The idea of a British Tea Party is being mooted again. Jeremy Clarkson could be its patron saint
Historian-turned-Labour MP Tristram Hunt can still claim the best one-liner explaining what the Tea Party is all about. It's the same in 2011 as it was in 1776 when a Boston mob was incited to throw a cargo of tea into the city's harbour: a bunch of rich folk getting poor folk to help them avoid paying their fair share of tax. Nowadays they don't even have to get their feet wet. It's all done on junk TV.
Never mind, with Sarah Palin for a cheerleader, the modern Tea Party remains as irony-free a zone as it was when Sam Adams and John Hancock were payrolling Boston mobs, Tripoli-style. What's more, the copycat UK media is trying to volunteer other people to start a British version.
A year ago "Desperate Dan" Hannan, the libertarian Conservative MEP, announced "the inaugural British Tea Party" at the Tory spring conference. There was another attempt at the October conference in Brum. A third was reported in Boston (geddit?), Lincs. But er, that's it. Barely enough tea bags used to block a single drain.
Potential leaders? Motormouth red-top columnists such as Jon Gaunt, Rod Liddle and Richard Littlejohn are routinely touted, with Jeremy Clarkson as their non-executive patron saint. But, like Boston merchant Adams, they're too rich and smart for that. So is Boris Johnson, occasionally promoted as the British Berlusconi: rogue-ish, lovable, priapic.
The English Defence League is sometimes dubbed the nearest thing we have to the Tea Party's bewildered cry of pain. The Freedom Association gingerly dips its toe in tea. More plausibly, the label is also stuck on Ukip. But, let's be frank: its leader, Nigel Farage MEP lacks the sassy good looks of a Palin or Christine O'Donnell, the TP witch-woman who lost Delaware.
The whole process starts again next month when the Tax payers Alliance joins forces with serial attention-seekers such as Toby Young and Annabelle Fuller, a former Farage aide, to stage a Rally Against Debt in reply to the TUC's March for the Alternative last month.
It promises to be a peaceful affair, though presumably the breakaway Blue Bloc faction (ex-rowdies from Oxford's Bullingdon Club perhaps?) will attack Fortnum & Mason's soup kitchen and the Piccadilly branch of the Co-op, before setting fire to bicycles in Pall Mall and monstering pensioners caught making claims on the NHS. Is Libya's Moussa Koussa free? He has the skillset.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/05/anyone-for-british-tea-party
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