Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren, and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.AdamSmith Works.org. Welcome back. It's not often on this podcast that I enjoy the chance to speak with someone from England, much less someone important. Today on March 4th, 2025, I'm excited to welcome Lord Daniel Hannon of Kingsclere to the podcast. He is a member of The House of Lords, and today we're going to be talking about mainly the current American administration's foreign and economic policy and his evaluation of it. But we're also going to be talking a little bit about what the heck is going on over there across the pond. So welcome to the podcast.

Daniel Hannan (1:03)

Hey, Juliette, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Juliette Sellgren 

You have such a good voice for public speaking.

Daniel Hannan 

Yeah, we've got that going for us on this side of the Atlantic, but it always works better on your side than on ours here. Everyone talks like this.

Juliette Sellgren (1:23)

So, first question, what is the most important thing that people my age or in my generation should know that we don't?

Daniel Hannan (1:32)

Nothing in politics, and few things in life, are as good or as bad as they first seem?

Juliette Sellgren 

Elaborate. I mean, everyone's freaking out right now on every dimension, at least around me.

Daniel Hannan (1:53)

Yes. When you think back to the great scandals and crises that consumed your every waking moment, they very rarely had the huge effects that people thought either positively or negatively. This is especially true about decisions in public affairs. People are always in a slightly hysterical mood. Every election is always the most important there's ever been. Every issue becomes kind of final and defining, and if the other side wins, we're never going to have another free election and so on. When you look back and you see that every previous generation has always taken that attitude about everything, then it gives you a sense of perspective. So let's take, because it's a segue into current US politics. Let's take the current obsession with immigration. I would argue that the attitude of every generation in the US since the foundation of the republic has been the same when it comes to immigration. It's a variant of, it's been a great idea up until now, but this time it's different and there's always an apparently new reason, something superficially plausible that makes it seem different, right? Yes. But up until now, they all spoke English. Yeah, but up until now, they were all Protestant, but up until now they were all white and so on and so on. Actually, it works out every time, but try and explain that to anybody at any point in the last 200 years and they'd have thought you were a lunatic. So perspective…

Juliette Sellgren (3:25)

I love that. I mean, given that you're politically involved career-wise at least, how do you kind of bound that with the fact that your job and your every day is dealing with this? When does it become important or how does your attitude towards it differ from how people who aren't working in it should feel towards it?

Daniel Hannan (3:53)

I wonder whether there may be something peculiar about being a member of an upper house whose purpose is to act as a check on the necessary radicalism of the popularly elected chamber. There's a story which I think is apocryphal, but it's a good story and it illustrates the point. So I'm going to tell it anyway, even if it's not true, that when [Thomas] Jefferson came back from having been ambassador to France and found that the new Constitution in contravention of strict Republican principles made space for an appointed Senate as it was at that time that he objected, he went to see George Washington and he said, why do we need the states to appoint a senate? We should be a proper democracy and trust the people. Washington according to the story said, why did you just pour your tea into your saucer? And Jefferson said to cool it, and Washington said precisely the role of an upper house is to provide a sense of perspective and sometimes to see that what seems all consuming can be a transient mood and that to legislate in a panic because of a transient mood, because the opinion polls demand, it can cause you to repent at leisure.

And in fact, I see my job mainly as being stopping bad bits of legislation that have been thrown up in response, pushed by the desire for one particular newspaper headline. So I suppose that's a longer version of what I'd give as my advice.

Juliette Sellgren (5:31)

So then is that a common attitude, do you think, or is that you and how you perceive your role? If the analogy that what you're doing is kind of functioning in the British version of the Senate? I mean, we've changed things over here and now they are popularly elected, which kind of ruins the intention, but they don't have that attitude.

Daniel Hannan (6:01)

I mean, we've changed things here, right? We've gone from it being an hereditary chamber, an aristocratic chamber to a chamber that is largely appointed, but the function I think is still the same. Edmund Burke had a nice metaphor. I mean, Edmund Burke could be a terrible creep when he was sucking up to his patrons, but he nonetheless, I think was right about this. He wrote to one of his aristocratic patrons, he said, A family like yours needs to think long term. That's kind of your function. And he said, you are like the mighty oak trees and the rest of us shelter under your shade. And now obviously this, as I said, a creepy way of putting it, but the point that somebody needs to take a long-term view, I think that really is important. And almost all bad laws come. There's a terrible moral panic because some child has been killed or because there's been a school shooting or because there's some upsurge in immigration or some whatever moral panic at the moment.

And you are then stuck four years with terrible, inappropriate, disproportionate legislation, which there's a lovely phrase that a friend of mine, a journalist colleague of mine who's no longer with us used, he used to say it's using a sledgehammer to miss a nut. It is laws that have all these unintended consequences but fail to have the intended consequence. I will give you plucking the example at random. We are at the moment here debating creating a regulator for football for what you would call soccer. The Premier League has worked extremely well without any regulation since the middle of the 19th century, entirely driven by the worst kind of cheap populism and wanting to show that you are on the side of the fans and against these nasty owners who can do what they like to the clubs, we're going to end up lumbering ourselves with something, which I guarantee will make things worse. No elected politician can say that without some blowback, it's a little bit easier for us. We don't need to worry about elections. We can say, this is not going to work, don't do it.

Juliette Sellgren (8:16)

I've never heard anyone, and I don't think an American would call Edmund Burke a creep. So I'm glad there's someone.

Daniel Hannan (8:24)

Well, don't get me wrong. I think Edmund Burke, I think he was a really great man, and I'm a huge fan, but he was still at the end of the day, a client of one powerful patron after another. And you read him through that lens.

Juliette Sellgren (8:41)

Yeah, no one, whether you like him or you hate him, I've never heard anything such a creative description.

Daniel Hannan (8:48)

You want me to really, really shop while we're on the subject of great men who could be creepy. John Locke, when he drew up the Constitution of the Carolinas, and John Locke really is a great man as Burke, right? I mean one more conservative, one more radical, but really, really great men within the anglophone sort of weak tradition, really towering figures who deserve their reputation. But on the day that John Locke was drawing up the constitution for the Carolinas, he was having a really bad day in contradiction to everything else he wrote for his entire career. He envisaged this hereditary landed aristocracy full of land, graves and CZs and things, and it's so at odds with the Lockean theory of original, compact and government by consent that you are left with the only possible explanation, which is that at the end of the day, he was making a living. And when his patron said, we want an aristocratic constitution for the Carolinas, he said, sure, there you go. So even Homer nods as Alexander Pope says, everyone is allowed a bad day. Even Shakespeare has bad days.

Juliette Sellgren (9:56)

True, true. That's also good advice, full of good advice. So just to get this clear before we kind of move on, because again, uninformed American semi voter, sometimes in the House of Lords, you're appointed but not elected. So are you appointed by?

Daniel Hannan (10:22)

Yeah. I'm not a fan of how the House of Lords is composed, even though I'm a beneficiary of that system. It's a very difficult system to justify. The House of Lords used to be, as I say, the here you sat here by, right? Because you inherited your title from your father. You were the due called the Earl or whatever of wherever. During I guess the 18th century, the House of Commons gained primacy in the House of Lords, became a revising and delaying and vetoing chamber and lost its parity. Although we still had a prime Minister in the House of Lords as late as 1902, but that was slightly anomalous. Even by then from 1956, there have been appointed peers, life peers, they're called because they are put in the house of lords. They're given a title, but it dies with them. They don't pass it on to their kids.

Since 1998, the hereditary have been supposedly phased out, but a deal was done between Tony Blair and the hereditary peers. He said, I'm going to get rid of a lot of you. And they said, okay, that's fine. We get that. It's kind of pretty tough to defend the hereditary principle in politics. We understand, but what are you going to put in our place? Is it going to be an elected senate? Is it going to be a regional chamber? Tell us what it, because we are worried that otherwise you are just going to have the right to appoint all of your friends and you'll never get around to democratizing it, which turned out to be exactly what happened. So a deal was done when 92 of the peers were allowed to stay as guarantors, that full democratization would eventually take place. They were the uncomfortable reminder that abolishing the hereditary was only phase one. Phase two would be moving to a fully democratic chamber. They were the pebble in the shoe, if you like. They were the reminder that the uncomfortable reminder that things had not been delivered yet. Well, here we are 27 years later and we are still waiting for the democratic reform.

Juliette Sellgren (12:39)

Who does the democratic reform?

Daniel Hannan (12:41)

Well, I mean there are different ways of doing this. Different countries do it. We could do it like your Senate. We could have some combination of election and regional representation or appointment. I mean, there's a million items. You could have selection by lottery, like a jury you could have,

Juliette Sellgren (12:59)

Who's in charge of making you have election by a different method?

Daniel Hannan (13:08)

That's another good question. To protect your job at the moment, what we've got is the worst of all worlds. It seems to me. You've got other than these 92 who at least they're elected by the other hereditary, right? So they're elected by a very, very small electorate, but at least they've got some kind of mandate from someone. The rest of us, I was appointed by Boris. The rest of us are here because a prime minister has said, why, you do this. And if this were happening in Venezuela, we'd all say this is the most shocking anti-democratic facet of a system because we're used to it here. We don't see how outrageous it is. But who would decide? Well, ultimately, actually Parliament, the House of Commons would decide which means that the Prime Minister of the day decides, which is again, a quite shocking thing. So the reason I was talking to you about those 92 is that today we are going to be debating the removal of those 92.

Juliette Sellgren (14:00)

Oh wow.

Daniel Hannan (14:01)

The government is, I think in violation of the deal that was done in 1998 is tapping the pebble from the shoe without moving to the democratic reform, which I think is scandalous. They are then giving themselves the right to nominate whomever they like. Now, I think that is the worst possible way. If you think about it, what is the primary function of the legislature? It's to hold the executive to account. I'm always having to explain this to my colleagues here. The function of either the Chamber of Parliament is not to pass legislation. In fact, calling people legislators, it gives them a really, really bad idea of what their job is, right? It's not to take part in debates, it's not to sit on committees. It's not even really to represent your constituents. All of those are like side issues. The primary function, the only reason that you are here, elementally and indispensably is to act as a check on the government to ensure that it doesn't exceed its powers.

So to have one of our two legislative houses appointed by the executive is the worst imaginable outcome, it seems to me, and I'm afraid we're moving in that direction. Of course, prime ministers love having this patronage power, and I realize this must sound strange to somebody in a normal country with a normal written constitution, it would be extraordinary if Donald Trump could just remove a quarter of the members of the Senate, or if the new coalition government in Germany could say we're moving from an appointed Bundestag to a democratically elected one. Or if Macron decided to change how the senators, I mean, in every one of those cases, it'd be a constitutional process to go through right here. Ultimately, it's just a vote in the House of Commons. So the strength and the weakness of our system is parliamentary sovereignty. In one way. It's very good. You don't have a constitutional court or any other tribunal, second guessing democracy and telling you what to do. It puts the responsibility directly with the people. But it does mean on these occasions that in practice you have huge powers concentrated in the hands of whoever is the prime minister of the time.

Juliette Sellgren (16:14)

But even you would think that I guess going off of that, that then in the American system, the legislature would do something. Okay, I am not my best up to date on everything that is going on, but it seems like there's been much criticism recently about the lack of doing things that's been happening and also about the expanding powers of the executive here. So if it's happening anyways, if that move is happening anyways, then I don't know, what do you make of that? That kind of seems like regardless, that power strongly In favor of lack of doing things right?

Daniel Hannan (16:51)

The stupidest criticism of Trump is exactly the same, although it comes from the other side- as the stupidest criticism of Obama. Namely he's spending too much time on the golf course. I mean, I want all politicians to spend as much time as possible on golf courses or wherever they should be legislating as rarely as possible. It should be an absolute last resort rather than being the first thing they do because they're chasing some headline. There's a lovely line, which I came across quite recently in Don Quixote, in Quixote, where Sanco Panza, the sidekick is asked, who is your ideal governor? And he says, whoever is at home with a broken leg. And I think there's a lot of truth in that. The capacity, actually, as Burke said, the capacity of governments to do harm is almost limitless, although their power to do good is very limited, and he was spot on about that as about most things. So I'm all in favor of that, but I think you're right. There has been an expanding role of the presidency. I mean, at least since Teddy Roosevelt, I'd have thought or the very least since Wilson in the US.

I think if the founders had been able to travel forward in time to the end of the 19th century, that'd have still basically recognized the Constitution. If they'd come back during Cleveland's presidency or something, they'd have recognized it. It's elements if they'd come back in the 1930s, been utterly bewildered by what was going on. So I think that is a problem, and you see it. I mean, I think they knew what they were doing when they put Congress in Article One and the presidency in article two. I mean, that wasn't an accident. And I think that that is a huge challenge. And when I look at the cheerleading from conservatives for executive power wielded by their side, the way in which people who all the times that I knew them in the nineties and early two thousands were basically limited government, Reagan who said, the ideal is for the state to do less, but who are now taking this Trumpy line that no, no, no, we want to use maximum coercive state power as long as it's turned against people we don't like. I think that is a really alarming tendency and it never ends well.

Juliette Sellgren (19:22)

So I guess when you first started responding to this, I was thinking, well, if it's been around, which I think you're right, it has been since basically the Wilson Roosevelt days, then it is, we were always freaking out about it, but it's always there. But also this kind of use of power specifically seems kind of new, at least not Woodrow Wilson old. And so how do you get something where it's like we think that every single move is the definitive final, like world shaking problematic or good move no matter what you think about it, but at the same time, there are changes.

Daniel Hannan (20:10)

That's a very good question. It's an incremental process. This is my colleague, the Lord Kamall. Syed . Juliet on the aside, and I share an office. He's a very, very great man. Look, each government, you couldn't have gone in a single jump from Cleveland to Trump, right? There were downward steps, but at every stage the problem has been the same, which is that most people don't care about process when they happen to favor a particular outcome. And you see this equally on both. People can always see this at the other side. Conservatives can see it about lefties and vice versa, but they all do it. They support outrageous acts of judicial activism or abusive executive power when it happens to be annoying all the right people as they would see it. I mean, one very good example of this, I was very anti lockdown. I think I was the first public critic of it in this country because I could see it coming. So I started attacking it in February of 2020 because I could see that all the alarmism was going to push people into some bad decisions. I hated the abuses of state power we lived through, and I hated even more the fact that people cheered that almost no one cared about freedom in principle or in practice.

But as the reaction set in, I realized that the abuse of state power was just as strong the other way. So I was a big fan during lockdown of Ron DeSantis in Florida, I thought, and I still think that he didn't get anything like the recognition he deserved for withstanding all that pressure. Really, really strong moral and intimidatory pressure. If you don't lock down, if you disregard the official advice, you're going to be sued. You're going to be personally liable. All the bereaved and the survivors are going to come after you. He said no to all of that, and he was completely vindicated, right? Florida ended up with a lower excess mortality rate than California, despite the age profile of the Floridian population, a hundred percent vindicated. I don't understand why he then topped out at 11% in the Republican primary after that. I think he deserved to do a bit better. Nonetheless, I say all that because DeSantis then went on to do things which struck me as completely at odds with the basic conservative principles of freedom and property. So he started saying, you as an individual, small business may not require your employees to be vaccinated. You as an individual, restaurant may not require your customers to wear a face mask, whatever.

That seems to me a shift from respect, freedom, respect, property, do as little as possible, allow people to pursue whatever rules they want, provided it's on their own premises to you guys, mobilize the full force of the state against us. How do you like them apples? And I just think it's a really, really dangerous tendency, and it lies behind 80% of what's going wrong in politics at the moment.

Juliette Sellgren (23:41)

Well, and I can also imagine there being this compounding effect, weaponize the state once expands the power of the state plus achieves whatever end. If it's possible, then weaponize it again, and it's already more active, more expansive. And so it does kind of snowball into this. Not only am I proving that we can do this, but also the capacity expands along with it. And so then the things that you can do become more egregious or even the size, I'm thinking of one of those video games where you have one of those huge pickax type things, the size of the thing, levels up, and then all of a sudden you're wielding the whole freaking an entire made up agency.

Daniel Hannan (24:29)

Well, the pickax grows during moments of crisis like the pandemic or a war. I mean, the correlation of tax hikes and wars is extraordinary because you can really picture it as a series of steps that are then followed by plateaus that things never return afterwards, or at least not to where they were. The state is always very reluctant to return the powers that it had seized on a supposedly contingent basis. So we saw this, I mean, we were in the second World War for a very long time. We had six years of full mobilization. I don't think we've ever really recovered from it. We had all these supposedly emergency measures turned out to be anything, but we had rationing until 1954. We had identity cards until 1952. We had full conscription until 1960. And then when you look at the economic measures that were put in place supposedly on an emergency basis in 1940, we had them until the eighties.

It was only under Margaret Thatcher that we got rid of them. And I can see a similar thing post lockdown. It's not just that people are prepared to put up with the biggest state is that they're actively demanding one because the emergency, or at least the perceived emergency, the perceived collective threat changed the chemistry of their brains and it does to everybody and changed the relationship between government and people. And so I'm afraid we are in a moral authoritarian age generally, and that's why I think it's impossible completely to divorce the lockdowns from the fact that if you like, the anti woke reaction is what my countryman Keir Starmer calls the woke, right? It is instead of it being a civil liberal reaction that says, treat everyone the same, it's the same identity politics, but with the labels of the good guys and the battle guys swapped around, it's equally collectivist.

It's equally victim and grievance driven, and it's equally driven by negative polarization, drinking liberal tears if it upsets the right people. By the way, I think it's very hard to divorce Trump's election victory from negative polarization even in this country. When people say, people who didn't support him in 2016 and did support him this time around, almost always, they give themselves away in the manner that they express their support. Oh, you should have heard the tone of voice of the BBC presenter when they had to announce the results. Choosing the leader of the free world on the basis of annoying people strikes me as a slightly weird approach, but it seems to be a universal.

Juliette Sellgren (27:21)

Well, and in the same way that demand for government and this reliance increases the threshold for tolerance is simultaneously decreasing, which cannot be a good thing because it is a liberal value. And so how do you have liberalism and freedom prevailing if one of the most important pillars of that is also just diminishing, not in writing. The writing hasn't changed, but the way that we talk about it and the way that we act and the way we respond to it is changing.

Daniel Hannan (28:02)

Yeah. Well, I think actually even the writing is changing for most of our lives. Actually, that's probably maybe not true for you, but for most of my life, I took for granted a long-term secular growth of liberal values and an open society. So for six or seven decades after 1945, the trend was towards law-based democracy. It was fitful. It was patchy, but it was an observable long-term trend. Sometimes countries would come in a rush to freedom, like the ones that were liberated from fascism after 1945 or from communism after 1990, often they would come singly as individual dictators fell. But the move generally was away from leaders being able to make up the rules as they went along and towards what John Adams called a government of laws and not of men until about, well, it depends exactly which measure you use, but until some point between 2010 and 2050, there are various outfits that measure this.

There's a thing called ideas. There's the economist Intelligence Unit, the United Nations does a democracy tracker index, and various kind of think tanks do their own, and they all use slightly different methods, but they all tell the same story that at some point in the first half of the last decade, the trend towards freedom, democracy and the rule of law stalled and began to go into reverse. And I just worry that if you like the previous 200 years from the late 18th century to the beginning of the 21st was really a blip. It was quite anomalous. It was quite unnatural. And we're a tribal species. We evolved in kin groups. We need to be educated out of collectivism. And that liberal moment starting in the English speaking world, then spreading to Europe, and then after 1945 spreading more widely depended on education, depended on teaching people all sorts of counterintuitive ideas.

Like the idea that someone you don't like might still have something true to say that the idea that the truth can be reached by experimentation, by empiricism, you can argue about it and improve your understanding rather than the truth being determined by whether you like the person who's saying it. And a few people are equipped to kind of tumble to that realization themselves. And our entire education system used, at least in the West, used to be based around inculcating in people, these difficult ideas. I'm sure you've worked out where I'm going with this maybe from the early two thousands colleges and then high schools, and now even junior schools stopped doing that and in many cases did the opposite. They started teaching identity politics. They started trying to tell you that maybe not the only, but the most interesting and important thing about you was that you are white and female and that your identity is part of a wider collective.

Well, I just don't think an open society can survive that. And so the biggest long-term threat, and we've got plenty of warning, plenty of opportunities to turn aside, but the biggest long-term threat we have is this failure to habituate through education. The idea that the individual is responsible and dignified and above the collective. And that's why I worry about the woke. If we move from one kind of grievance driven identity politics to another, or to put it even more crudely, if the backlash to the kind of Antifa BLM moment is an aggrieved white backlash rather than a classical liberal rejection of the whole concept of groups, we're not in a great place.

Juliette Sellgren (32:18)

I think a few things, it's so much cheaper, and I mean that in an insulting sense, it is cheaper and it's not cheaper in a good way for politics to turn in that direction, especially if that's what your opponent is doing. But how do you kind of reconcile this? I've been struggling with for a few years now, because it is something that we talk about, especially as I talk more and more with people who totally disagree about the importance of these values, that I know that freedom and benefit of the doubt and things like that, that trust and the pursuit of truth and tolerance are all important. How do you explain and how do you reconcile the fact that if that needs to be taught and a country and a people need to be marinated in this because sure, it's correlated with economic prosperity, whatever, use a metric. How come we decide that when they say that's wrong, we want to decide something else? And it's like a liberalism paradox where it's like I'm humble enough to know that I'm wrong, so I'm giving you benefit of the doubt and I want to listen to what you have to say. But then on the other hand, I'm imposing, and it's not that I'm imposing, it's just that the polity kind of needs to impose that. We give people that, and at some point you're making a decision.

Daniel Hannan 

It's something a non imposition, isn't it? I mean,

Juliette Sellgren 

I mean, I agree. 

Daniel Hannan (34:03)

The great thing about a classical liberal values is that it doesn't impose. So all you are really saying is you, do you, but give everyone else space, right? And this is often, this is often the dialogue. The libertarian says, you have your views, I have mine. Let's agree to disagree. The collectivist says, no deal hater, right? And it is, as you say, cheap, because it's anyone listening whether, I don't know how many of your listeners on this podcast are on the left or on the right, but anyone who's listened to our conversation and who's been thinking to herself, but the other side started it, that's the problem. It's the most natural human way of dealing with this because like I say, we're driven by tribal instincts. It's how we're made, and yet we have managed for a long time to build something better. And we've done it through education.

The great German American philosopher, Hannah Arendt said, every generation the west is invaded by barbarians. We call them children. You and I came into the world with the same stone age instincts that our ancestors would've had 10,000 years ago, but we don't live like them because we've been able to inherit this collective work that has led to this pinnacle of a free society. And I really do feel this carries an obligation. We inherit these good things on a repairing lease. It's our duty to look at the civility, the institute, I mean the university that you are speaking to me from, that was not the work of one generation. You are, and everyone there with you is inheriting the collective work, the accumulated work, the accretions of generation after generation. I think that that carries with it a commensurate responsibility to hand it on in an improved condition to the people who come next. I think most people for the last couple of hundred years have understood that it's why alumni give money to their old institutions. On some level we get that. But if the ruling ideology becomes fundamentally hostile to that whole way of thinking, oh no, this was an institution built by a slaver, it's disgraceful.

We're going to smash up in one generation more precious things than we can imagine

Juliette Sellgren (36:43)

It is, in speaking of how it incrementally kind of turned towards where we are now, it is even more of a difficult incremental uphill battle to go back because I think it has to do with personal responsibility. If you're blaming the people before you for making it bad, and you're not focused on improving it, but rather on blaming, how are you going to make it better?

Daniel Hannan (37:17)

Look, one thing we can do, one thing we should do is police our own side, call out aggressive and dishonest campaigning from people who are broadly seen as being on our side. And it's the hardest thing in politics. It makes you so unpopular because people just can't understand why you're doing it. And like I say, most people are results driven and reason backwards from their preferred outcome. But if we don't do that, then we end up in a very bad, but lemme give you one example, right, of how this happens in a catastrophic way, as you say, today is the 4th of March. Today is therefore the day that the US tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China have come into effect. We say tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada, but we're not being accurate. They are taxes on American consumers. And any incidental advantage to selected and politically connected American producers will be wiped out by the overall damage to the US economy because when prices go up, Americans have less money to spend on everything else, which means that everyone else loses a bit an idea that is counterintuitive to some people that is uncontroversial among economists.

Now here's the thing. Despite every grownup understanding that Canada and Mexico are having to retaliate, in other words, America has dropped rocks in her harbors. We're going to retaliate by dropping rocks in our harbors. If you guys want to harm yourselves, we're going to harm our consumers. And why do they do that? Because the tribal instinct for retaliation overwhelms any reason, any rational consideration of what's actually in your economic interest, and that's how these things spiral so quickly out of control. Again, we need to patrol our own side on this. I literally just came from the chamber making an intervention saying the UK are in trade talks with the us, which is great. We have an interest as the single biggest investor in the us, in the US not applying tariffs to other people. Never mind if we Trump is signaling that doesn't want, he's going to impose tariffs on the EU, but not on us.

Okay, thank you very much. That's very nice. Obviously I want to have a really mutually beneficial deal that is as liberal as possible, but we are hurt as owners of so many American companies by the US choosing to impoverish itself by pushing up the cost of all its component parts. So we're damaged by US protectionism just because we have a vested interest in the prosperity of Americans. And that's what I mean. It's so easy to say, look, it's up to them what they do because you have to police your own side. And I count this as an example of policing your own side.

Juliette Sellgren (40:21)

What you're doing is impressive, and also something that I and people who are not in this sort of job can do. I don't have the sort of capacity to do that because no one has given me the power to do that. 

Daniel Hannan

What would you like?

Juliette Sellgren 

I don't think so.

Daniel Hannan (40:44)

No, no, I don't. No one should want to be a politician, or if they do, they need their head examined. It's a terrible life, but you may feel that you want to get something done.

Juliette Sellgren (40:54)

Well, so is it? Part of me feels as though it's part of your responsibility to not as someone. I don't know. What do you think about that? Because you're in this position on the one hand, but on the other I'm ignoring.

Daniel Hannan (41:12)

Okay, so I mean, look, first of all, you, Juliette are a very, very smart and widely read and impressive woman. So you have a lot to give. And that's true whether you go into politics or into anything else. Plato says, the price of not getting involved in politics is being governed by your inferiors. So I guess the question that you or anyone else who's contemplating it should ask is, are things bad enough that I need to do this? And I mean, that's a perfectly serious question. I've just been moaning about all the things that are going wrong in terms of the abuses of state power, abuses of executive power, tariffs, et cetera, et cetera. I haven't even got on to Trump threatening friendly western democracies with territorial claims.

But despite all of that, Americans are richer than they've ever been. More people are in work than ever. So you may feel that there's no need to go into, there's other contributions you can make. If I were living in Switzerland, I probably wouldn't have ever felt the need to go to politics is being perfectly well done by other people. If on the other hand, you think there are trends here that I don't like and I think I've got something to contribute, then maybe it's a platform not so different from what you're doing now. Why are you doing this? But presumably you're doing it to spread ideas and get people talking about the right things. So you could think of it as a huge amplifier, a massive megaphone. The fact of holding office beyond just being able to broadcast,

Juliette Sellgren (42:51)

You've made the single best case. I think anyone on the podcast or ever, at least in conversation with me has made for that sort of thing because especially classical liberal values and all, everyone's like, no, politics is one thing, but most of your life should be lived doing other things. And yet, perhaps part of how we're here now is because we back to policing our own side, have not focused on that and protecting the actual institutions.

Daniel Hannan (43:24)

And by the way, politics is never your whole life any more than being a lawyer or a doctor or a vet or whatever. I mean, I was having a furious argument just before I went on air about which is the best restaurant in Lima, we have the same broad range of intro cake. Maybe that one's a slightly eccentric one, but we have the same range of interest outside of our field of work that anyone else has, right? It's not like you're keeping up your personality. You're the same. The reason I say that is I'm always struck by how many people think that politicians are separate species, and actually from one day to the next, being a nurse or a plumber or a businessman or a solicitor or whatever, all you've done is persuaded the people who live around you to give you a vote. It is like you didn't suddenly become a crook and a liar just because they voted for

Juliette Sellgren (44:24)

You. Yeah, that's true. You also didn't become an angel. It swings both ways, and I think we have to remember that. Wow, I'm being challenged on so many fronts right now. You've given me so much to think about, and obviously we could have so much more to talk about. I could probably talk to you for hours and ask you 1,000,010 questions, but I have two more, huge, relatively short. The first is, did you anticipate yourself doing this when you were younger? Did you dream of this as a kid, as I put it before, the way that American children say, I'm going to be president? Is that done in Britain? Was that done by you?

Daniel Hannan (45:07)

Well, not the president bit, obviously. But having said the only good reason to go into politics is to get something, which I fundamentally believe. I think there is also a distinction between people who find it interesting in people who don't. And you and I, and I guess most people listening are in the smaller of those two categories. By virtue of the fact that we're having this conversation, we are evincing a minority interest. And I often have to remind myself and other politicians that ours is on one level is a hobby. Hobby, just in the same way that Formula one racing is a hobby or whatever, and is as uninteresting to non hobbyists as Formula One racing is to non hobbyists there. So I guess I have that interest as you have. So I watched election results coming in and took a side and was cheerleading who I wanted to win.

But I can tell you exactly when I decided to go into politics, I can tell you to the day when it was, it was the 22nd of November, 1990. It was the day that Margaret Thatcher was overthrown. And up until then, I suppose I was very spoiled growing up in the eighties, things were in political terms, getting better and better. And looking back, I now see what I couldn't see then, which is that this was a really exceptional moment, maybe the best moment we've had in living memory as a country politically. We were doing all the right things, winning all the right arguments, coming back as a country, getting richer, et cetera.

When she was kicked out, I was really shaken. I was 18 years old, and I, it took me a while just to get my head around the fact that her own members of parliament had kicked out this incredibly successful leader after three election victories. And that I think was when I decided to get involved, and I was particularly focused on the European issue. It's often forgotten that the trigger, I don't say the whole reason, but the trigger for getting rid of Margaret Thacher was her opposition to the Euro. Yes, there were other things going on. Yes, she wouldn't have fallen had that been the only thing. She was unpopular already for other reasons. But in 1990, the EU leaders ambushed her with this plan for a single currency, and it was like a signal to the domestic resistance to rise against her. It was horribly coordinated, and it was very visible at the time. And I mean, what an extraordinary thing that this gracious of our prime ministers was booted out over not wanting to join the Euro. I mean, for God's sake, who called that one correctly, right? And that was the thing. So I then became very, very focused on the European issue just after the 22nd of November, 1990, I set up an organization at my university called the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain, which was the beginning of the campaign for what later came to be called Brexit.

It then took me a quarter of a century to get there, but we got there. We took on all the main parties, all the big corporates, all the foreign governments, Obama telling us that we'd be the back of the queue for a trade deal and all this, and we won. And so I don't regret that at all. It was a much longer game than I'd ever thought I'd have to play. And knowing what I now know, I'd have gone into politics much later and done other things first. But I didn't know that it was going to take 25 years. But I did get to finish on my own terms, which is not often given to people in politics. So I was very blessed in that sense.

Juliette Sellgren (49:13)

That's great. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights and your wisdom and personal stories and quotes of other people and all of this. I've learned a ton, and I've thoroughly enjoyed this, and I'm certain that my listeners will as well. I have one last question for you.

Daniel Hannan 

Talk to you, Juliette. It's a great pleasure, and I hope to see you in the flesh again.

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah. One last question. Shoot. What is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

Daniel Hannan (49:44)

Okay, you said before we went on air, it was just fun talking about British things. This is a supremely British thing, but I'm not saying this performatively. I absolutely mean every word of this. The biggest change in my life is that I moved from Tory to Whig at some point in my twenties. There was a liberal MP here in the beginning of the 20th century called Isaac Foot. He was the father of the guy who went on to be the leader of the Labor party called Michael Foot. And he used to say, the only thing I want to know about a man is which side he would like his ancestors to have been on at the Battle of Masterton war. Now, the battle of Martin War was what determined our civil war in the 1640s. So were you for the king or were you for parliament or more loosely, were you a Tory or at wig? Because that was really the beginning of our part of the system. I was a Tory in my teens, high romantic Tory, patriotic for the king, for the established constitution. And I then came to see that the worst thing that could have happened to England and then to Scotland and Ireland would've been if that war had ended differently, we would've joined the general European move towards monarchical absolutism and all the things that we take for granted that make life modern and comfortable and rational would've been at the whim of an autocrat. The same switch made me very enthusiastic, still does make me very enthusiastic for the Patriot cause in the American colonies, which was really the same thing. If I can bore your listeners with one book recommendation, which I just thought was absolutely fascinating, there was a book written, I think in the late nineties, quite a long time ago now, by a Reagan era official called Kevin Phillips, who's a historian, and the book is called The Cousins Wars, and it's the story of the English Civil War or the war, the wars of the Three Kingdoms, as it's now called the American Revolution, and then the American Civil War.

And his argument is that there were really three continuing episodes of one enduring conflict between, on the one hand, the forces of hierarchy, aristocracy, Episcopal countryside, agriculture tradition, and on the other the forces of Protestantism, wiry industry towns, free trade individualism. I think he's slightly pushing it when he tries to make the argument about the American Civil War, but about the other two skeptical as I was when I first read it, it was utterly convincing. The biggest predictor of whether you were a patriot or a loyalist in the 1760s and seventies was not where you went to church or where you lived or how much you earned, but which side your ancestors had been on in the English Civil War, and its local variance. People at the time saw it very, very clearly in those terms. And I changed my mind. I think there is a beauty and a poetry to the Tory tradition, but it is a beauty that is a sentiment we can indulge because it lost had we been subjected to what a steward victory would've meant. The whole modern world might not have come into being in the way that it did. So that was the single biggest issue I changed my mind over. And it matters way, way more than changing your mind over control or nuclear weapons or something, because it's fundamentally about what kind of person you are.

Juliette Sellgren 

I love that. What is the name of the book?

Daniel Hannan 

The Cousins’ Wars

Juliette Sellgren 

Oh yes.

Daniel Hannan (53:35)

The Cousins Wars. It's a great book. Also along those lines, probably the best academic book from a layman's perspective is a wonderful book by a man called David Hackett Fisher called Albion's Seed, which is about which groups of Americans were descended from people from different parts of the British Isles and how they carried their folk ways and their politics with them. One of the things that becomes almost impossible to resist once you've read a few of these books is you realize the cultural continuum of the English speaking democracies. This is not obvious to people in them at the time. It's very obvious to people outside, it's very obvious to Germans or Italians or whatever, that Britain and Australia and the US have things in common. A lot of my American friends push back when I suggest this and bracket us with Europe. I've never known an American who's lived here and still thinks that, if I can put it that way. One measure of this, it is kind of, I suppose a weird way of finishing our talk with a Godwins law thing. But why did Hitler declare war on the US? I mean, I don't think we asked that question nearly often enough. Right after Pearl Harbor, there was absolutely no reason for Germany to declare war on the United States. At the very least. Why didn't he hold out for an equivalent Japanese declaration of war on the USSR?

So what was he thinking? And honestly, I think the only, I've turned this question over and over in my mind, and I keep coming back to the only possible answer he made. The same calculation that the Kaiser had made in the First World War, which is the English speaking democracies are all going to gang up on me eventually, so I might as well get this first smoother advantage and that it, it's a much more obvious way of looking at us from the outside, if you see what I mean. So I think you see them everywhere once you start looking. And one of the things that I really do hope is that in this massive global reordering, we push ahead with closer partnership among the countries that have the most in common, the orca countries, the five ice countries. That is why I take so badly the idea of starting an economic war with Canada's difficult to think of people who are less offensive and more pro-American.

Juliette Sellgren (56:24)

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to the Great Antidote Podcast. It means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.