The London Tea Party
There’s sometimes a note of condescension in commentary about American politics. It comes from a silent assumption that the crazier elements of public life in our breakaway colony – Fox News, Quran burning, the Ground Zero mosque non-story – could never happen here: that even British conservatives are too level headed to let themselves be infiltrated by sinister madness in the way that the Republican Party has.
Well, the Tea Party, they coming to your town:
Lobbyists behind the rightwing Tea Party group in the US will arrive in London today to spread their message of low taxes and small government at an event organised by the UK’s controversial Taxpayers’ Alliance.
Today’s conference will be attended by Americans who have lobbied in the US to overturn Barack Obama’s healthcare plan and maintain tax breaks for the rich. Several of the groups have close links to the billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, prominent tormentors of the Obama administration.
US groups sponsoring the event include the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which came to prominence in the 1970s as Ronald Reagan’s favourite thinktank. The Kochs, whose private company owns oil rigs and pipelines in the US, founded the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and have spent tens of millions of dollars supporting the Cato Institute. They also channel funds into causes through their business empire and one Koch-owned firm, Flint Hills Resources, has donated $1m (£650,000) to the campaign against California’s anti-global warning proposition being voted on in November.
The Cato Institute, which promotes its views on Fox News and other rightwing media, is one of the Tea Party’s main backers.
Prominent Tory supporters are also backing the conference. Stanley Kalms, the former chairman of Dixons, is a key sponsor of the event along with investment banker Howard Flight. Flight was a Tory MP and frontbench Treasury spokesman before David Cameron became leader, while Kalms was Tory treasurer and one of its main backers.
The European Resource Bank conference, also billed as the Taxpayers’ Conference and Free Market Roadshow, which will be held at various venues in the capital and includes a dinner at the Guildhall, is a spinoff from the American Resource Bank conference.
The Guardian piece barely dents the iceberg of the Tea Party, but its aggressive freemarket ideology and its billionaire financing have been covered extensively by the NYT (it’s also worth mentioning that Fox News, which led the Ground Zero mosque attack, is part financed by Saudi royalty) and its bigotry and conspiracism has been chronicled by teams of weary liberal-left stateside bloggers.
A recent Tea Party rally in Washington drew praise from a blogger on the influential ConservativeHome site recently. This was a huge demo organised by Glenn Beck, a Fox News wingnut with a history of racist jocularity, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s march for jobs and freedom. The author, Donal Blaney, described the march as a ‘remarkable gathering of conservatives, independents, monotheists and patriots… Beck’s efforts this weekend cannot simply be ignored, derided or sneered at by bien pensant liberals and self-appointed elites.’
It’s no surprise that the rally turned his dials. Blaney heads the Young Briton’s Foundation, an extreme Tory affiliate or, in his own words, ‘conservative madrassa’, and advocates waterboarding, climate change denial and the abolition of the NHS.
All this is my way of arguing that there is a Palinite tendency creeping into UK mainstream rightwing politics. You see the same malevolent populism in our debates on immigration as in US debates over healthcare. And I’m not sure after the London event that anyone outside it will seriously be able to claim that the Taxpayers’ Alliance is an apolitical watchdog devoted to eliminating waste in the public sector and cutting the deficit (which are both good, legitimate, nonpartisan ambitions). Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant who recently published a report for the TUC on the billions lost to the UK through tax avoidance, gets it about right:
It’s clear the Taxpayers’ Alliance receives a huge amount of support from the US, where there is serious money behind the lobbying for low taxes. The conference is billed as a debate among European thinktanks, but it is a barely disguised front for the most aggressive lobby tactics championed on the other side of the Atlantic.
It regularly grabs slots on the BBC and other media to argue that taxpayers are hard done by. But the freedoms it wants is freedom from taxes for a tiny minority of wealthy people.
A senior TPA figure, Susie Squire, has now become a special adviser to Iain Duncan Smith.
Couldn’t happen here?
Mike Killingworth said,
September 8, 2010 at 7:48 pm
The political cultures are very different.
I remember, back in the late 1980s, sitting in a pub garden in southern California, and being asked by some liberal Americans what I thought the matter with their country was. I pointed west and said “it’s twenty miles over there” – meaning the Pacific Ocean, and the fact that there was no more frontier. Almost all American communities were originally set up as millenarian experiments of one sort or another, typically in the belief that God likes certain rules & rituals to the exclusion of all others. There is nothing like that in English (or European) history.
Religion apart, the concept of the frontier is one of an anarchistic space in which people take responsibility for their own personal security, rather than delegating it to the State. In the HBO series “Deadwood” Wild Bill Hickok is killed by a bullet in the back of the head, fired by a mentally ill man who would sooner die notoriously than live anonymously. To the American libertarian, Hickok got what he deserved – he had killed a man for which he stood trial and was acquitted – as many thought, according to Wikipedia, wrongly. This approach is as alien to our culture as a Japanese Tea Ceremony, for all that tea is a national British drink.
I suspect that the Taxpayers’ Alliance are in danger of parodying themselves. Does James Murdoch think there is a market for Fox (as opposed to Sky) in the UK? I haven’t heard him say so.
Laban said,
September 8, 2010 at 8:49 pm
I am a tribune of the people.
You are a malevolent populist.
Oscar Lomax said,
September 8, 2010 at 10:56 pm
and you are just a plain old sheep farming nazi so fuck off.
Tom said,
September 8, 2010 at 11:07 pm
“Almost all American communities were originally set up as millenarian experiments of one sort or another, typically in the belief that God likes certain rules & rituals to the exclusion of all others. ”
You clearly know next to nothing of American history if you believe this to be true. Do you even know what millenarian means? Or is this another Pseud’s Corner prattle like this:
“I remember, back in the late 1980s, sitting in a pub garden in southern California, and being asked by some liberal Americans what I thought the matter with their country was. I pointed west and said “it’s twenty miles over there” – meaning the Pacific Ocean, and the fact that there was no more frontier. “
Tea Party bald auch in Britannien? « Entdinglichung said,
September 9, 2010 at 8:16 am
[...] Europa so mit der britischen Taxpayers’ Alliance interessiert zu sein, wie der Guardian und Shiraz Socialist berichten … ob der Laden auch an Kontakten mit einer „Sarrazin-Bewegung“ in der [...]
Carl P said,
September 9, 2010 at 10:02 am
there is something interesting here in that Julian Sanchez, who works for Cato Institute, not long ago reappropriated the word “epistemic closure” to refer to a saturation of US conservative thought by shock jocks and the like. Well, Cato Institute is a backer of the tea party movement in this country, and look who organised the demo there – none other than Glenn Beck, a shock jock. Such tension.
Epistemic closure and Julian Sanchez « Though Cowards Flinch said,
September 9, 2010 at 11:00 am
[...] Shiraz Socialist blog has posted yesterday saying that the Taxpayer’s Alliance have organised an event, funded by US lobbyists, which [...]
shug said,
September 9, 2010 at 11:13 am
How do you like your tea,one lump or two.As it comes,thank you.
socialrepublican said,
September 9, 2010 at 11:24 am
I can’t see it sticking.
The American paradigm of “everyone’s middle class” from Construction workers who haven’t worked in three years to CEOs doesn’t fly over here. Consider the mirth at Davey C’s comments on his class status
Secondly, there is no rural middle class worth mentioning in the old country. The countryside alliance could hardly look to small government considering its’ dependency on CAP.
Thirdly, the cultural and knowledge division between the left and right is nowhere near as wide as in the state, so media and political narratives still have to somewhat consensual. In the states, a con need never pollute their brain with another heretical opinion as can the liberal.
Carl P said,
September 9, 2010 at 1:25 pm
a little problem chaps – I’ve spoken to Julian Sanchez, it turns out that rather than funding tea party activities, Cato were just going here: http://www.europeanresourcebank.com/
Looks like this article is wrong.
Dwayne Hendricks said,
December 22, 2010 at 6:36 pm
As a conservative American living in liberal California, and worse, socialist Santa Monica, I’d love to fill you in on how wrong you are about our present core society, but the sad truth is I no longer have the passion to do so. America as the world knows it (or more accurately, had known it), is rapidly fading into the past. We are entering a new era of ordinary, not unlike much of Europe, and the concept of American Exceptionalism is nearly dead. Like most Americans, despite what you may have been taught, I love other races (I’m mixed) and respect other religions, but when the demographic makeup of the country deviates significantly from the people who founded it (mainly Judeo-Christan Europeans in America’s case), it should not be surprising when a dramatic, rapid change occurs. English is no longer the dominant language in my area; the liberals here are so twisted they will side with the most contrarian groups out there to form a majority. Don’t be surprised when Spanish becomes the official language in a few years, quickly followed by Mandarin once we finally implode.