In his new book, Daniel Hannan, a Europhobe Tory Member of the European Parliament, asks why the English-speaking peoples, who invented freedom, now shy away from the uniqueness of their achievement.
He believes that Lefty, liberal self-loathing has made the people of Britain - the nation that gave the world Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and defeated Nazism and Communism - ashamed of being Great.
Nationalism, it seems, is fine for Leftist opponents of the English-speaking world. It’s fine for South American Chavists, or African anti-colonialists or Ba’athists in the Arab world.
It’s fine for separatists in Quebec, Scotland or Wales. Patriotism in the Anglosphere, however, is decried as chauvinism or racism.
George Orwell wrote disparagingly of ‘the masochism of the English Left’, by which he meant its readiness to ally with any cause, however vile, provided it was sufficiently Anglophobic. He cited the IRA and Stalinism. Today, he might cite some of the extremist Islamist groups.
Hannan also argues that Britain should leave the anti-democratic EU - and he believes that one day it will - and start to build an Anglosphere free-trade area, with the likes of Australia, USA, Canada, New Zealand and India.
Here is an excerpt from Hannan's new book
How Britain became ashamed of being Great: Major new book argues liberal self-loathing threatens the values that define our nation
By Daniel Hannan, MEP for South East England
25 November 2013
Daily Mail
Daily Mail
We, the English-speaking peoples, invented freedom. We gave the world the glorious concept that the law was something bigger than the wishes of the king or the strongest man in the tribe. We taught other nations that the state could be the servant of the citizen, rather than the other way around.
So why do we now shy away from the uniqueness of our achievement? It’s extraordinary that we don’t want to pass on to our children the fact that they are heirs to a sublime tradition.
Personal liberty, the rule of law, representative government: these things are not, as we sometimes like to think, the natural condition of an advanced society.
Proud History: Kenneth Branagh as Henry V in the film adaptation of the patriotic Shakespeare play
Jury trials, parliamentary elections, habeas corpus, secure property, legal equality for women: the temptation is to think that all countries will adopt these things when they become rich enough and educated enough.
In fact, these concepts were largely developed in the English language. We call them ‘Western’ to be polite and modest. What we really mean is that they were the values of the Anglo-American system of government.
They became ‘Western’ because of a series of military victories by the English-speaking peoples - what we might call the Anglosphere.
But there comes a point when modesty tips over into self-loathing. Then, we focus obsessively on the bad things we’re supposed to have done, notably our exploitation of colonies, without seeing the bigger picture: how we brought those colonies to independence, in most cases, without a shot being fired in anger; our relentless and selfless campaign against the slave trade; our war against the Nazi tyranny.
Who has done more to spread freedom across the continents? You’d think that Leftists would be proud of this heritage.
In what other civilisation were civil rights so strong? In Africa? Tsarist Russia? Maoist China?
Rule of law: The English were responsible for the Magna Carta, pictured. The document limits the power of kings, and was signed by King John at Runnymede in 1215. It also influenced the US Constitution
Like every country, we have had our shameful moments, of course. But when the balance is weighed, few places have contributed so much to the happiness of mankind. The story of freedom is a long one.
It stretches back through the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (when an authoritarian king was toppled in favour of parliamentary democracy) to the Magna Carta (the landmark 1215 document limiting his royal powers).
Right from the days of Anglo-Saxon England (which was the most advanced nation in Europe), we find peculiar legal and political structures that set this country apart.
For example, inheritance rules favoured the individual over the extended family. Kings were answerable to representative councils, Witans, which on occasion dictated terms to the sovereign. There was no separate aristocratic caste.
Above all, our remote ancestors came up with a legal system whereby the law grew like a coral, case by case, rather than being handed down by the government.
It is a bottom-up rather than top-down system and is therefore the property of the people not the state. Again and again, it has proved a sure defence against tyranny.
The happy accident of Great Britain being an island meant there was no need for a permanent standing army. Taxes were commensurately low, and the government commensurately weak. If the regime needed resources, it had to collect them by consent through the people’s representatives.
It is no coincidence that all the world’s oldest parliaments are on islands: England, Iceland, the Isle of Man, the Faroes. Because the state was weak, the individual was conversely strong.
In terms of the economy, for the first time since farming became widespread 6,000 years ago, it became more rewarding to make or sell things than to seize them from others. Production, as sociologists put it, became more attractive than predatory behaviour.
Social mobility rewarded effort. Prosperity followed. After hundreds of thousands of years of economic flat-lining, the human species took off.
English-speakers carried their unique political culture with them over the seas. The United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand formed a common and unique civilisation.
But the ideas could be spread without direct settlement: anyone could buy into them. This is why Bermuda is not Haiti, why Hong Kong is not China, why Singapore is not Indonesia.
'Freedom of speech has been abandoned'
Elsewhere, democracy took a different turn, elevating majority rule over individual liberty.
Not surprisingly, our values have come under constant attack.
In the 1930s the democratic-capitalist order was rejected by fascists and communists, who saw it as past its prime. ‘Capitalism has run its course,’ Hitler proclaimed.
Authoritarians of the Left and Right saw individualism as a perversion of the natural order. They believed statist ideologies, which elevated martial vigour, collective endeavour and self-sacrifice, were bound to triumph.
Yet what the Nazis called ‘decadent Anglo-Saxon liberalism’ was not in decline at all. It triumphed in 1945. Two generations later it also saw off the Marxist monolith of the Soviet Union, to emerge as the most successful system on earth.
The tragedy of our present age is that it is now under siege at home.
Having developed the most successful system of government known to the human race, the English-speaking peoples are turning on their own creation.
One vivid illustration of the problem is our approach to Europe.
Ever since I was elected to the European Parliament in 1999, a question has nagged away at me: how many of the EU’s 28 member states have my unshakable commitment to freedom under the law?
The truth is that the rule of law is regularly set aside when it stands in the way of what Brussels’ elites want.
Committed? Members of the European Parliament (pictured) set aside the rule of law to bail out countries such as Greece
For example, the euro-zone bailouts of countries such as Greece were in blatant defiance of Article 125 of the EU Treaty (which makes it illegal for one member to assume the debts of another).
Yet, as soon as it became clear that the euro wouldn’t survive without cash transfusions, the law was set aside.
To British eyes, the whole process seemed bizarre. Rules had been drawn up but, the moment they became inconvenient, they were ignored. In Brussels, though, objections seemed pernickety, legalistic and altogether very British.
EU laws are initiated by unelected officials. Taxes are levied without popular consent. Power shifts inexorably from elected representatives to standing bureaucracies.
As for the idea that the individual should be as free as possible from state coercion, this is regarded in Brussels as the ultimate Anglophone fetish.
Whenever the EU extends its jurisdiction into a new field - for instance, decreeing what vitamins we can buy, what hours we may work, how herbal remedies are to be regulated - I ask what specific problem the new rules are needed to solve.
The response is always the same. ‘But the old system was unregulated!’
The idea that absence of regulation might be a natural state of affairs is seen as preposterous.
Two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, who saw himself as a true heir to the British liberal tradition, warned of the risks of ‘corruption, plunder and waste’ when governments get too big.
We could do with a Jefferson today as power shifts from people to government, from local authorities to the centre, from elected representatives to bureaucrats, and as the state machine becomes bigger, more extravagant and yet, oddly, less effective.
Jefferson immortally promised his countrymen ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. By contrast, the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Freedoms guarantees the right to strike action, free healthcare and affordable housing.
In the short term, of course, shorter working days, two-hour lunch breaks, long holidays and early retirement are very nice.
The trouble is that, when people enter the workforce older, leave it younger, and in all probability spend the few years in between working for the Government, it means no one is generating much wealth. There comes a point when the money runs out.
Europe has reached that point - or at least ordinary Europeans, trapped in their stagnant economies, have. Money is still plentiful for our gourmandising, Michelin-starred Eurocrats.
Heir to the liberal tradition: US Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, pictured, warned of the risks of big government
Why do British Leftists not recoil from an undemocratic, elitist European project that is harming the least well off? Why don’t they prefer the tried civil freedoms of the Anglosphere?
George Orwell wrote disparagingly of ‘the masochism of the English Left’, by which he meant its readiness to ally with any cause, however vile, provided it was sufficiently Anglophobic. He cited the IRA and Stalinism. Today, he might cite some of the extremist Islamist groups.
Struggle to preserve the traditional culture and way of life of, say, the Bedouin or the Masai, and you’re a hero. But argue for those values which, let’s face it, give us longer, easier and wealthier lives than anything dreamed up by such tribes - and you’re a bigot.
Nationalism, it seems, is fine for Leftist opponents of the English-speaking world. It’s fine for South American Chavists, or African anti-colonialists or Ba’athists in the Arab world. It’s fine for separatists in Quebec or Wales. Patriotism in the Anglosphere, however, is decried as chauvinism or racism.
Free speech used to be a key distinguishing characteristic of these values. Not any more. Since the early 1990s, laws have criminalised various forms of opinion on the grounds that they might cause offence to someone, typically from a racial or religious minority.
Throughout the Cold War, there was absolute freedom of speech in most English-speaking countries. We liked to tell each other that, unlike the poor wretches behind the Iron Curtain, we couldn’t have our collar grabbed by a police officer for saying the wrong thing.
Now freed from the menace of communism, we casually abandon one of the principles for which we had been fighting. People are arrested for such offences as quoting Bible verses that might offend gay people, or being rude about jihadi extremists.
In one especially preposterous case, a pianist in my constituency was investigated by the police for racism because, at a dinner dance, he played the disco-hit Kung-Fu Fighting in the hearing of a Chinese couple.
These sudden restrictions on free expression are the result of the elevation of human-rights charters promoted by international bodies over democratically elected legislatures.
In just two decades, international law has moved from covering cross-border issues such as the status of diplomats and maritime rights, to behind-border issues, such as labour law and the rights of minorities.
In every English-speaking democracy, the executive has grown to a degree that earlier generations would have found incredible.
Like the robots of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction, this proliferation of agencies and executive bodies have learned to programme each other without human intervention.
This unstoppable machine has outgrown democratic scrutiny.
'Uphold our way of life and you're branded a bigot'
The CSA, HSE, FSA and the rest of the alphabet soup of unelected agencies are the driving force of a cradle-to-grave interventionist state that won’t let us get on with our lives. As a result, we now have tax levels that would once have prompted revolution.
In 1900, a British household typically spent 8.5 per cent of its income on government - a figure little changed since the days of the medieval tithe. Now it’s 46 per cent and by far the largest item of household expenditure of working families.
Tax levels have reached saturation point, but spending continues to rise. In order to cover the difference, governments are borrowing from what Shakespeare called ‘your children yet unborn and unbegot’.
Once, we nurtured a unique political culture in which the individual was larger than the state, and in which there were mechanisms to hold the government to account. Those mechanisms are becoming so rusty that they are ceasing to work at all.
Here in the UK, laws are passed by European Commissioners, who are appointed not elected.
The connection between taxation and representation has been broken.
The connection between taxation and representation has been broken.
Even common law itself, the first and last bulwark of our traditional liberty, is being battered down by the primacy of EU law.
Bit by bit, our country starts to look like everyone else’s.
Its taxes rise; its legislature loses ground to the executive and to an activist judiciary; it accepts foreign law codes and charters as supreme; it drops the notion of free contract; it prescribes whom you may employ and on what terms; it expands its bureaucracy; it forgets its history.
How silently, how complacently, our generation is losing its heritage. At a time when Asian states are liberalising, we in the English-speaking states are going in the opposite direction on the road to uniformity, centralisation, high taxation, and state control.
But I argue there is nothing inevitable about this process.
Advocate: Winston Churchill was a great supporter of 'the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples'
Our values, with their unique emphasis on individualism, ought to be perfectly designed to flourish in the age of the internet (another of our inventions).
We should remember who we are. We should capitalise on our shared heritage by setting up an Anglosphere free-trade area, based on the unhindered movement of goods, services, capital and, in some measure, labour.
It’s not such a preposterous idea. The U.S. and Canada already form a single market as do Australia and New Zealand. The U.S. has a free-trade agreement with Australia.
India, a common-law, English-speaking democracy (the largest democracy in the world), would be a very welcome addition to this economic bloc. It is now the second-largest investor in the UK, its economy is poised to overtake ours, it is a nuclear power and a major military ally - and it has achieved all this while remaining a law-based democracy.
The main obstacle to such a free-trade area is that Britain, being a member of the EU, cannot sign independent commercial agreements, but are instead held back by Brussels protectionism.
When we leave the EU (which I believe will happen), the first thing we should do is to negotiate an Anglosphere free market.
The word ‘Anglosphere’ was first used in a science fiction novel 20 years ago. But the idea is much older. Winston Churchill was the great advocate of what he called ‘the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples’.
If transported to our present age, I think he would be bewildered and depressed by its terrible loss of confidence.
He would wonder why, having seen off the authoritarian challenges of both fascism and Marxism, we now seem so ready to discard the things that had raised us to greatness.
But he would be optimistic, as ever, and rightly so. For we are not finished yet. We remain an inventive, quizzical, enterprising people, if we hold fast to the model that made us that way.
It is time to throw away the self-doubt and revive, revitalise and expand our value system.
- Extracted from How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters by Daniel Hannan, published by Head of Zeus at £20. © 2013 Daniel Hannan. To order a copy for £16.99 (incl p&p) call 0844 472 4157.
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