Daniel Hannan is succeeding David Frost as Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs. He starts on 1st June. Hannan said this afternoon:
“The IEA set Britain free. When it was founded in 1955, there was a consensus in favour of high spending, industrial management and economic planning. Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon showed people what was wrong with those ideas, and thus unleashed the genius of our nation.
“We face a similar challenge today. Public spending and taxation are higher now than they were in 1955. We are back to the fatal conceit, the idea that politicians, bureaucrats and planners know best.
“Just like the IEA’s founders, we need to change people’s minds, to open people’s eyes. The route to national prosperity, now as then, is through deregulation, free trade, sound money and low spending. It’s not just the politicians we need to convince; it’s not even primarily the politicians. When voters understand the case for smaller government, MPs follow.
“I am so grateful to every one of my predecessors, from Ralph Harris, who inspired me as a teenager, to David Frost, whom I am proud to call my friend. They kept the flame burning. Now it is time to heap up the fire.”
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Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”