By Jonathan Copsey / STAFF

There’s a very good chance that you don’t know who Daniel Hannan is. There’s an equally good chance that many of his constituents in South East England don’t know him either.

Hannan is a minister in the European Parliament and he is part of a new breed of minister – a libertarian working within a massive bureaucratic body.

Always rocking back and forth, bouncing, moving as if he were on a caffeine high, Hannan was the energetic guest speaker at the Fulton County GOP meeting last week. He has quickly become an international sensation through his lashing of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for his handling of the economic crisis. The six minute tirade has been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube and has led to Hannan appearing on prominent American shows as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

The minister was able to give the assembled Republicans plenty to fear with his tales of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), the social health and welfare system of the United Kingdom

“Last year, 7,000 people died in British hospitals from affiliations that were completely unrelated to why the went in,” explained Hannan, detailing the un-cleanliness of the NHS hospitals; so-called “superbugs” are frequently deemed the cause of illness or even death to patients in the hospitals. 

“Once you have the system, you will find it impossible to get rid of.” He pointed out that even Britain’s conservative party, the Tories –which Hannan is a part of – do not claim to want to end the NHS, just fix it. As Hannan pointed out, when the NHS is the fifth largest employer in the world, employing more than 1.4 million people (that’s just behind the Chinese Army, the Indian National Railway, Wal-Mart and the U.S. Department of Defense), to say it should be abolished is essentially telling those 1.4 million constituents they should be unemployed; it’s political suicide.

That, said Hannan, is the danger of nationalized health care. Like any government program, it will grow out of good intentions into a monstrous program eating up the majority of GDP. And once enacted, like many welfare programs, constituents will guard against revoking it, no matter how flawed it is.  

“The system leads to queues, to rationing, state committees decreeing what drugs you are entitled to,” Hannan warned. And the argument that public insurance can exist alongside private? “It’s like the banks. You have one that’s backed by the government and one that isn’t. So which one would you rather put your money in?”

“Think of me as that guy from H.G. Wells’ Time Machine who comes back in time saying ‘no, no! Don’t do it!’”

If Daniel Hannan is in fact like the man from the future, perhaps we should start listening to his warnings.