British Tea Party: discontent is not enough
Posted on Wednesday 27 October, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party, The right
ANGRY middle-aged white blokes with a grudge against politicians of all stripes, measured on a per capita basis, must surely make up a similar proportion of the population of this country as the comparative demographic does in the States.
Yet somehow rightwing activists over here have not been able to tap into the spleen and launch a mass populist grassroots movement on the lines of the one that has emerged with frightening rapidity in the US.
It’s not as if the wingnuts haven’t tried. Twice this year already – once in February and once in September – the birth of the British Tea Party has been proclaimed. Has anyone out there in the real world even noticed?
But as a former Trotskyist, I could have told them for nothing that the tricky bit is not setting yourself up as a party by self-declaration, but actually developing an organisation that has some palpable impact in any arena wider than a room above a pub.
Sure, the combustible raw material is all there. There are many people plainly disenchanted with what is offer from the political mainstream. The far left would love to reach them, but they are impervious to the appeal of theoretically based creeds.
They are not going to read Marx, Lenin or Trotsky and neither are they going to gen up on Nozick, Rothbard and Hayek. Anything that requires the adoption of a coherent weltanschauung is out for starters.
In so far as they constitute themselves as a political force, they will swing behind whoever can articulate their prejudices in a manner that keeps intellectual effort to a minimum.
They are not racists, you understand. But you’ve got to admit that Labour let in too many bleedin’ immigrants, right? And they all know a family with eight kids that is just taking the piss from the welfare state.
Perhaps the crucial difference is that the Conservative Party’s flirtation with a US-style primary system has been limited to asking the punters to choose from a list of pre-approved candidates, with our homegrown equivalents of Christine O’Donnell and Rand Paul not allowed to make it to the starting block.
The system militates against the chances of doing a Delaware in Dorset, so the chances of flakey erstwhile witches opposed to masturbation securing a major party nomination are limited.
But ultimately, I am not sure what Daniel Hannan and Simon Heffer are griping about to begin with. Mutatis mutandis, the actually existing Tories seem to be filling the gap in the market quite nicely, thank you.
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Seems to me the Tea Party are pretty much already in power over here…public spending = bad, taxes = bad, government = bad etc etc…
If I were wanting to be in a British Tea Party, I’d be filling out my Conservative/LibDem application form right now.
“Yet somehow rightwing activists over here have not been able to tap into the spleen and launch a mass populist grassroots movement on the lines of the one that has emerged with frightening rapidity in the US.”
Errm, see above Dave. You’re assuming that the TP phenomenon is a genuine ‘grass roots’ style, movement and not just a handy political gimmick for the arch-manipulators in the Republican Party to use to take the wind out of the sails of the newly-elected Democrat in the White House. They can shut down the TP as soon as they need to, which is as soon as Palin or another moron looks like causing a genuine problem in the primaries next year. That’s why all the TP candidates are so OBVIOUSLY flawed. It makes them easier to do in. In the meantime they can just let them cause havoc for Obama.
“opposed to masturbation”
How do our small staters propose policing that? By offering free hand jobs to wankers?
Yet somehow rightwing activists over here have not been able to tap into the spleen and launch a mass populist grassroots movement on the lines of the one that has emerged with frightening rapidity in the US.
That’s because angry middle aged white blokes tend to be left leaning, utter lumpens apart.
One notes that leftwing activists have managed to tap into our collective spleen and launch a (staggeringly successful) mass populist grassroots movement in the past – that was before the highest aspiration of the vanguard was an op-ed sinecure in the Guardian mind.
Agree with Lawrence above.The Tp’s prejudices= anti anything that does not maintain houseprices is pretty well over-fulfilled here anyway with the grovelling pandering from all three parties.The UK left still has n’t clued into the changed class structure in the Uk which makes homeowners the kingmakers.Nor to the fact that the demands of the over-mortgaged masses run the economy.We need somebody like NY’s Jimmy McMillan and his “The rents too damn high.”
I think UKIP is the best candidate for the tea Party UK franchise …
The English working class are probably the best T PARTY. THEY KEEP VOTING IN TOFFS THAT SCREW THEM. It may be something the poor English have inherited or the socialist are incompetent with their arguments.
@JG
The British ruling class cut the middle and “aspirant” working-class into their racket years ago.Good of them.The deal is you buy a house and they make sure it becomes an investment which guarantees an untaxed capital gain before you retire ,whereupon you can start using the place as a source of income.People used to say and long to say again “My house made more than I did last year”.They stopped identifying work as the sole source of income years ago.The job for the left is surely to make people see work as productive instead of hankering after the profits of property ownership like the upper classes and landed gentry.Unfortunately too many lefties believe you can from the same money supply have high wages and high house prices: you can’t.
It’s about that ‘Radio Station’ we forgot to target.
When was the last time you actually heard so many of the points discussed here aired in any primetime media. When was the last time any of us watched any history blurb that covered working class achievement over the past 200 years. Comprehensive history? Mentioning the millions and not just bloody Churchill.
They do know what they are doing, make no mistake.
Laughingly calling the BBC leftwing and treating it like a pariah is just posturing. Cameron needs it like a singer needs a microphone. For now.
People think there is no alternative because they have not been allowed to listen to one. Simple as that.
Radio Mast as it happen’s near me. Here goes.
DBC Reed. Maybe the ruling class got it right by inviting the others to share and feed of the crumbs. Were the others willing participants or just after the crumbs. Maybe the others want to be the ruling class.
In laughing at the yanks it would be easy to miss something that seems to be happening in the UK. It’s more than ANGRY middle-aged white blokes with a grudge against politicians of all stripes, it’s almost a total disgust by the public of politicians.
Here, more so than in the States, the politicians are regarded as self-serving careerists. I’ve been listening to the BBC’s adaption of the latest Chris Mullin’s offerings. Not only do you lose respect for the obvious line-up of Blair, Brown, Miliband D., Straw, Hoon and so on, but you lose it also for Mullin himself who continued the play the game.
Until the last couple of years I can’t remember hearing the phrase ‘the political class’ before. Now it’s the enemy and it crosses all the major and minor political parties. That’s why there seems to be no honeymoon* for the coalition, just a weary acceptance by many that we shouldn’t expect anything better.
Maybe one day someone will be able to advantage from this anti-politician feeling, for better or worse.
*I’m taking the lack of coalition honeymoon from the audience of BBC’s Question Time where the government seems unable to generate any support.
aren’t the EDL the Tea Party equivalent in Britain – both motivated by rabid Islamophobia?
Walpole. What is islamaphobia?
@JG
The homeowner bloc is pretty much the ruling class.There is an Inner Party Of Tories and capitalists who give the lower classes capital gains in house prices and in return make them accept low wages but the rabble controls the three major political parties (in England!)and has its insane beliefs in something for nothing(unearned capital gains in their houses) confirmed by the press,some of which like the disgrace papers the Mail and Express
do nothing but propound House price rises good;wage rises bad.
Nice one Les Abbey, maybe we could call our total distrust and disgust of all Westminter politicians, ‘Class War’. Now where could that lead if we were allowed to utter it?
Sorry, I forgot, Tony Blair abolished class. Just like his ‘Uncle Joe’. New Labour is pure State Stalinist Capitalism. They learned their lessons well.
Hope to god they do not resort to the same methods.
Not looking good is it?
Now about this Socialist Revoluton…….
@ Martin
I wish there was a way we could time travel into two futures five years from now where in one the BBC remains, and in another there is no BBC. Unfortunately there isn’t a way.
Instead, you’re going to have to look at the sickening state of the US media – which has largely created the “Tea Party Phenomenon” as what the UK could look like if the “evil” beeb were to vanish.
BBC is not perfect. It is attacked by pretty much every government in power and every political party for some sort of “bias”. But to slag it off without for one second thinking about what the landscape would look like without it is extraordinarily shortsighted.
Lawrence
There is one word to shut up critics of the BBC: Murdoch.
It may not have got to Britain yet, but it has got to Israel, unsurprisingly I suppose. From Ha’aretz:
“Likud activists who oppose the settlement freeze have set up a protest movement against the peace process and the continued construction moratorium in the West Bank. The group is modeled after the far-right conservative Tea Party movement in the United States.
The Israeli group will hold a rally Sunday at the Zionist Organization of America House in Tel Aviv, under the banner “Saying No to Obama,” where they plan to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy and the American pressure on Israel to renew the settlement construction freeze.”
pharisee. If people in Israel need houses then why not build them where required.
Lawrence, just a bit confused here. As ever if all we have is the written word.
Scrambled to find my criticism of the BBC? I entirely agree with you Lawrence. So much of the rest is a nightmare. Problem is the BBC has been a valued organ of the State. A state we use to own a bit more of and feel a part of.
What can it do when the likes of Tesco and Murdoch take over the State? As they have done.
Cameron still needs it as a conduit for his lies. Bloody good historical cover. Then slashes it’s budget to allow Murdoch to march right over it.
Anybody else here feel they are living in Germany in 32. Just what the hell is round the corner. I was told at school it could never happen again.
Tell me it is so.