Daniel Hannan

The U.S. states that allow for citizens' initiatives tend to have fewer laws and lower taxes than the ones that don't. But the beauty of the system is that it encourages the spread of best practice.

It's irresponsible to scare E.U. nationals in the U.K. by hinting that their status might change after Brexit.

Every human on the planet is descended from both slaves and slave owners. What makes Britain unusual is not that we engaged in the disgusting trade, but that we eliminated it. Our political institutions led us, earlier than many, to the conclusion that freedom was the highest virtue.

I'm going to devote myself full time to securing and then winning a referendum on leaving the E.U.

The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.

The complexity of a tax system is every bit as damaging to competitiveness as the overall tax rate. The more convoluted the tax code becomes, the more time we have to take off work to comply with it.

The 'EU in a Nutshell' is a miscellany of facts and anecdotes about the system which rules us. It's a book you can delve into in pursuit of a particular fact, or crack open for entertainment at virtually any page.

One way to think of the tax system is as a massive Swiss cheese. Each hole is an exemption created by a chancellor in pursuit of good headlines - a hole waiting to be filled by the clever accountants who work for Starbucks or Jimmy Carr.

You cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.