There is an interesting debate taking place in Britain right now. On one side is Dan Hannan. Or if you prefer to be formal, then Lord Hannan of Kingsclere. I like Hannan because he exercised his brain at the start of all the Covid hysteria, learned the data, and knew that healthy young ones under thirty had essentially zero chance of dying from the virus. And that the average age of Covid death was older than the life expectancy. And he wrote about the thuggishness and illiberality and stupidity from day one – just like a bunch of us here in the best publication in Australia, this one – even though it was his own party, the Conservatives, doing the tyrannical heavy-handedness up there.

Hannan was also very good in pushing the Brexit case, a cause dear to my heart as a diehard majoritarian democrat who believes that the nation state will over time almost always outperform largely undemocratic supranational bodies that lack real accountability, including ones that rhyme with ‘Me Too’. Hannan spent twenty-one years till 2020 in the European parliament (not really what we’d consider a parliament, by the way, not least because it can’t even initiate legislation), on the side of those wanting Britain to exit. In early 2021, the Tories appointed him to the House of Lords, hence the grandiose new moniker.

All up, then, a far better than average politician (the man loves Shakespeare, for Pete’s sake, so there’s that too). But Hannan is something of an economic reductionist to me. He seems to me to downplay the role of culture and religion when it comes to such things as the ability to assimilate different peoples from different parts of the world.  But what got the debate going in the UK was a column Hannan wrote in the Telegraph.  In it he essentially argued that the blame for the dire state of Britain (and hence Australia and Canada) lies with the voters, not so much the politicians who are just giving people what they want. Hannan gives examples of policies that he says politicians across the political divide favour but can’t pursue for fear of losing too many votes. Privatisation of parts of the woeful NHS health system. Abandoning Britain’s terrible ‘triple lock’ on pensions (that takes money from the young and gives it to the old, even the well-off old). New housing developments blocked by not-in-my-backyard Nimbys who vote their interest big time. You get the idea.

And yes. There is a kernel of truth to the case Hannan tried to make. But as various respondents then pointed out (perhaps the best being in Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic), an awful lot of things have been done to Britain by its politicians in direct opposition to what the voters wanted. Fourteen years of Conservative governments, each one elected based on a firm promise to cut immigration massively (one pledge to virtually nothing). And after each election the Tories upped the numbers. That’s not the voters’ fault. The Tories never anywhere signalled that they would run down the armed forces. In fact, their voters strongly despised this. The Tories promised to be the party of lower taxes and lower spending each time they were campaigning. They won and instead became the biggest-spending and taxing since Attlee after the second world war. And all the ‘moderate’ Tory MPs, the ones who fought to stall Brexit (against their voters’ wishes) and who seem willing to destroy their own party to keep Britain in the truly awful European Convention on Human Rights and the now clearly outdated Refugees Convention, well, they know their voters want neither.  Again, hard to blame the voters as opposed to a feckless political caste.

And it’s the same for Labour in the UK. Prime Minister Starmer and Labour nowhere signalled they would let the activist human rights lawyers in the party room prosecute ex-servicemen (let alone funding them from the public purse). This is not what the majority of Labour voters want. Nor was anyone told Mr Starmer would try to give the Chagos Islands back by paying Mauritius to take them (only to be blocked by Mr Trump, but you get the point). Meantime nothing remotely like a majority of voters ever wanted the massive immigration both parties imposed on us. Nothing like a majority wanted the crazy net zero policies denuding the country of any manufacturing base and costing steroidal amounts of money. Nor did the vast majority of Brits (traditional Labour voters included) ever want the political cover-up of Pakistani grooming gang rapes. Or the huge explosion of welfare benefits. Or the burgeoning hate-speech laws insanities.

I could go on. Alas, much of this applies to Australia. Voters elected Scott Morrison because he promised not to go down the impoverishing net zero highway. After winning, he and the Libs opted to do so anyway.  No one in 2019 voted for the lockdown thuggery or copying of the authoritarian response of the Chinese communist politburo or the incessant fearmongering of the press and politicians (though I grant you that the fearmongering was brutally effective in scaring normally sane voters into lockstep supportive conformity). Core Liberal party voters did not vote for the defenestration of Tony Abbott by Turnbull and the wets. We in Australia, likewise, never voted for massive immigration because during each election (Labor in the last one included) we’re always promised it will be seriously pared back. But it isn’t. Nor do I recall voters voting for ever more inroads on free speech because this, too, is never signalled by any of the politicians (or at least any of the non-Green politicians).

And where is the public pressure on elected governments to continually increase taxes? Or to keep upping the tax money going to the ABC? Or to repatriate the Isis brides? Or to undermine our armed services (and no, I do not agree with the criminal prosecution of Ben Roberts-Smith)?

It is not any feat of mental dexterity to go on and on with examples of our elected politicians ignoring the wishes of the voters – and sometimes directly contradicting what they promised those voters to get elected.   Clever as Dan Hannan is, then, I really don’t think he won this debate. The curse of the last two or three decades around the Anglosphere is that we have what I have for some time been describing as ‘the worst political caste’ in at least a century. Pusillanimous, shiftless and vacillating. Obsessed with the latest focus groups. Deferential to advisors who have lamentable track records and appear to believe in nothing except the next pay cheque.

That, readers, is why Donald Trump has won two elections in the US and has achieved more in the first year of his second term than all the other Anglosphere politicians, put together, in two decades. And that is why Nigel Farage and his Reform party in Britain are favoured to win the next election (out of comparative nowhere).  And that is why we here in Australia are witnessing the meteoric rise of One Nation. Because in all three cases these non-politician politicians appear to be brave enough to actually do – or fight like hell to try to do – what they are promising.

Hence, I give this debate to the Hannan critics in a knockout.