Like his fans in our free and fearless press, Hannan must wish for a time before social media, and the Internet that never forgets, to enable him to get away with it. Again.
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Sunday, 10 April 2022
Dan, Dan The Clueless About EU Man
As alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson takes his opportunity to enjoy a walkabout in central Kyiv - sadly, Ursula von der Leyen got there before him - and his personal stock rose a little from the lows of Partygate, the last thing the Tories needed was a clueless loose cannon taking the shine off the occasion. There was quite enough distraction with Rishi Sunak and his wife, thank you very much.
But cometh the hour, cometh the unwanted bad penny, and so it was that former MEP and sometime Tory Dan, Dan The Oratory Man decided to pipe up, rather than pipe down, or just not pipe at all. Hannan had decided, at a time when it might have been best not to slag off everyone across the Channel, to, er, slag off everyone across the Channel.
First on the Hannan target list was the Rotten French™, because, well, they talk foreign and do elections differently. “France faces an unappetising choice between a Putin enabler and a Putin ally” he pontificated, correctly characterising Marine le Pen, who has admitted the charge, but smearing Emmanuel Macron, because he talked to Vlad The Invader.
That’s as opposed to letting Vlad’s pals buy British passports, buy significant property holdings across London and the Home Counties (des res by the golf course at Wentworth, anyone?), launder non-trivial amounts of not totally clean money through the City of London, and, just coincidentally you understand, donate millions to the Tory Party.
Still, he was at least able to finally focus on Ukraine. The problem was, as so often, Hannan’s lack of veracity. “Delighted that we're scrapping all tariffs and quotas for Ukraine. Thanks, [Boris Johnson], [Liz Truss] and [Anne-Marie Trevelyan]. We're able to do it because we're outside the EU. It would be nice if Brussels followed suit. It would also be nice if we made the same offer to other countries". But that wasn’t quite right, was it?
Jessica Simor was, helpfully, on hand to correct The Great Man. “The EU removed nearly all tariff barriers in relation to Ukraine 5 years ago. Of course Hannan knows this because when talking about the future UKTCA people looked at the Ukraine-EU ‘deep & comprehensive free trade agreement’ as a potential model”. Actually, it was as long ago as 2013 that Ukraine signed a Free Trade Agreement with the EU.
We know that because the occasion was marked by a commemorative Tweet by a then long-serving Tory MEP, someone by the name of … Daniel Hannan! Yes, on New Year’s Eve 2013, Hannan had opined “Ukraine is right to sign an FTA with the EU rather than joining a customs union with Russia; FTAs, unlike customs unions, are non-exclusive”.
So it would be a good idea for the Daniel Hannan who wants “Brussels” to follow suit on scrapping tariffs and quotas for Ukraine to consult the Daniel Hannan who previously celebrated “Brussels”, er, scrapping tariffs and quotas for Ukraine. So both Daniel Hannans could get their story straight, and not use the occasion of Bozo visiting Kyiv as another excuse to bash the hated EU, just to deflect from the UK being late again.
Like his fans in our free and fearless press, Hannan must wish for a time before social media, and the Internet that never forgets, to enable him to get away with it. Again.
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Like his fans in our free and fearless press, Hannan must wish for a time before social media, and the Internet that never forgets, to enable him to get away with it. Again.
https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton
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8 comments:
Indeed. Hannan is very chummy with Putineers like Farage. If Hannan had spent less time rubbishing the NHS in the USA when he should have been doing what he was elected to do as an MEP, he might have amounted to something close to respectable.
If Hannan was a footballer he'd put through his own goal and run back to the centre circle with arms raised in victory.
The crackpot budgie-wanking tory gimp. "Good" enough for the Quiff Quisling front bench though.
Well,he is a Brexit supporter so talking through his arse wouldn't be that much of a new experience.
There seems to be a lot of selective criticism of Twitter fro certain groups and individuals.
It certainly does have its problems, but some people don't seem to like the fact that they cannot Tweet any old rubbish without a response. "How dare you reply to my opinion with facts"
Despite this, 99% percent of these groups and individuals are still regularly posting, clinging on to a laughable hope that Elon Musk might change things.
A pedant writes. Obviously your general point is right. Ukraine does have a free trade agreement with the EU. But it wasn't signed in 2013. Hannon's December 2013 tweet was a response to Catherine Ashton's announcement, following negotiations with then president Yanukovych, that Ukraine would be signing an association agreement with the EU. Shortly after Hannon tweeted his approval, the deal fell through. It wasn't until June 2014, after Yanukovych had been ousted by the Maidan protests, that his successor Poroshenko signed the association agreement. The resulting free trade agreement between the EU and Ukraine was provisionally applied from January 2016 and formally came into force in September 2017.
I wonder if any of the brexity types like Hannan would actually prefer us to still be in the EU. They'd still be able to have their air of victimhood about the EU, they'd still be able to posit all the potential benefits of Brexit, and they'd still be able to be MEPS, constantly whanging on about the former.
To 21:10.
"Maidan protests"?
Is that a replacement for "CIA instigated Maidan coup" and/or "incinerated innocents in Odessa" and/or "eight years of ignored mass slaughter in the Donbass"?
I chose the term "Maidan protests" because I thought it was neutral. I didn't want to get diverted into a debate about the political character of those protests, the role of Victoria Nuland etc. As it happens I was opposed to the Maidan movement, in which the far right ended up playing a decisive part, and was certainly opposed to the coup against Yanukovych when a democratic solution was available to his opponents, namely that they could vote him out at the forthcoming presidential election. So you're arguing with the wrong person.
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