,
9 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Daniel Hannan's 2012 speech to the annual American Conservative Union event CPAC is a treasure trove of Brexit madness. (1/x)
Daniel Hannan: “I’ve made it my life’s work to try and take Britain out of this false and synthetic alignment in Europe and to rejoin the wider Anglosphere and the community of free, English-speaking nations.” (2/x)
Hannan calls the USA a “secure vessel and repository of British freedom” from which he wants to “take back the freedoms to the old country” in the same way that vines resistant to phylloxera were imported after the blight that devastated Europe in the 19th century. (3/x)
Hannan turns the usual ‘United States of Europe’ rhetoric on its head and says the USA is heading in the same direction as the EU, warning that Barack Obama was “plainly born in Brussels” and wanted to “Europeanise” America. (4/x)
Hannan compares the UK’s grievances against the EU to the Thirteen Colonies’ grievances against the British Empire, such as “abolishing the system of English Laws”. (Hannan leaves out the following words "in a neighbouring province".) (5/x)
This is a reference to the Quebec Act, passed by the British parliament in 1774 which restored the use of French civil law in the province of Quebec and protected the practice of Catholicism. Quebec still uses civil law to this day. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Act (6/x)
Hannan compares the adoption of the US constitution unfavourably with attempts to introduce an EU constitution, but notes: “…as I understand it Rhode Island and North Carolina were a little bit later in ‘falling into line’.” (7/x)
In fact North Carolina first rejected the constitution before ‘voting again’ the following year, and Rhode Island only ratified it under threat of a trade embargo from the other states. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratificat… (8/x)
The full speech is available here (9/9)
