The date that Daniel Hannan chose for his now infamous Newsnight video and Reaction Life article, published two days before voters went to the polls in the 2016 referendum, has finally arrived. Yes, it’s 24 June 2025 and Britain has certainly left the EU, exactly as Hannan urged, but unfortunately life in Britain is unrecognisable from the one he predicted nine years ago with all the misplaced confidence of the anti-EU zealot.
Brexit Independence Day
Britain isn’t celebrating its Independence Day with fireworks. Older industries like steel, cement, paper, plastics and ceramics haven’t “revived as energy prices have fallen back to global levels”. Or at least if they have, it will come as a surprise to those working in them. London, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow haven’t “boomed” and neither has shale oil and gas “come on tap”. Our universities aren’t “flourishing”, and their revenues aren’t “rising”. Fuel bills for UK consumers haven’t “tumbled” either.
The EU hasn’t “turned inward” and no, “Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland” didn’t “follow us out” as he forecast. Plans to harmonise income tax and social security across the bloc never materialised and therefore didn’t “prompt referendums in three other EU states”. And unfortunately for Hannan, Britain doesn’t “lead a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU”.
They were all figments of his imagination.
I could go on. Essentially, none of his Utopian vision of post-Brexit Britain has actually come to pass. Quite the opposite in fact. Trade in goods both with the EU and the rest of the world is substantially down since Brexit. Predictions of a £40bn annual hit to the UK’s GDP have proven to be substantially ‘correct’ according to an article in The Times, leading to higher taxes and lower living standards.
Hannan’s fantasies …
And what must be galling to Hannan, now in the Lords after being ennobled by Boris Johnson in 2020 (presumably for services to falsity), recent polling shows support for the EU among citizens in the member states is at an all time record, and polls in the UK show a significant majority want to rejoin.
Perhaps, we shouldn’t be too surprised. Being wrong is a Hannan speciality, something he appears to be devoting his life to. Who can forget in February 2020, him advising us not to worry about a pandemic, that was “unlikely” to be fatal if we contracted coronavirus. It would be less lethal than flu, said the man with a degree in modern history. By March 2023, just under 227,000 people had died in the UK with Covid-19 listed as one of the causes on their death certificate.
No doubt Lord Hannan of Kingsclere would have preferred to have delivered a valedictory piece for The Telegraph on the ninth anniversary of the referendum but his latest effort, just a few days ago, was not quite what he had in mind: ‘Britain is turning into a Third World country’.Oh, dear.
… and loss of memory
You will search his article in vain for a mention of Brexit, new sea borders separating us from Northern Ireland and Gibraltar, the imminent collapse of the EU or even Hoxton (in Hackney) failing to become “the software capital of the world”. What happened there?
Perhaps it has all slipped his mind, what with one thing and another. Or, he has taken the advice of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice who maintained that, “in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable”.
I think we’re owed an apology.
