Daniel Hannan goes full-on Matthew Goodwin

In the 17th paragraph of his article, Hannan concedes that “Yes, most Brits of immigrant heritage are law-abiding”. But the rest paints a picture of quite the opposite, with Baron Hannan of Kingsclere writing: “In attempting to deflect from the number of terror-style attacks carried out by immigrants, the authorities inadvertently emphasise how many are carried out by the sons of immigrants. They may have grown up watching Blue Peter; but they are moved by ancestral voices prophesying war.”

He adds that “we should admit that not all immigrants are equal. Some places are more backward and more violent than others. People who come from these places are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes than the children of immigrants from, say, Switzerland.” He then gives a kicking to the hit Netflix drama Adolescence – an old target of his – for making the protagonist white.

Hannan has also recently backed Robert Jenrick’s claims about areas of Britain where no white faces are seen, and was supportive of Christian Calgie, the Daily Express reporter who called for Zarah Sultana, the Birmingham-born MP, to be deported.

Still, Elon Musk’s Grok AI states as fact that Hannan is “a principled conservative thinker who championed Brexit and critiques supranational bureaucracy with eloquence and consistency. His advocacy for free markets and national sovereignty stems from deep historical knowledge, not greed or deception.” So that’s alright then.

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Rats in a Sack

Meanwhile, to the no doubt horror of the literally dozens of people who turned out to vote for them, the government today announced the scrapping of police and crime commissioners.

Introduced by the coalition government, the idea of voting for commissioners to oversee police forces in England and Wales never struck a chord with the public, hitting an absolute nadir in Staffordshire in 2012 when just 11.6% of electors turned out. One polling station in Gwent had not a single voter on one polling day.

And whose terrible idea was it? Daniel Hannan!

Hannan first pitched the idea in The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, a 2008 book co-authored with Douglas Carswell, a Conservative MP who later defected to UKIP and now lives in Mississippi from where he posts racist tripe on X. The introduction would “make the state accountable once more to its people”, he wrote.

But as it quickly became clear the people didn’t want the state to be accountable, they just wanted wrong ‘uns to get nicked, Hannan quickly got to the root of what the problem was – the name. In The Plan the Americophile urged the new position to be called ‘Sheriffs’, rather than boring old commissioners.

“When I asked what was wrong with ‘sheriffs’, the name originally proposed, I was told that Home Office focus groups had rejected it as ‘too American’,” he harrumphed in the Daily Telegraph in 2020.

“‘Where’ I asked ‘do you think the Americans got the name from?’ But, rather as was later to happen over Brexit, Whitehall was determined to be as unambitious as possible. ‘Commissioner’ is a name only a civil servant would propose. And the shoddy syntax implies that PCCs are in charge of crime.

“Please let’s come up with a better name. If Sheriff really is too American, how about High Marshall? Anything rather than what we have.”

Alas for Hannan, rather than getting a Yankee-doodle-dandy new name, the pointless role is to be scrapped altogether. Now perhaps it’s time to remedy some of the other idiot ideas he had in The Plan, such as withdrawing from the European Union…