British PM Gordon Brown skewered in Hannan speech (over economic irresponsibility)

A member of the European Parliament chided British Prime Minister Gordron Brown Tuesday, labeling him "The devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government."

Daniel Hannan, who represents South East England for the Conservative Party, posted a video to YouTube showing his impassioned speech that outlines his thoughts on Brown's handling of the country's economic recession.

"I see you've already mastered the essential craft of the European politician," Hannan told the prime minister. "Namely, the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate."

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_032509/content/01125107.guest.html

“”RUSH: Now, the last part of that is fascinating. Again, the whole thing is great because this is, again, European parliament member Daniel Hannan, member Daniel Hannan taking it to Gordon Brown at the European parliament meeting in Strasbourg, France. This was yesterday. But the last item here in that particular sound bite, “Prime Minister, you cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.” Meaning, you can’t keep taxing the achievers and giving it to the unachievers. And, see, that’s obviously true. It’s economically true; it’s logically true; it’s mathematically true. These guys all know it. The difference is they intend this. These are socialists! These are statists! Hundred thousand British jobs lost while 30,000 government jobs — government gets bigger, same thing happening here, 600,000 Americans lose their jobs every month in this country, 8.1% unemployment on our way to 10%, and the government keeps hiring. It’s being done on purpose!

It is a purposeful restructuring of free market societies to socialist societies, socialist Democrat societies with the government as the giant power broker that runs and is in control of everything. It’s being done on purpose. This is not people making mistakes. This is not people who don’t understand what they’re doing. They understand fully what they are doing. These are people who don’t believe in individual liberty, people who don’t believe in individual freedom; people who don’t think that you have what it takes to deal with all that freedom. You’ll make a mess of it, you need to be controlled, you need to be programmed, you need to be directed into certain spheres of work and play because otherwise we’ll all suffer. Here’s a story I have here from one of the European papers. What’s happening is that they’re having flyovers, spy planes. It is the UK Daily Mail: “’Council Uses Spy Plane with Thermal Imaging Camera to Snoop on Homes Wasting Energy’ — In Great Britain, snooping on the public has reached new heights with local authorities putting spy planes in the air to snoop on homeowners who are wasting too much energy. Thermal imaging cameras are being used to create color-coded maps which will enable council officers to identify offenders and pay them a visit to educate them about the harm to the environment and measures they can take,” to reduce their usage.

There’s a picture here. They’ve already spent 30,000 pounds using a spy plane carrying a thermal camera to determine which homes are wasting energy. There’s a picture. Let me show it to you here on the Dittocam. There’s a picture of a UK home from the spy agency that shows that home as vastly overusing energy, according to the little control Nazis at the British government. My point is, this is not accidental; this is not people making mistakes; this is not people who don’t know what’s right. Same thing in the United States. Same thing. It’s just patently ridiculous last night to listen to Barack Obama talking about saving and reducing deficits while he’s expanding them to $10 trillion over ten years. But he gets away with it because he says he’s going to cut the deficit, it’s only going to be eight trillion over ten years, so that’s a cut. It’s just like the Democrats, the Washington Post and everyone else saying, “Democrats not happy with Obama budget, they’re going to cut the budget.” They’re gonna cut Obama’s budget, and there’s that magic word cut, and the word “cut,” it carries weight.

When you tell the uninformed, the uneducated, and the mob that the budget’s being cut, they don’t have any recourse other than to think they’re going to lose services. Okay, so Obama submits a $3.6 trillion budget. The Democrats find a hundred billion in it that’s too much or $500 billion in it that’s too much, and so they claim they’re going to cut it, so $3.6 becomes $3.55, and therefore it’s a cut, when actually it’s an increase of $5.5 billion over the current budget. There’s no cut. There’s never a cut. A cut in what’s projected, but the word “cut” is used, the Drive-Bys dutifully fall in line, “Oh, my God we’re cutting services, we’re cutting this, we’re cutting that.” There are no cuts, just like there are no cuts in the deficit. How are you gonna take a deficit from $400 billion to eight trillion and claim you’re cutting it, that’s Barack Obama. Here’s the final bite from Daniel Hannan to Gordon Brown, the prime minister the UK.

HANNAN: You cannot spend your way out of 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’re 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 30%, 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.

MEMBER: Hear, hear.

RUSH: Hear, hear. Hear, hear. Republicans in Washington could take a lesson from the bravery of this man.

END TRANSCRIPT””

And yet, Mr. Hannan still supports Obama:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/daniel_hannan/blog/2009/03/22/i_wont_disown_obama__yet

“”I won’t disown Obama - yet
By: Daniel Hannan at Mar 22, 2009 at 20:56:47

Several of you are pestering me to turn against Barack Obama. “C’mon, Tory boy”, you cry, “still think he’s the messiah?”

There’s no point in repeating that my support for the man was faute-de-mieux, that I strongly supported GOP Congressional candidates and that, far from believing Obama was the messiah, I kept citing the millenarianism of his supporters as one of the main arguments against him. This is a blog, after all, and blogs allow no shades of gray. Once I had declared for him, qualified as my declaration was, I became an “Obamaniac” - which attitude, by the way, neatly demonstrates the with-us-or-against-us bellicosity that has put so many Republicans off their party.

So, have I changed my mind? Well, I won’t deny that Obama has done plenty of irritating things, ranging from the idiotic stimulus package to the way he dissed the Prime Minister (yes, I know the man’s a clot, Mr President, but he’s our clot; and, tired as you may have been, I suspect the Royal Marines in their Forward Operating Bases in Helmand, fighting a war that few of your allies will touch, are pretty drowsy too).

On the other hand, the US remains more popular than it has been for years, and Obama’s own approval ratings, though fallen, are well above the vote he received in November.

The only fair answer I can give is that it’s too early to say. As Andrew Sullivan puts it in today’s Sunday Times:

“In an age of 24-hour news channels, millions of blogs and columnists vying to stay above the bloggerrhoeic tide, there is a real urge to make a clear and instant judgment.

I’m not going to do it, because, two months after a president has taken office in the middle of a global financial and economic crisis, as he grapples with two unending wars and a battered constitution, the whole idea of a definitive judgment is loopy. It’s also likely to be wrong. If you had judged the last Bush administration at this point, you would have said it was much better than expected.”

I can’t put it better any better than that. Sorry, guys: you’ll have to come back and ask me in few months’ time.””

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