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MP Expense Scandal Brings Tea Party Atmosphere to UK
British leaders got taxpayer-funded reimbursements for everything from dog food to mortgages.
This has never happened before: I had nearly completed a piece for Pajamas Media and then realized it was totally out of date within forty-eight hours.
I had been trying to posit that British society is not conducive to the tea party movement that has been sweeping America. First, this is a small nation without recent experience of throwing off a colonial power. Some would argue that the brave defeat of Hitler by the British nation led by Winston Churchill was the ultimate spurning of a conqueror; the American “tea party” campaign is a peacetime social movement and obviously harks back to the overthrow of the colonial mother country.
Until yesterday my analysis of why there are no anti-big-government tea party brigades pitching their tents across the British Isles emanated from my conclusion that football and cricket results are of much more importance to its citizens than are big government and bank bailouts. At the other extreme, violence has peppered the landscape when animal rights protesters have attacked laboratory researchers, anti-poll tax rioters in the West End have caused mayhem, and as reported in a previous article supporters of Palestinians have smashed London’s Starbucks branches and G20 protesters have been beaten by bobbies. There is the Countryside Alliance, a group of lobbyists in favor of fox-hunting and of other genteel preoccupations that have been cruelly (in their eyes) curtailed by the Labour regime.
So, up until mid-May I had decided that there would never be a nationwide tea party movement in the United Kingdom. Inasmuch as I watch the American news each evening starting at 11:30 p.m. London time (Williams, then Couric at 12:30 a.m. and Charlie at 1:35 a.m., followed by O’Reilly, King, Hannity, and Anderson Cooper into the wee hours) I had become acutely aware in May that the tea party movement had definitely not crossed the ocean, and in turn the British news cycle, obsessed with football and a scandal about the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s porn movie collection, had no idea of what was unfolding stateside.
Then came the MP expenses scandal. The calumnies being revealed by the Daily Telegraph newspaper make the now-dismissed misdemeanors by former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens look — literally — like a tea party. They even make former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s shenanigans look — well, like shenanigans.
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Carol Gould is the Philadelphia-born author of Don’t Tread on Me: Anti-Americanism Abroad, Spitfire Girls, and A Room at Camp Pickett, a play about her mother’s experiences as a WAC in World War II; she has just completed films about black GIs and GI babies. Carol has been a panelist on BBC's Any Questions?, hosted by Jonathan Dimbleby, and is a commentator on Sky News, Press TV, the BBC World Service, and Five Live.
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11 Comments
1. Old Soldier:Forget a Teaparty – give us some old fashioned Anglo-Saxon bloodlust.
May 19, 2009 - 6:38 am 2. Gary Ogletree:Old Soldier, it may come to that if Dear Leader suspends the 2012 elections.
May 19, 2009 - 11:47 am 3. Bohemond:Ah, Gary: he won’t suspend them, he’ll just rig them. It’s the Chicago Way.
Ms Gould: let’s hope that in the next couple of years Americans can summon up the righteous anger our Cousins have mustered.
May 19, 2009 - 2:01 pm 4. Kevin:Sounds like a little anarchy in the UK may be in the offering. At least as far as house cleaning goes. Wonder how deep this will end up going? And if the rumors of the Blair family shredder is correct, probably on their fourth one if it’s made in China.
May 19, 2009 - 9:30 pm 5. Houdini:Hey they are just getting the government that they voted for. Do they have an outfit like ACORN in Britain if so maybe they need to abolish it as well as have some of these clowns expelled never to be able to hold a governmental office again.
May 20, 2009 - 6:22 am 6. FrancisT:The speaker has actually announced his resignation and various pols seem to be hoping that this means they can “draw a line under the affair”.
I don’t think this is going to happen and indeed yesterday at my blog – http://www.di2.nu/200905/19.htm – I quoted part of Cromwell’s speech to the Rump Parliament when he got rid of them at musketpoint. I think quite a large chunk of the British population feels the same way I do…
May 20, 2009 - 9:15 am 7. TomTom:allegedly not informing the House that opposition MP Damian Green’s house was raided by police without a warrant.
NO! That his Parliamentary and Constituency Offices were raided and correspondence and computers seized AND the Representative was arrested, his fingerprints and DNA taken and he was incarcerated in police custody for hours. That Police raided Parliament without a warrant (because they would not have been granted one)
May 22, 2009 - 9:32 pm 8. Mary Jackson:Compared with, say, Italy, let alone Middle Eastern or African countries, British MPs are squeaky clean. But so what? In those countries everyone’s on the fiddle and nobody pays tax if they can help it. In Britain, by contrast, anyone who fiddles their tax by as much as the cost of a sandwich faces fines and even imprisonment. Also, we are one of the highest taxed people in the world.
We taxpayers earn our money honestly, and pay everything we owe. To see it stolen and squandered by MPs – and all parties are equally to blame – is outrageous. No wonder we’re furious and cynical to boot.
May 23, 2009 - 5:59 am 9. peter james:Mr Blair may well have had his records shredded to avoid any discomfort, but there must be other bits of paper – bank statements,tax returns to the Revenue, hard disks and so on?
May 23, 2009 - 10:29 am 10. Carol Gould:the Telegraph has changed our political culture for the better, and forever, for which our eternal gratitude, but where’s Blair? We seek him hair, we seek him thair, but whair’s Blair?
Since writing this article I can confirm Francis T’s message that the Speaker of the House has announed he will step down on 21 June.
May 24, 2009 - 4:42 pm 11. M Henson:I think what is interesting about this continuing story is that the Tory ‘Daily Telegraph’ exposed the wrongdoing but the irony of it all is that the Tories are emerging as the worst offenders. Did the Telegraph really want to bring down so many Tories ? An ‘own goal…’
Hey bothers,
May 25, 2009 - 8:38 pmDon’t you all have a Monarchy? Where does the Queen stand on all this? Has she not the power of oversight when it comes to matters such as these? IF not; then what is the Monarchy good for?