We can’t have a Tea Party - but we could take over the Lib-Dems!

When a right-winger is confronted, as I was this morning, by headlines telling them that a Conservative Prime Minister has agreed to cave in to the ECHR by giving prisoners the vote, and has welcomed the possibility of a cheese-eating surrender monkey giving orders to the SAS, one’s thoughts tend to drift to the other side of the Atlantic, where the Tea Party movement could be about to have a seismic impact on the US Mid-Term elections. 

I’m baffled as to why anyone is baffled by the rapid rise of the Tea Party. The BBC is particularly mystified: having finally realized that ignoring or sneering at this seeming collection of unsophisticated, lard-arsed, Bible-thumping hayseeds won’t actually make them go away, they sent out their pet right-winger Andrew Neil to do a documentary about them. It aired last night on BBC2 and it was absolutely and utterly unilluminating. 

The Tea Party is a loose agglomeration of right-wing individuals and groups who no longer feel that any of the mainstream parties represents their opinions, and that, in fact, all of the mainstream parties are positively acting against their best interests and that of the US as a whole. Barry Obama’s Democrats are big-spending, Big State socialists seeking to replace rugged individualism and standing on your own two feet and facing the consequences of your actions  with an expensive European fiscal and social model which takes money from the law-abiding and self-sufficient in order to reward the feckless and the useless. The Republicans are centrists intent on sucking up to Big Business and getting into bed with Barry when they fancy a roll in the pork-barrel. Besides, the GOP now supports many of the liberal social policies most God-fearing Middle Americans despise. 

Many Tea Party members are Christians. They aren’t politically sophisticated. The vast majority are white, and some of them aren’t that keen on positive discrimination on behalf of Muslims or blacks. Most of them want to retain the right to own guns. 

The attachment to Christianity and gun ownership were the only things that seemed to worry Andy (who had gone a very strange colour – Scots really should keep out of the sun). The thing he should have been asking, of course, is could it happen here?

When no political party speaks to your instincts, beliefs or prejudices, you can take the standard approach - shrug your shoulders and become an internal exile. Or you form your own political party and duke it out with the Big Boys, without any real chance of being elected, but hoping that one of the main parties may bend some of its policies to your will to stop voters deserting for an alternative candidate (e.g. the Greens, UKIP, and the BNP - essentially one-issue parties with a limited chance of national success.) Or you infiltrate one of the big parties and ensure that candidates sympathetic to your cause are chosen to fight elections (e.g. the numerous UK-based Marxist and Trotskyist groups who infiltrated the Labour Party during the 1970s and 1980s and, currently,  US Tea Party supporters who are doing the same to the Republican Party).

For most Britons of a conservative or right-wing disposition, passive grumbling is, of course, the preferred option: we all like a good moan. Because of the success of the 80-year old Marxist trick of rebranding racist Fascist parties as Far Right rather than Far Left (which is, of course, what they really are), we mistakenly accept that there are already two parties to the right of the Conservatives – the BNP, who are, frankly, a brutish, left-wing shower, and UKIP, which is dead right about Europe, but can’t seem to gain any sustainable mainstream traction, and doesn’t seem to have affected Tory policies in any meaningful way (but might have denied them an outright majority at the last election). Besides, the leadership of both parties is distinctly unenthralling. A new right-of-centre party just feels like a non-starter.

As for infiltrating the Tories – is there really any point? Apart from the brief, glorious reign of Queen Margaret, the Conservative Party has proved, again and again, that it doesn’t much care which policies it implements as long as it’s in power. And now it has adopted the Mandelsonian doctrine that the only way to gain power in Britain is to occupy the soft, vacillating, constantly shifting, principle-free centre ground where policies are chosen on the basis of whether they’ll “play”, rather than on whether they’re ideologically sound or whether they appeal to a party’s core voters. Besides, so much of our policy-making is constrained by our European masters that it sometimes appears there’s not that much to be decided domestically. Just as Europe constrains what a British government can choose to do, the Conservative Party now ruthlessly circumscribes what its associations are allowed to get up to: local associations are already full of old-fashioned, right-wing Tories – but pressure often prevents them choosing the candidates they want. 

The other problem facing  right-wingers in the UK is the lack of a suitable figure to galvanise us. The Americans have TV demagogue Glenn Beck, who has used his position as a Fox News commentator to lend the Tea Party movement verve and direction. And, of course, we have no equivalent of Sarah Palin, a good-looking screech-voiced woman of the people only too willing to harness the frustration of ordinary Americans to further her own boundless ambition. I just don’t see Jeremy Clarkson or Anne Widdecombe being up for it!

So, if you’re a right-winger over here, you’re stuffed. But I have a bold suggestion for those of us who feel politically unrepresented: why not infiltrate the Lib-Dems? In five years’ time, their support will be at rock bottom, their main leaders will have joined the left-of-centre collaborationist Tories or hooked up with Ed Miliband’s socialist comedy troupe. Yet, the Lib-Dems will still be a proper, functioning national political party, complete with a local and general election-fighting infrastructure and a long tradition of being “the third party”. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time for us right wingers to stage a coup and take it back to its free market roots – after all, Tony Benn was always accusing Mrs. T of being an old-style Manchester Liberal rather than a Tory. Now that the “progressivist” tag is becoming widespread, we could even recapture the term “Liberal”.

The Lib-Dems will be ripe for the plucking by 2015, I’d say.