Daniel Hannan and the Libertarian Lie

I am a libertarian. Not by fashion or whim, but by conviction—forged in the glow of the Enlightenment and hardened by the spectacle of a ruling class that steals with ceremony and cages with compassion. I believe the state is a standing affront to justice, that taxation is a euphemism for extortion, and that the rights of man begin where the writ of government ends. So it is with no joy—and less patience—that I read Daniel Hannan’s “Tax is theft” in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph.

It is not that the statement is untrue. It is that it has become—under his pen and under the party he spent his life serving—a lie. And not just a lie, but a slogan wielded by thieves. Mr Hannan tells us that forcing your way into someone’s home and stealing half their property is wrong. But if you call yourself the government and your theft “tax,” it apparently becomes acceptable. This, he insists, is the eternal insight of libertarianism.

Yes, quite. And where was this insight during fourteen years of Conservative rule? Where was it when they raised every tax they could, when they inflated the currency to fund their paymasters, when they turned HMRC into an inquisition? Where was this libertarian outrage when people were locked in their homes without charge and forced to take experimental injections to keep their jobs?

It was nowhere. Because Hannan’s libertarianism is not a creed. It is a marketing device. A rhetorical fig-leaf for a wing of the political class that long ago sold its soul to the state it pretends to restrain. The Conservative Party learned in the 1970s how to clothe itself in our words as camouflage. It found in the language of liberty a useful costume—one that let it deregulate for its friends while regulating everyone else. It privatised national monopolies only to hand them to international cartels. It talked of sovereignty and sold it to Brussels, then later to Silicon Valley and Pfizer. It invoked Burke and Locke to pass laws criminalising opinions and imposing ideological orthodoxy in schools.

Daniel Hannan was never outside this machine. He was, and remains, part of its decoration: the man with the Latin quotes, the polite accent, the well-thumbed Hayek volume. A salesman of liberty whose product always arrives broken.

He has now taken to quoting Confucius and the Talmud, invoking the “Silver Rule”—do not do to others what is hateful to you. I agree. But I find it hateful to be lied to, stolen from, locked down, masked, monitored, taxed, fined, and lied to again. And I find it more hateful still that this was done to me by people who claimed to speak for liberty.

In his column, Hannan refers admiringly to Dr Steve Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs. He credits Davies with predicting the “Great Realignment”—where political divisions are no longer Left versus Right, but globalist versus nationalist. But Steve Davies is not a prophet. He is a functionary of the State–Capital complex, issuing pronouncements from within a think tank that serves the regime it pretends to critique. Were he four dozen years younger, you might call him a young man with promise, but also much to learn. But he is not four dozen years younger. He is an aged and glib mediocrity, wrong on every issue where he has made falsifiable statements. He was wrong about public support for Brexit, wrong about the danger of the Coronavirus, wrong about the need for lockdowns, wrong about the vaccines. And above all, he is wrong about power—because he does not understand who has it or what they want. The division is not between liberals with iPhones drinking skinny latte, and tattooed proles who hate foreigners. It is between a supernational ruling class that profits from war and financial parasitism, and everyone else who believes in a local order where some degree of liberty can exist.

Davies’ “realignment” is just another excuse for why his wing of the movement no longer commands attention. Libertarians like him spent decades insisting that if we just privatised enough railways, deregulated enough industries, cut enough taxes, all would be well. The world would be freer. Instead, we got oligopolies, censorship, surveillance, foreign ownership of every strategic asset, and the criminalisation of ordinary life. We got Woke Capital and borderless authoritarianism.

And yet they go on, these men—Hannan, Davies, the lot of them—blaming others for their own legacy. Hannan mocks the post-liberal Right—“idealistic and patriotic young men,” he calls them—for pointing out that his brand of libertarianism serves not the people, but the globalist elite. But they are right. Classical liberalism, as administered by the Conservative Party, was not a defence of the nation—it was its liquidation.

What Hannan defends is not liberty. It is a style: market economics with just enough manners to be sold in a Telegraph column. He asks us to return to Thatcher, to Burke, to some supposed golden age of “limited government.” But the Conservatives were in office from 2010 to 2024. What did they limit? Not the tax burden. Not the surveillance state. Not the ideological indoctrination in schools and corporations. Not the flow of migrants or the employment of authoritarian drones. What they limited—brutally—was dissent. What they managed was decline.

Hannan’s entire article is an exercise in misdirection. “Who are these people,” he asks, “who elevate the capital-M Market above the national interest?” We are meant to believe such creatures are figments of JD Vance’s imagination. But we know who they are. They are his colleagues. They are his donors. They are his friends. They are the people who sold out the country while quoting von Mises.

He ends, inevitably, with the same plea: that there might still be room for a “grown-up party” to tell the truth about public finances and argue for cuts. He offers it as if it were a bold alternative, rather than the very con the Tories used for fifty years while growing the state in every direction for the benefit of a ruling class that sees us sometimes as consumers, more often as a nuisance to be neutralised, and possibly culled.

Enough of this! Libertarianism is not a party brand. It is not a slogan. It is not a device for selling deregulation to multinationals or tax cuts to banks. It is a moral stance against power—especially when that power is cloaked in the language of liberty. The Conservative Party betrayed that stance. Daniel Hannan justifies that betrayal. Steve Davies rationalises it. And the rest of us are left to live in its consequences.

Let us stop pretending these people are allies. Let us stop mistaking the appearance of principle for the thing itself. They are not libertarians. And every day they are still respected, still published, is a day our cause is sucked deeper into the mire they made for it.