Brits Catching Tea Party Fever

Posted by NosferatusCoffin | February 26th, 2010

Being England and all, it should be the Afternoon Tea Party.

In any case, good to see that the disaffection with the usual budget busting, irresponsible Leftist policy is starting to bubble up from under the surface even in Old Blighty.

From Daniel Hannan’s Telegraph Blog – Hat Tip: ASPF)

The inaugural British Tea Party will take place on Saturday in my home town of Brighton, and I’ll be speaking. Do try to come: here are the details.

Labour has raised more than a trillion pounds in additional taxation since 1997. Yet, unbelievably, Gordon Brown has still managed to run up a deficit of 12.6 per cent of GDP (Greece’s is 12.7 per cent). A far lower level of taxation brought Americans out in spontaneous protest last year.

If you happen to be coming to the Conservative Spring Conference, do please pop in: the Tea Party is five minutes’ walk from the conference venue. It is, however, outside the security zone, and anyone is welcome to come. Oh, and this being England, we’ll be serving actual, you know, tea. I hope to see some of this blog’s readers there.

Comments seem rather divided. However, here is one that could have been written by one of Pelosi’s 14 year old interns:

LOL! I expect about 5 people will turn up – all the usual swivel-eyed, frothing Europhobes, public sector-hating Thatcherites.

The deficit is under control. Why do you persist in talking down our economy, thereby undermining confidence?

Here is a sample of the text from a call to action from Hannan.

Simon Jenkins raises a question that has been nagging at me for some time. Why is there no British Tea Party?

Where are the crowds of revenue slaves flocking to London to demand redress for the squandering of their money? Marginal tax is rising to 50%, VAT to 17.5% and state spending towards half the national product. The Treasury has lost control of public finance. So why no furious blue-rinses, bail-out haters, bonus-bleaters and embittered VAT victims storming Parliament?

Yeah: why? Some of my US readers believe that anti-tax rebellions are an American speciality, but we’ve had plenty of them in this country, from the Poll Tax Riots of 1381 (the Peasants’ Revolt) to the Poll Tax Riots of 1990. The doctrines that inspired the Boston mutineers – above all, the idea that taxes should not be levied without parliamentary process – were borrowed from English political theory.

Indeed, as Hugh Brogan drily observed in his History of the United States, the taxpayers’ revolt which sparked the American Revolution began on this side of the Atlantic: the Seven Years War had pushed taxes up to 25 shillings a year for the average Englishman as against sixpence for the average colonist, and MPs were determined to export part of that cost to North America.

More power to you, Mr. Hannan. The Dems are absolutely doomed here in 2010. Hopefully we can say the same about Labour soon enough.