Dan Hannan is Gaslighting the Public by Blaming the Voters Not the Politicians for the State of the UK

In a recent Telegraph article, Lord Hannan explained that he was quitting the Conservative Party to replace David Frost as the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). He sees his future role as educating us, the lumpen proletariat, in economic realities. He’s decided we need remedial classes in economics because, due to our own venality, we keep forcing governments to adopt self-harming policies by not voting for them if they threaten to do anything vaguely sensible.

I’m an admirer of Dan Hannan. He’s a brilliant speaker and writer. His stance on Covid endeared him to me as one of the very few journalists who spoke out against the tyranny imposed by his own party. But fingering you and me for the current mess suggests to me that he’s letting politicians off the hook a little too easily and blaming us a little too much.

The age-old adage about wagons and horses comes to mind. I always viewed politicians as the horses pulling us lot, the voters, onwards into the sunlit uplands. Baron Hannan takes a rather different view; he thinks the wagon has got ahead of the horses and now we’re all calling the tune. He thinks we keep getting the politicians we deserve. I’m not so sure.

His article details some examples of policies that politicians across the board favour but none can follow for fear of losing our votes. Examples he cites include privatisation of parts of the NHS, building new towns and abandonment of the pension triple lock. He sees it as his new task to educate the electorate to change their ways. Apparently, we need to be persuaded to take some harsh medicine.

His theory would hold rather more weight if he could show that we’d bent the politicians arms up their back to force policies into their manifestos which they subsequently delivered once in government. But that hasn’t happened at all. Invariably, their manifestos are relatively sane. It’s just that once in power they abandon their pledges and go their own sweet way.

After 14 years of Tory rule was it possible to point to any aspect of life that had become more conservative? Likewise, after almost two years of the current shower, what aspects of Labour’s pre-election promises have borne fruit? Taxes have continued to rise, growth has flatlined, small boats continue to ply their trade across the Channel, we’ve built hardly any of the promised one-and-a-half million new houses and, as Starmer himself observed, we’re rapidly becoming a country of strangers.

You may have your own favourites, but I thought I’d just jot down some of the policies that I think are badly wrong and consider whether it’s the politicians playing the role of horse or cart.

As it’s a government’s primary concern, let’s start with defence of the realm. Whose smart idea was it to pay the Mauritians to relieve us of the Chagos Islands: the public’s or the politicians’?

Exactly which voters were pressurising governments to stand back while ambulance chasing lawyers, such as Phil Shiner, Lord Hermer and Sir Keir Starmer, prosecuted ex-servicemen? And was it the electors who were demanding that these cases be funded from the public purse? Isn’t it likely that our servicemen and women will be rather less enthusiastic to risk life and limb in our defence if we prosecute them on their return? Doesn’t Baron Dan recognise that there would be huge public support for limiting rather than expanding the reach of the ECHR?

I can’t speak for you, but I haven’t heard anyone demand that we reduce spending on defence. That we run down the RAF. That we reduce the Navy to a laughing stock. And that we enact these policies solely to spend ever more on benefit claimants.

Does Lord Hannan really think that most people want to be dependent on state handouts rather than earning their own way? In-work benefits subsidise low-paying businesses. Supermarkets or the ‘care sector’ can get away with paying less because their low-paid employees can get state top-ups. If the in-work benefits didn’t exist the alternative wouldn’t be earners taking home less money; it would mean wages going up. People want self-respect, not charity.

I seriously doubt I know anyone who wants to see 10 million working-age adults dependent on the state. We’re told that one in five working age adults is disabled, which must mean that four in five aren’t! Does Hannan really think that it’s the majority who want even more from our productive side to go over and join the lot we’re all paying for?

I bet most people would rather see more done to stop the boats rather than less. It isn’t voters demanding that migrants get warmly welcomed. Nor do the majority support migrants being put up in hotels in their towns.

Most of us would have preferred politicians not to have ignored the mass rape of working-class girls. It wasn’t the majority who demanded that politicians order the police to scale back ‘stop and search’. It isn’t the voters who are pressurising politicians to introduce special rights for Muslims. We all thought we were supposed to be equal before the law!

Can it be that MPs’ email boxes are bursting with a clamour for two-tier justice? Is it us demanding that judges punish one group of protesters more harshly than another?

Strange as it may seem, antisemitism isn’t universally popular. And we mostly think that human rights legislation has gone too far and that free speech has been too constrained.

We aren’t universally in favour of the concept of hate crimes and we’d, on the whole, rather not see pro-Gaza, antisemitic protests on our streets. We’d like our streets to be policed properly to stop shoplifting rather than it become a career of choice. Nor do we support the sacking of shop workers who try to stop the thieves.

When given a vote on EU membership most of us voted against it. I’m not at all sure that I see a groundswell of opinion forcing politicians to take us back in.

Three million of us, a record number, signed a petition not to introduce digital ID cards. Did anyone sign a petition to introduce them?

People are rather more likely to object to abortion up to birth than approve of it. And at the other end of a life’s span we’re very suspicious of the state getting involved in bumping us off. It wasn’t us demanding the Government introduce such bills ahead of others that were promised in the manifesto.

It really isn’t popular demand forcing politicians of every stripe to take freebies from their wealthy mates or giving them undeserved jobs. We tend to think people should be treated equally; we know that if we took backhanders at work we’d get sacked and really can’t understand why the PM should get away with it.

We all know how hard we work to earn our money and we don’t like to see it wasted on virtue-signalling projects or overly generous pay settlements to favoured groups.

There really isn’t public pressure demanding that politicians confiscate more of our money than ever before only to redistribute it from the productive to the unproductive. We’re happy to help the genuinely disabled or unfortunates but we don’t believe that one in five of our fellow citizens is really disabled or that every kid diagnosed on the ADHD spectrum needs to get a taxi to school.

We think choice in education is good, we don’t want central government taking over academies. Despite most people sending their kids to state schools it doesn’t mean that they support the vindictive application of VAT on to already high school fees. Nor is it a demand from parents that schools teach kids that there are multiple genders.

Most of us can tell that the BBC doesn’t represent us or our views. We know that it exhibits bias to a ridiculous scale. We don’t like it endlessly shoving DEI and Net Zero down our throats, both things that we’re deeply suspicious of. We’re not marching in the streets to maintain the BBC licence fee.

It wasn’t us that demanded the Climate Change Act or persuaded the Tories to strengthen it. We’re all for picking up litter, protecting hedgehogs and planting the odd wild-flower meadow, but our priority is cheap electricity, affordable cars and heating systems that keep our houses warm. On the whole we’d like a few little luxuries rather than indulge in a plethora of luxury beliefs.

Dan Hannan would have us believe that it’s the electorate dragging reluctant politicians to act in ways that immiserate us. That make our streets less safe. That herald the demise of our high-trust society and an end to our relatively harmonious culture. None of this is true. Electorates repeatedly vote for parties that promise relatively sane policies only for them to enact something completely different once in office.

The vast majority of the population is pretty centrist. They aren’t interested in radical positions. How did we manage to end up with a legislature that seemingly ignores our every wish?

So, no, Lord Hannan. I don’t think you can put this down to the voters. The electorate, on the whole, are a pretty sensible lot. They’re mainly small ‘c’ conservatives who just want to get on with their lives with minimal interference from the state. They don’t mind paying taxes but they want those taxes spent frugally and wisely.

I wish Dan Hannan every success in his new role. I’m sure he’ll bring energy and drive to the IEA. But can I suggest that it’s not always true that we “get the politicians we deserve”, as he asserts in his Telegraph piece. What’s more, I can’t help thinking that Dan Hannan would find it infinitely easier and more profitable if, rather than try to re-educate the voters, why not re-educate the politicians?