Speech of the Year: 2009

Daniel Hannan MEP attacks British PM Gordon Brown, becomes an internet sensation, and American hero despite being British. He attacks leftist economic and regulatory policies which have failed Britain. It serves as a warning to the U.S. about the goofy policies advocated by the Obama Administration.
The Youtube video and text are included...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs

The speech:

'Prime Minister, I see you've already mastered the essential craft of the European politician: namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate. You've spoken here of free trade, and amen to that.

Who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase 'British jobs for British workers,' and that you have subsidised - where you have not nationalised outright - swaths of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.

Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this House if your actions matched your words, and perhaps more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not sailing into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is now born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.

Now, once again today, you have tried to spread the blame around. You spoke about an international recession, an international crisis.

Well, it's true that we are sailing together into the squalls but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging - in other words, to pay off debt. But you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further.

As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the waterline under the accumulated weight of your debt.

We are now running a deficit that touches 10 per cent of GDP, an almost unbelievable figure - more than Pakistan, more than Hungary; countries where the IMF has already been called in.

It's not just that you are not apologising - like everyone else I've long accepted that you are pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things - it's that you are carrying on wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left.

In the last year 100,000 private sector jobs have been lost and yet you have created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister, you cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.

You cannot spend your way out of a recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev era apparatchik giving the party line.

You know and we know and you know that we know that it's nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times.

The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets say so, which is why the pound has lost a third of its value.

In a few months, the voters will have their chance to say so, too.

They can see what the markets have seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government.

-Daniel Hannan MEP to British PM Gordon Brown

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1165027/An-internet-sensation-Tory-told-Brown-face-hes-disaster.html