Could there be a British Tea Party?

Article by Charlie Thompson. Edited by Ellie Veryard. Additional Research by Emily Spencer.

A read through Richard Hofstadter’s essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics will reveal many bizarre conspiracy theories created by the American far right. In the nineteenth century Nativists raged against the allegedly subversive Bavarian Illuminati (an Enlightenment secret society that believed in secular rationalism) despite no record of their ever existing in America. Freemasons were attacked as a secret aristocracy hell-bent on destroying democracy. More recently water fluoridation was attacked as a sinister plot to rot American brains, and thus deliver them to communism. Conspirators blamed Kennedy’s assassination on communists who became disillusioned with Kennedy after his failure to deliver America to communism on a prior prearranged date. Recently the historian Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker described how the John Birch Society sees Presidents Obama, Eisenhower and Wilson as part of a secret plot to deliver America to totalitarianism at the behest of the Federal Reserve, the Rothschilds and various NGOs.

Today one in five Americans think President Obama is a Muslim (or, as The Onion parodied it, one in five Americans think he is a cactus) and Republican congressmen deny he is even an American. Add a healthy dose of fiscal conservatism (at least until cutting seniors’ or veterans’ healthcare, military spending or road repairs are proposed) and a hatred of anything slightly resembling cultural relativism and you have the motivation for the Tea Party; a campaign group for far-right Republican candidates and against anything remotely connected with President Obama.

There are no organisations in the UK that could today claim the mantle of being the British Tea Party. Despite the outrage over the parliamentary expenses scandal and a visceral hatred of the venal political class, no movement ever gained enough traction to unite populist anti-government feeling. The English Defence League – a far-right group that claims only to defend the UK from sharia law and is organising with Tea Party activists – has solely focused in rabble-rousing in northern cities with little effect.

Yet in the past we British were prepared to convert a wedge issue into a long-running campaign to effect formal political change, as the Tea Party does. The women’s suffrage campaign and the early Labour Party are perhaps closer historic equivalents. Rallies, marches and protests were also common during the 1930s, where fascists, communists and “greenshirts” formed organised extra-parliamentary movements to challenge the political establishment. The less well- known “greenshirts” agitated for an obscure form of monetary reform known as Social Credit, which included technocratic control over the economy achieved by giving ‘experts’ power to grant individuals a regulated amount of credit to put into the economy. The movement in Britain did little more than teach theory at a 1920s offshoot of the Boy Scouts, the Kibbo Kift, but it had a significant amount of support in Canada, and had seats in the Canadian House of Commons until 1979.

British political culture seems more restrained and less activist and populist than our American counterparts. The civil rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan, the Bonus Army, Vietnam Veterans, anti-abortionists and now the Tea Party, to name a few, got out and made their voices heard. Richard Hofstadter implies that the diverse ethnic makeup, which Britain lacks to the same degree, has helped push issues relating to religion, values and morality into the political limelight; an eternal culture war between the Christian Right and everybody else. Today we do have demonstrations and political movements, such as the poll tax riots, the anti-Iraq War movement and the miners’ strikes, but they hardly constituted the sort of organised mass movement that, as the Tea Party seeks to do, seek enough support to become the elected government. Perhaps the closest to such an organised movement to influence formal politics in the UK is the Stop the War Coalition. Need I say more?

The anonymity of the internet is also injecting a worrying amount of Tea Partyesque insanity into informal political debate, as any visitor to ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com or Mailwatch can attest. How the unmoderated and anonymous internet has spawned so much bile has reached the attention of both the media and government. It doesn’t take a deep dig into the BBC’s Have Your Say, the Guardian’s ‘Comments’ section or the plethora of online forums and blogs to find a range of conspiracies and angry rage. The EU, ZaNuLab (an apparently clever play on Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party) and recently tuition fees (an attempt by the government to control knowledge in order to keep themselves in power; is Foucault standard high school reading now?) are often targets.

So if the populist outrage over the expenses scandal during a recession and an unpopular fifth-year government couldn’t excite our desktop ranters off Have Your Say, perhaps nothing can. However, if a person can channel those ideas, make them more mainstream and unleash a torrent of populist anger at the British political establishment – perhaps with the Murdoch press on their side – then Britain might be capable of having a Tea Party after all. If the Suffragettes and the “greenshirts” could turn women’s suffrage and the idea of social credit into varying levels of protest, why not low taxes and xenophobia? I just hope I haven’t given RightwingRighty on Have Your Say any ideas.

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The Greenshirts: A paramilitary movement with the full title “The Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit”, formed by John Hargrave in 1932 as an offshoot of the youth organisation the Kibbo Kift.

The Tea Party: The Tea Party is a populist libertarian political movement in America. Emerging in 2009, the movement echoed the 1773 Boston Tea Party famous for the destruction of British tea over the rights of taxation.

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