Leader of the Tea Party

The Guardian’s political editor, Michael White, has been writing about the possibility of there being a British version of the American’s Tea Party. He says:

“Potential leaders? Motormouth red-top columnists such as Jon Gaunt, Rod Liddle and Richard Littlejohn are routinely touted……..”

Are we? Excellent. I think I’d make a wonderful leader of a British Tea Party. As someone who believes in high taxation and the redistribution of wealth, increased state investment in industry, state control of our railways and public utilities, a higher minimum wage and an element of protectionism for our industries and a limit on the supposed free movement of labour, I think I am exactly the man for the job. I suppose my membership of the Labour Party might help attract people who wouldn’t normally join such a party too.

That’s the trouble with these bien pensant guardianista monkeys. If Vladimir Lenin had pointed out that he thought widescale immigration wasn’t altogether an unalloyed benefit to the country, the likes of Michael White would have had him marked down as a free market right winger. Not absolutely sure that The Sunday Times is a red top, either, still less this place.

My suspicion is that the currents of public opinion run a little differently over here and that we’ve never, for better or worse, been possessed of the profound anti-statist mentality which is intrinsic to the American free market right. And as White later concedes, we have UKIP already……