Daniel Hannan is an MEP for South-East England, and a journalist, author and broadcaster.
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The message that some send to Brussels – that if the Eurocrats make it all painful enough then we can be bullied into changing our minds – is mistaken but harmful.
Voters habitually opt for parties of the Right when times are tough, only to ditch them for the Left once there’s money to spare. But now populists seek to break the cycle.
Many voters – Leave and Remain – appreciate his spirit of boldness, and want to move on from past divisions, not reopen them. There are opportunities to be grasped.
When these terms are misused as catch-all boo-words, they lose their meaning and their essential value.
A bit of romantic rhetoric from Brussels cannot change the fact that their only offers – before and after we voted Leave – have been provocatively unacceptable.
Nasserism, Ba’athism and Arab Socialism, not capitalism, are the colonial impositions on the Arab world.
It is hard to avoid the impression that leaving is being undertaken in a spirit of damage limitation rather than a spirit of opportunity.
And here’s the thing: Banks knew it. Farage knew it. But they didn’t care. Their primary objective was to be seen to lead the campaign, not to win it.
EU leaders – encourage by a rump of British Europhiles – are pursuing the fantasy that if they bully us enough, we might change our minds.
The tiniest quantum of goodwill would have solved – indeed, might yet solve – the problem. But neither side is willing to display it.
Just as the MPs of the 1970s realised the need to understand economics, the MPs of the 21st Century must understand how we think, and why.
Nor will the eventual separation from the EU see a sudden break. Rather, this will be a gradual and partial divergence.
Behind his languid exterior lay a man of unusual principle, to whom all Conservatives have cause to be grateful.
The underlying motive for this tradition, though now often dressed up in quasi-medical language, is as much aesthetic as sanitary.
Most people in both camps are interested in getting the best outcome starting from where we are. Here’s how.