2018correct\u2019 according to an article<\/strong><\/a> in The Times, leading to higher taxes and lower living standards.<\/p>\n

Hannan\u2019s fantasies \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

And what must be galling to Hannan, now in the Lords after being ennobled by Boris Johnson in 2020 (presumably for services to falsity), recent polling shows support for the EU among citizens in the member states is at an all time record<\/strong><\/a>, and polls in the UK show a significant majority want to rejoin<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps, we shouldn\u2019t be too surprised. Being wrong is a Hannan speciality, something he appears to be devoting his life to. Who can forget in February 2020, him advising us not to worry<\/strong><\/a> about a pandemic, that was \u201cunlikely\u201d to be fatal if we contracted coronavirus. It would be less lethal than flu, said the man with a degree in modern history. By March 2023, just under 227,000 people<\/strong><\/a> had died in the UK with Covid-19 listed as one of the causes on their death certificate.<\/p>\n

No doubt Lord Hannan of Kingsclere would have preferred to have delivered a valedictory piece for The Telegraph on the ninth anniversary of the referendum but his latest effort, just a few days ago, was not quite what he had in mind: \u2018Britain is turning into a Third World country<\/strong>\u2019<\/strong>.<\/a>Oh, dear.<\/p>\n

\u2026 and loss of memory<\/strong><\/p>\n

You will search his article in vain for a mention of Brexit, new sea borders separating us from Northern Ireland and Gibraltar, the imminent collapse of the EU or even Hoxton (in Hackney) failing to become \u201cthe software capital of the world\u201d. What happened there?<\/p>\n

Perhaps it has all slipped his mind, what with one thing and another. Or, he has taken the advice of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice who maintained that, \u201cin such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable\u201d.<\/p>\n

I think we\u2019re owed an apology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The date that Daniel Hannan chose for his now infamous Newsnight video and Reaction Life article, published two…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210118,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-210117","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114737845568814944","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}