Home > Alex Massie

Thursday 9 February 2012

British Tea Parties?

Tuesday, 9th March 2010

Rod Dreher had a good post riffing on David Brooks column last week which is in turn well worth reading. Brooks argues, astutely in my view, that the Tea Party movement is in many ways the flipside of the 1960s New Left:

Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.

Indeed. And since many American political trends end up crossing the Atlantic it's probably not a great surprise that there are, or there want to be, British Tea Partiers too. Here's Daniel Hannan explaining it all:

[T]he idea, in 1773, that Britain was a foreign country would have struck most Americans, patriot or loyalist, as ridiculous. A large majority of the British population sympathised with the arguments of the colonists. So, indeed, did the greatest British parliamentarians of the age.

“I rejoice that America has resisted,” proclaimed William Pitt the Elder setting out the case against the Stamp Act in 1766. “Three million people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest [of us]”

“Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American Empire,” said Edmund Burke in 1775, taking up the cause of no taxation without representation. “English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.”

Those British Lefties who now sneer at what they regard as the Americanisation of the British Right would do well to remember their own history. They are the political heirs of Charles James Fox, of John Wilkes, or Tom Paine. I have no doubt that if the heroes of that age – Burke or Fox or Pitt or Johnson or Swift – could be transported to our own time, they would recoil with horror at the level of taxation and state intervention.

To remind you, Labour has introduced 111 tax rises since 1997. It has taken a trillion pounds in additional taxation. And it has still left us with a deficit of 12.6 per cent of GDP.

Enough is enough.

Well, I'm not a fan of the intruding state, nor of high taxation but this is hardly a serious political manifesto. We may all admite the giants of the 18th century (and their rhetoric and principles) while appreciating that, you know, we don't actually live in the 18th century.

If Fox and Burke and Pitt and Dundas and all the others were to be transported to our time they might indeed be astonished by the levels of taxation and state intrusion (and their horror would not be baseless) but they'd also be astonished by stuff such as, I dunno, universal education, universal health care, universal pensions and much, much more. Unfashionable as it may be to say this, all these things need to be paid for. (It's true that this does not mean that the state can or should be the universal provider or funder, of course.)

Noting that hardly makes one an apologist for Big Government or punitive taxation but, entertaining though it is to contemplate the era of Georgian political giants and contrast them with our own dessicated pygmies, it's not really terribly useful. (Even if it's a temptation many of us succumb to from time to time.)

Lower taxes and a smaller, more limited idea of govenrment would both be very good things and, as an outlet for pent-up frustration, there's not too much wrong with the idea of British Tea Parties. I sense, however, that this will not become a mass movement. There's something of a Monty Python sketch about it all and, however well-intentioned they may be, I suspect the Tea Partiers will simultaneously be too silly and too earnest to be taken too seriously.

A version of this post appeared at the Daily Dish last week. I meant to post it here too but forgot.

Filed under: Americana (457 more articles) , Britain (678 more articles) , Conservatives (2070 more articles) , Tories (265 more articles)

Previous Back to Alex Massie Next

Blogs: Martin Bright | Susan Hill | Melanie Phillips | Coffee House | Faith Based

Actions: Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (9)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

Rhoda Klapp

March 9th, 2010 2:30pm Report this comment

So it's a good idea, only it's not because you don't like the people who support it. Or the way they promote it. Or maybe your mates don't like it so you have to criticize? Whichever, you are part of the problem.

David Preiser

March 9th, 2010 3:04pm Report this comment

Another liberal media type dismissing the silly Tea Party folks, I see. There's one important way in which we are different from the Leftists of the '60s, as well as from today's Leftists: we don't do violence. We're responsible citizens who are trying to raise up, not tear down. Consider that at your next dinner party.

If you think we're too silly to be of any use, even after Tea Party groups have gotten real results in local and state-wide elections, from Senate races to town council votes, it's difficult to take you seriously. That's fine with us, though. Keep on talking amongst yourselves while the citizens go about the business of trying to get some common sense (Tom Paine wasn't wrong) back into government.

THX1138

March 9th, 2010 3:12pm Report this comment

I bet Hannan timed the launch to coincide with the release of 'Alice in Wonderland'

CG

March 9th, 2010 4:01pm Report this comment

This is a vote loser in the UK. People just don't object that much to taxes. They know that they are used by the government to pay for things like roads, education and defence. The problems are not taxes, it is only when tax money is wasted that we should object. However, the tea partiers seem to think that nobody anywhere (certainly not themselves) should ever have to pay so much as a penny in tax and give the impression that they don't care about anything or anyone much outside their own bubble. That is why it won't catch on in this country. And that is why David Cameron is wise to keep away from these short-sighted saddoes.

Beefeater

March 9th, 2010 4:12pm Report this comment

Brooks is a snob. The demotic has never been his cuppa.

He is so busy trying to turn the Tea Partiers into a mob that he misses the glaringly obvious point. They do not wish to return to a state of Rousseauesque simplicity and innocence. That was 60s stuff. They wish to return to the Constitution ( the final act in the drama which started with the Boston Tea Party), to the sophisticated idea of civilization - a republican form of constrained government. They wish to replace the chains on government that the 60's radicals threw off. Their not wanting to be taken over by any party is because the People precede faction constitutionally. Brooks has it completely wrong when he says the Tea Party movement is not conservative - it is, to its core.
His piece - and yours - are exhibits 1 and 2 of the prosecution's case against the insidiousness of the anti-constitutional, collectivist, and savagely stupid 60's politics, against which the Tea Parties protest.

"These things will have to be paid for." Oh boy.

David Lindsay

March 9th, 2010 6:05pm Report this comment

Why adopt a tactic which has already failed in its own country? The Tea Party movement there has already descended to engineering and then celebrating the election of Scott “Jobs Bill” Brown, and to levying an enormous registration charge in order to pay a decidedly non-Middle American fee to Sarah Palin.

The whole thing was only ever astroturfing: the corporate faking of grassroots. Hence the failure to criticise the very big government, very high tax wars. Hence the level of publicity. And hence the absence of any publicity worth speaking of for the British effort, lacking as it does the necessary corporate sponsorship. But since when did big business believe in, say, national sovereignty, or family values?

DavidDP

March 10th, 2010 12:06am Report this comment

Most of the tea partiers are just silly, but as the conference a month or so ago revealed, quite a worrying proportion are nasty bigots. They have no place here.

Rhoda Klapp

March 10th, 2010 9:32am Report this comment

A couple of random observations. People above who are of a left-wing bent certainly do not want the great unwashed talking among themselves, or taking exception to being saved by collectivism. Oh well.

I recently watched a BBC item on the debate in Australia about ETS, climate change and the new opposition to it. Quite balanced for the BBC, maybe that's why it was only on news 24, not terrestrial tv. Anyhow, it closed with a parallel between the aussie protests and the US tea parties.
I wonder how the US tea parties would even be known to the averaghe BBC viewer, as they have been little mentioned on their own news reporting. If I didn't see it on FOX or mentioned on blogs, I'd never have heard of it. Just wondering.

The british tea party thing I've only seen on the coffeee house. Apart from that it might as well have been a secret. Is this how we deal with things which are not part of the narrative? If they don't make the news, they never happened?

(Not that I agree with the brit tea party's tactics or approach, it should not be linked to the tories or Hannan, it needs a front person from outside the bubble and a set of clearer aims, to influence the parties without being a party.

David Preiser

March 12th, 2010 12:58am Report this comment

David Lindsay, your statement that the Tea Party protests were "astroturfing" is a lie. I would advise all other readers not to believe a word you say on this issue. The movement began as independent little groups around the country, eventually inspiring each other, and grew rapidly enough to gain national attention within two months. There are hundreds of independent organizers around the country, as well as a couple of national organizations which have sprung up to ride the wave. But none of this is driven by corporations or any other nefarious characters. You're slandering honest people such as myself here.

The Tea Party movement affected city council votes and local elections around the country long before you ever heard of Scott Brown. You really need to get your information on US issues from somewhere other than the BBC and the HuffingtonPost.

Post comment