Daniel Hannan Quotes

Whenever anyone points to the socialist roots of fascism, there are howls of outrage. Yet the people howling the loudest are often the first to claim some ideological link between fascism and conservatism.

We threaten to rain fire upon North Korea and Iran, yet we quail before an elderly, impoverished and decrepit Russia. How diminished we are as a civilization.

It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.

You cannot spend your way out of a recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev era apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it's nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by thirty percent. And soon, the voters too will get their chance to say so. They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government

The only serious attempt to prioritise growth came from Liz Truss, and prompted outrage from civil servants, commentators and MPs, including many Tories.

What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists.

Race is said to be non-existent, yet our cultural elites rarely seem to think of anything else.

The two armies [Red Army and Nazi Army] met at the town of Brest, where the 1918 peace treaty between the Kaiser’s government and Lenin’s revolutionary state had been signed. Soldiers fraternised, exchanging food and tobacco – pre-rolled German cigarettes contrasting favourably against rough Russian papirosi. A joint military parade was staged, the Wehrmacht’s field grey uniforms alongside the olive green of the shoddier Soviets. The two generals, Guderian and Krivoshein, had a slap-up lunch and, as they bade each other farewell, the Soviet commander invited German reporters to visit him in Moscow “after the victory over capitalist Albion”.

The bureaucracy has ballooned since Brexit – in other words, at precisely the moment when we could be opting out of the needlessly intrusive bits of the EU’s Money Laundering Directive.

Georgia, like Ukraine and Moldova, is a sovereign state. If we accept, in practice, that Russia can alter borders by force, we signal to Moscow that it can violate international norms with impunity. We can hardly then complain if the Kremlin meddles in American elections, or orders murders on British soil.

Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.

The two totalitarian systems [USSR Communism and German National-Socialism] traded in all the necessary commodities of war: not just oil and vital chemicals, but arms and ships. They exhibited each other’s cultural achievements, performed each other’s music and films, stressed their joint hostility to Western capitalism.

Hayek, writing in 1944, devoted the greater part of his Road to Serfdom to refuting the idea that Nazism and Communism were opposed ideologies, well aware of how fervently this idea was being promoted.

Detaining people for shouting republican slogans, even if they do so in a deliberately coarse and provocative way, is utterly un-British [...] I worry that our police are becoming more authoritarian and — worse — that a section of the public is cheering them on.

That idea that car manufacturers might disinvest after we leave the EU? It's a - what's the word? - oh yes. Lie.