By Daniel Hannan
When he lays into the 'Tory Tea Party tendency', I'm guessing that Chris Huhne means me. I am, as far as I know, the only elected Conservative actually to have organised a Tea Party – that is, an anti-tax rally (see here). Not that the Environment Secretary seems to have our views about tax in mind. Rather, he is using 'Tea Partiers' in the sense that most British Lefties do, to mean 'horrid people'. The Environment Secretary usually claims that his opponents are like Nazis. This time, though, he's taking off the gloves. Never mind Adolf Hitler; these Right-wing Tories are like… like… Sarah Palin!
The Tea Party, perhaps more than any other contemporary movement, brings out the 'Yeah, but what they're really saying…' tendency. The 'tea' stands for 'Taxed Enough Already' but, if you relied on the BBC and the Guardian for your information, you might not know it. Many Lefties pretend – or perhaps have genuinely convinced themselves – that the Tea Party is clandestinely protesting against immigration or abortion or the fact of having a mixed race president; anything, in fact, other than what it actually says it's against, viz big government. The existence of a popular and spontaneous anti-tax movement has unsettled the Establishment. They'd much rather deal with a stupid and authoritarian Right than with a libertarian one. Hence the almost desperate insistence that the Tea Partiers have some secret agenda (see, for example, this unintentionally hilarious Grauniad piece).
Despite having been told in no uncertain terms what to think, most Americans remain stubbornly of the view that the Tea Party's central contention is moderate. Politicians are taxing, spending and borrowing too much. The federal government is 30 per cent bigger than it was when the financial crisis hit. As recently as the 2008 election, both US parties would have regarded current expenditure levels as unacceptable. You could, in other words, have voted Democrat in 2008 (or, for that matter, Labour in 2005) thinking that spending ought to increase a little, and still be horrified by what has happened.
My tea party was held in what is arguably the most Left-wing constituency in the country: Brighton Pavilion. Yet it was packed out. You don't have to be on the Right to think that present debt levels are unsustainable; you simply have to be able to understand these graphs.
In many ways, our situation is worse than that the Americans'. Our overall tax level is far higher and, unlike the cousins, we can legitimately raise the cry of the original 1773 Boston mutineers: 'No taxation without representation'. Whereas taxes in the US are these days levied only by elected legislators, ours come increasingly from Brussels.
Why, then, has the Tea Party not properly crossed the Atlantic? For a rather boring yet obvious reason: we have no open primaries. The Tea Party was focused on returning candidates who shared its values – an aim in which it was more successful than most commentators had believed possible. In Britain, however, as in most democracies, voters are presented with candidates handed down by the main parties.
It would be quite wrong to infer an enthusiasm for tax levels from the lack of protest. That would be to confuse fatalism with consent, sufferance with agreement. Nor should Huhne read to much into those opinion polls which ask 'Would you be happy to pay more tax in return for better public services?' In the current climate, people hear that question as 'Are you a decent human being or a selfish bastard?' The only meaningful opinion poll question is the one which asks, 'Is the level of tax you are currently paying too low, about right, or too high?'
If you think it's too high, you don't have anyone to vote for at the moment. Only when there is a proper choice will we be able to discover who the country regards as extreme.
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