Daniel Hannan is a Conservative Member of the European Parliament. He spoke to CUCA in Michaelmas 2008. With Douglas Carswell MP, he is author of “The Plan: 12 months to renew Britain.
One of the advantages of leaving the European People’s Party is that we will get more influence. Because he is not a member, Mr Hannan was the only Conservative to speak when Gordon Brown visited the European Parliament today. Here is what he said:
“Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the word 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 born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.”
Do watch the whole thing. If only we could have seen Gordon Brown’s face.
Tags: Daniel Hannan, EU, Gordon Brown
Refreshing. Possibly the most consistent employment of a single metaphor throughout an entire speech I have ever heard.
The viewer does get a slight glimpse at Mr Brown, who is writing something on a piece of paper and smiling as if to try and laugh it off.
ConservativeHome are all over it and the Daily Politics made a point of how it’s become extraordinarily popular on the internet, despite not being covered by the mainstream broadcasters.
‘Consistent’ is one way to describe the metaphor. Terminally repetitious might be another. Only a stone edifice can be ‘delapidated’ (lapis, lapis meaning stone…) so the word’s application to a vessel is perhaps dubious. Similarly, denouncing Brown’s incompetence in pushing our hull below the waterline is perhaps uncharitable, since below the waterline is precisely where hulls are supposed to be. ‘Brezhnev-era apparatchik’ is possibly the most tedious cliche in the rusting armoury of a Daily Mail leader writer. ‘Devalued’ is not an intransitive word, so a currency cannot ‘devalue’. I suppose literacy is rather a stringent requirement to make of the modern Tory party.
Actually, it is ‘dilapidated,’ not ‘delapidated.’ Hence, ‘dilapidate’ does not mean to de-stone, as you suggest, but rather to destroy with stones: dis (intensive) + lapidare (‘to stone’). A ship could be dilapidated; presumably, in this case, by the metaphorical stones of public debt. A hull refers to the body of a ship, upon which the superstructure is built. The waterline is an imaginary line circumscribing the hull, where the surface of the hull meets the water. Saying the hull is supposed to be below the waterline would, I suppose, be true for a sunken ship, but certainly not for a bouyant one. Perhaps you are confusing hull with ballast?
What fun this is.
Ben, even if you were correct about the etymology of “dilapidated”, you would still be committing the etymological fallacy. According to the OED, dilapidated means “Fallen into ruin or disrepair; ruined, impaired, broken down.” Its etymology is irrelevant to its current meaning. A definition for the verb “delapidate” is given as “To bring (a building) into a state of decay or of partial ruin.” Certainly this does not apply to only stone buildings, and it would be uncharitable to refuse its application to a ship.
However, both of you are wrong about the etymology, according to the OED. The etymology is “to scatter as if throwing stones asunder”.
Ben is correct that a hull (well, most of it) should be below the waterline. Indeed, since the waterline is an imaginary line where the hull meets the surface of the water, it would be impossible for that not to be the case, unless the ship was not in the water (e.g. in dry dock).
What Daniel actually said was “our hull is pressed deep into the waterline”, which doesn’t make sense. He should have said “our hull is pressed deep into the water”. But we all know what he meant.
(The Plimsoll line is a line actually painted on the ship to indicate when it has reached maximum safe load. It is named after Samuel Plimsoll, who devised it against “coffin ships”; over-insured ships worth more to their owners sunk than afloat, deliberately over-filled, which often sunk taking their crew with them. The Plimsoll shoe is named after the Plimsoll line. If water gets above the rubber line of the sole, disaster!)
“Devalued” is not an intransitive verb, so a currency can’t devalue itself, but has to be devalued (by someone). But what do you say when a currency is devalued by a market – by the actions of millions of people? “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
Interesting: http://maxatkinson.blogspot.com/2009/03/does-daniel-hannans-attack-on-brown.html