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Nov. 21, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
23:46
Delingpod 46: Daniel Hannan
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Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James Dellingpole, and my very exciting special guest, I've been trying to track him down for ages.
I finally found him, who would have thought, in Brussels...
It's Dan Hannan.
James, welcome to the belly of the beast.
It's great to have you here at last.
You've been lucky, or you're special anyway, that you're one of the very few MEPs I've ever encountered that hasn't been corrupted too much by this...
Well, I made the terrible mistake of getting elected on a kind of anti-corruption...
Ticket.
And, you know, there isn't a day I don't kick myself.
It means I can't really now engage in any corruption.
It's extremely frustrating.
But it's such a good life out here.
I've seen the free limos you get.
I mean...
MPs in the UK are treated like shit.
And rightly so.
I mean, you know, what a shower.
But here, MEPs...
No, it's a whole different level.
It's a whole different level.
To the Michelin-starred, gourmandising MEP, what counts as an expensive scandal in Westminster is incomprehensible.
I remember when the...
Where receipts were being published and there was a big row and everyone in Britain was terribly hit up.
Over and over again, I would try and explain what the row was about to incredulous continental MEP friends.
And they would just keep on saying, hang on, wait a minute, go through that again.
The money was for the upkeep of their houses and they were spending it on the upkeep of their houses.
Where's the scandal?
Because of course in...
In some of their countries, scandal means briefcases full of banknotes, mafia links, maybe even the odd assassination.
And they genuinely couldn't understand how in Britain there was a scandal about bath plugs.
What is the deal?
What are you saying goodbye to, or rather being forced to say goodbye to when we leave the EU? What's the salary and what are the expenses?
I mean, you know, it is a lot, it is a much, much better deal than you get as a national parliamentarian.
The salary is higher, the taxes are better, the expenses are better.
And it used to be the case, until ten years ago, that the basic salary was tied to that of a national MP, and you were paid by your own government.
So an Italian was paid the same as an Italian MP and so on.
Brits were roughly in the middle then, behind the Germans, the Austrians, the Italians, but ahead of the Lithuanians and the Portuguese.
They made it up.
Through massive expenses.
Then they standardised the salary, but decided to keep the expenses as well.
I would have done that, had I been there.
Yeah, well that was how they managed to get it through.
Yeah, yeah.
How extraordinary.
It must appall you, seeing the world slowly being subject to all these regulations passed by these troffers.
Well, they're not all troffers.
I mean, to be fair, there have been some reforms of the system.
But what really enrages me is that this is basically an institution that gets to make up the rules as it goes along.
And that bothers me more than the lack of democracy, more than the corruption, more than the fraud.
It's the way in which...
There's no real rule of law here.
When they don't like something, they simply ignore their own rulebook.
On big things like the bailouts, which were not just lacking any legal base in the treaties, but were expressly prohibited.
And on little things like persecuting MEPs and Eurocrats who are Eurosceptic and throwing out the rulebooks.
Did you not get that vibe that we're slightly going down that route?
The way that the Supreme Court suddenly...
Yes.
A Tony Blair creation.
Yes.
We're European.
Yes.
Yes.
This was always one of my real beefs with the EU. Rather pretentiously, I called it the EU's hideous strength, which is a reference to one of C.S. Lewis's adult novels.
It's a novel about a literally diabolical plot to take over England through an apparently benign bureaucracy.
Hilariously called the NICE. This was a book written in the 1940s.
Right.
Rather funny.
It seems to me that this lack of democracy in the EU... As well as being a problem in itself, in the sense that ultimate power here is vested in the hands of officials who are invulnerable to the ballot box, it infects the member states in the sense that in order to sustain the requirements of membership of a fundamentally undemocratic organisation, they have repeatedly to traduce and compromise their own constitutional procedures.
So, for example, they have to...
Ireland used to have exemplary, fair rules on referendums, providing for equal funding and so on.
In order to get their EU referendums through, they had to ditch that, which means that now all Irish referendums are one-sided.
We saw permanent changes in the balance of power in Britain.
The politicisation of the judiciary, the politicisation of the Speaker's chair, the change in the...
Banners between executive and legislature, all for the sake of trying to keep us in the EU. But these changes won't be easily undone.
And that's what I mean by the EU's hideous strength, the way it distorts not just democracy in Brussels, but it gets into the member states and it subverts their internal constitutional order in order to make them sustain membership.
I'm going to ask you something that's really, really hard now and you may find impossible, which is you and I both have lost many, many friends over Brexit and we would have been surprised because we would have thought that, well, I mean, they were a mate or they were an acquaintance at least.
I've never successfully understood what it is that makes people get Brexit derangement syndrome, that has driven so many Remainers mad, got them so upset about leaving this sclerotic, corrupt, anti-democratic institution.
It's really bizarre.
And this didn't happen during the referendum.
It happened after the result came in and then got worse with almost every passing day for the subsequent three years.
I would characterize most of my Remain friends in 2016 as being of the view that, you know, the EU is a bit rubbish, but it's not worth the disruption of leaving.
And that's a perfectly valid, defensible point of view.
On balance, I disagree with it, but, you know, I totally get why people of goodwill can sincerely think that, you know, you stick with an imperfect reality.
What happened after that is that it became a culture war.
It became about what kind of people we don't like.
So in the referendum itself, I remember I was out manning street stalls almost every day.
And often we would run into the stronger in types with their blue t-shirts and we'd pose for selfies and we'd wish each other luck and it was a perfectly civil conversation about trade and sovereignty and money and so on.
Now it's about I don't like those people.
It's become tribal.
Now what do we mean by those people?
Well delete as appropriate depending on which side you're on.
Those people are either...
You know, ignorant working class oafs who fell for unscrupulous demagogues or sneering snobs who secretly hate their own country.
But once it becomes about the kinds of people I don't like, it's almost impossible to find a compromise because it's no longer about policy.
But you're making out that it's a two-way thing.
Obviously it is to a degree, but I would say that most of the animus, most of the nastiness comes from the Remainers.
I would not chuck a friend of mine because they voted Remain.
They would definitely chuck me because I voted Brexit.
The statistics suggest that you're right.
I mean, there were lots of polls.
Would it bother you if a member of your family married someone who voted the other way?
Plainly, there is a lot more anger on the Remain side, you might say, inevitably.
Yeah, because they're losers with big L's on their phones.
Well, do you know the weird thing?
The weirdest thing about this is, I know a lot of, if you like, civilians have been affected by this.
It's perfectly unpolitical people who suddenly find that they're falling out.
I mean, you know, I have a fairly unpolitical friend who has not spoken to her brother since the vote because he's so angry with her for having voted leave.
Yeah.
I think it is fair to say, I think you're right, that this is asymmetric.
I have yet to come across someone who has lost a friend as a result of having voted Remain.
But as I say, that may simply be because of the frustration you get.
But it is the oddest thing.
When someone like you or me, I mean, our views were hardly a secret.
I've been campaigning to leave the EU since the mid-90s.
And the same people who always knew that those were my opinions and who were perfectly okay with them.
Have suddenly, not in many cases, but in a few cases now, will literally sort of turn their backs if we find ourselves in the lift together.
Not because I'm saying anything different, but because something has changed in their psychology.
And I think that that something is the sheer trauma of losing control.
The sense that they no longer get to set the parameters within which acceptable debate is allowed.
Yeah.
They were the liberal elite.
And they've been...
And I have some sympathy.
If I woke up tomorrow and found that Jeremy Corbyn had won the election, my first thought would be, I didn't know my country at all.
I had no idea that my countrymen could feel this way.
And I think they must have felt that way in June 2016.
Yeah, well, it's certainly true, I think, that Europe was a proxy for something.
I mean, the Brexit was a proxy for something else.
It wasn't really about Europe.
It was about a whole mindset.
And it's possibly to do with that kind of Anglo-Saxon bloody-mindedness that you like to celebrate, and rightly so.
People don't like being pushed around, told what to do.
We don't, do we?
They don't like being talked down to.
I mean, I remember during the referendum, when I was one of the people running the Leave campaign, I remember the delight in the office.
Every time we had a new patronising d'eau en bas letter from...
Captains of industry or academics or actors or whatever group, they're almost always funded by Brussels, almost always directly or indirectly in receipt of subsidies, saying, listen, here's what we're telling you to do.
How badly do you misunderstand the psyche of the British people if you think that that is going to move them?
People we should thank for Brexit.
Barack Obama.
Jean-Claude Juncker.
Christine Lagarde.
Tony Blair.
And Bob Geldof.
And Peter Mandelson.
Oh, they've all played their role.
But Bob Geldof would deserve a knighthood if he hadn't got one already.
Yes, flicking a V sign at fishermen from a yacht.
I mean, if you wanted the problem that the Remain campaign had in one image.
Yeah.
And even now, if you like, the non-jurors, the irreconcilables, the ones who say...
It didn't count.
And who try and convince themselves that it was stolen or there was Russian involvement or it was all based on lies or whatever.
Fundamentally, what they are unable to accept is that they were simply in the minority because people like them, who had up until then told the rest of us what we were allowed to say and think, have now lost the ability to do that.
Yeah, yeah.
I think this is going to be a dividing issue for the rest, certainly the rest of our lives, and possibly beyond now.
I'm not sure it will, actually, because I think that the Mandelsons and the Geldoffs are quite a small minority of the 48%.
I think that, you know, you very naturally remember the friends who cut you.
You don't particularly notice the ones who don't, right?
Yeah.
If I think of my school friends or my university friends fairly unpolitical in most cases, in almost every case we're still friends.
And the attitude of a lot of the Remainers in those categories is, okay, you know, fair enough, we lost, let's get on with it.
So you were obviously deeply involved in the Brexit campaign.
What do you reckon it was?
How close were we to losing it, number one?
And what do you think it was that really swung it?
It's a very good question, James.
I mean...
When something unexpected happens, people try to construct a vast explanation commensurate with how surprised they were.
Hence all this rubbish about, you know, Russian involvement and secret data, or indeed, at a different level, all the stuff about the sort of fury of the ignored white working classes and stuff.
I think it's a much, much simpler thing, and it's this.
When David Cameron came back empty-handed, most people said, oh, That's how they're treating us now before we've even voted.
We're the second biggest financial contributor and they won't let us have any power back now.
How would they treat us if we actually vote to stay, you know?
And frankly, I think it's almost indisputable that if David Cameron in February 2016 had come back with any retrieval of power, just one thing, maybe just fisheries or just one thing, he would have carried the referendum because people would have said, oh, it's not a ratchet.
It doesn't always have to be centralized.
Power can come back.
You know, that would have been enough.
But you've got to face...
We have to address the issue that, faced with the loss of its second largest economy, the EU was readier to lose a member state of that size than to concede that any power could ever be devolved back to the national level.
And that's the reality of what the EU is turning into.
And what counterfactuals here, what's the closest we came, you think, in the referendum process to throwing away our victory?
Frankly, the biggest problem we had in Vote Leave, and I think if you speak to any of the staff there, they'll say the same thing, was the spoiler operation run by Aaron Banks, which spent the entire campaign not attacking the EU, but attacking us.
To the extent of...
He boasts in his memoirs about putting private investigators to tail our people around.
We got lawyers' letters from them every week.
He even...
Ten days or so before the poll gave out the phone numbers of our press officers and told people to spam them.
So, you know, this was not the behaviour of somebody who actually wanted to win the referendum.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, obviously they're going to come up with a completely different argument.
I have no doubt they will.
Yeah.
But they were speaking to an audience which is already...
They were going to vote for Brexit anyway, weren't they?
People can just assess the facts.
I look at that behaviour, saying spam them, and I say these were not people who were primarily interested in the result of the referendum.
Their bigger goal was to try to use the referendum to boost themselves.
Now, Boris's deal.
I'm sure there's going to be lots of listeners here.
Of course, there's only one special friend, as you know, but the special friend might possibly be of the view that Dan Hannan is a complete cuck.
He's just going along with this ghastly sellout plan that's warmed over version of a polished version of Theresa May's turd.
What do you say?
Yeah, I get that a lot from people who have come to the argument in the last five minutes, right?
I mean, I was arguing for Brexit before UKIP existed, right?
I started in the early 90s, long before the word Brexit had been coined.
And my argument then was always that we needed to get back legal supremacy.
In other words, that EU law should no longer have primacy over British law on our own territory, that our courts should no longer be required to recognise the acts of EU institutions as superior to statutes of our own parliament.
Plainly, Boris' deal delivers that.
And that was the central aim of anti-marketeers going back to the original long marches, to Tony Bairn and Enoch Powell and Hugh Gateskill and Dick Potty and so on.
Now, in addition, we're going to get back fisheries, we're going to get back farming, trade policy, money, control of our own taxes.
You know, we are becoming an independent country.
Of course we should want, having got back sovereignty, to have the closest, friendliest links with our European allies compatible with being a fully independent state.
And for people to say, somehow that isn't Brexit, leaving the EU is somehow not Brexit.
I mean...
Try putting in the alternative.
Try putting in a Lib Lab SNP coalition led by Corbyn, and then I'll show you what not Brexit looks like.
Yeah, yeah.
So, what about the European Court of Justice and its...
So, it has a...
It has a residual role in one very limited area, which is about interpreting the rights of EU nationals who were already in the UK before.
So the rest of the supremacy of the ECJ disappears at the end of 2020.
And you sounded very confident about fisheries.
Yes, we've become a third country, and that's very clear now, which means that we are like Norway or Iceland.
Now, of course, like every other country in the world, we will want to have sensible bilateral agreements with our neighbours.
So just like Norway and Iceland, we will come to a deal about what's the total allowable catch.
You know, if the fish spawn in the waters of country A, but grow to maturity in the waters of country B, then what's a reasonable way that we can share it out?
So, of course, we will want to do that with the EU, just as with every other neighbour.
But we will do so as a sovereign country.
Right.
Yeah.
Is there anything in the withdrawal agreement that makes you uncomfortable?
Yes.
I mean, the thing that makes me uncomfortable is Northern Ireland.
And I'm afraid that is a function of the unbelievably cack-handed negotiations that we had under Theresa May for three years.
She put things on the table that the other side never dreamed would be conceded.
But of course, once they're on the table, it's much harder to put them back.
And I'm afraid her readiness, or indeed her keenness, to pursue the customs union meant that we had a much weaker position, that Boris was playing a much weaker hand.
I think he's played it almost miraculously cleverly given what he inherited.
You've got a plane to catch shortly, and I just wanted to ask you off-piste, because we can't always talk about Europe, Shakespeare.
Yeah.
If my hits didn't decline by 80%, I would talk about nothing except Shakespeare.
Well, I know, Dan.
When did you start learning so much Shakespeare?
You read them every night, don't you?
No, not every night, but I do...
And I watch it a lot.
I mean, I think there's never been a better time than now to watch...
Actually, for theatre in general, but certainly there's never been a time and place better...
Well, excuse me, not at the RSC anymore, mate.
No, the RSC I have issues with, although they do have the occasional moment of brilliance.
I don't think any more...
The last one I saw was Richard II. That was the last good play with David Tennant.
Yes.
So there are...
I mean, the curse of modern Shakespeare, particularly the RSE, is overproduced Shakespeare.
So, you know, whiz-bangs and random casting and...
I think of it as the director interposing his ego between you and the text, so that even if you've got the best seats in the house, you still have an obstructed view of the action, because you're not getting the, you know, I mean, a good director should say, listen, this is the best stuff ever written.
All I can ever do is show it off better.
I'm like the craftsman finding the best setting for a priceless gem, but I should never forget that the gem is better than anything I can find.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, you know, there are so many other groups around.
I've seen some really fabulous productions, including one or two at the RSC. But, you know, to be honest, I look like you, like all of us, I guess.
I read the plays at school and I thought...
This is good stuff.
This is great language.
This is phenomenal poetry.
But I don't think it was really until my late 20s that I began to think this isn't like any other literature.
This is on a different plane from anything else.
The creation of these characters who become more real to us than the flesh and blood people we know, the Endless, bottomless ambiguity, the way in which the same line can speak to you in totally contradictory ways at different moments in your life, depending on what mood you're in, depending on what you've brought to it.
That's a property that I don't think anyone else exactly has.
And how it works, it's kind of sorcery.
How it works, I don't know.
But...
I give thanks every day that he speaks to me in my own language.
Now, this actually makes me think.
We've got to bring this podcast today because we've got to do a tiny film section.
But I'm thinking actually this is the beginning of the next podcast we do together.
Because actually I wanted to ask you about the histrionic elements in your character as a politician.
The way that you're always pretty much on.
You're always very hyper-articulate but it's like you're on stage.
And I want to know about the evolution of that character, but I think we'll have to do that in another podcast.
Yes, one of the bits of Shakespeare that you will be able to quote is the bit about how we're all permanently on stage.
But you are Larry, basically.
Do you know what?
I kind of...
I do.
I actually, I quote a lot of Shakespeare in the European Parliament.
It started because an irritating, I mean, he's quite a good mate of mine, but an irritating German MEP friend of mine was advancing the claim that you often get from German friends that Shakespeare is better in German.
Yeah, yeah.
And, I mean, to be fair, lots of people think that, you know, and the translations...
Germans mainly.
Germans, sure, but I mean, you know, the problem they have is that the translations by Tierk and Novales and particularly by Schiller are...
You know, at the outer end of achievement in terms of German writing.
And of course, it's very difficult to accept that the best works in German can be translations.
And so hence this idea that Herder had originally that Shakespeare was a kind of spiritual German who'd been accidentally born in the wrong place and that putting him in German was restoring the true Geist, you know, the true spirit.
And because I had this friend who carried on boring me about that, I... I, just for a gag, said, all right, I'm going to start quoting a bit, see what the interpreters make of it.
And after a while, one of the interpreters, indiscreetly but rather sweetly, said, you know, in one of the translation booths there's a picture of you and a note in the language of that booth saying, don't even bother trying when this guy starts talking to you.
But I just, you know, like a director should let him speak for himself.
You know, he's given us the best lines in our language, in any language.
Yeah.
Okay, so till our next podcast, Dan, thank you very much.
Thank you, James.
This was Delling Pog with Dan Hannan.
More another time.
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