Tea parties began here
Sir: Daniel McCarthy is right that the tea party is ‘a symbol of colonial rebellion’ (‘The trouble with tea parties’, 10 April). But where does he suppose the rebels drew their inspiration from? The American patriots of 1773 didn’t see themselves as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. In their minds, all they were asking for was what they had always assumed to be their birthright as freeborn Englishmen.
Part of that birthright was liberty from unjust, arbitrary or punitive taxation. The proposition that taxes ought not to be levied except by elected representatives would have been every bit as popular in contemporary Great Britain as in the thirteen colonies. The American Revolution was inspired by British political philosophy and — more to the point — by British political practice. American patriots saw themselves as part of a continuing British tradition, stretching back through the Glorious Revolution, back through the agitations of Pym and Hampden, back even through the Great Charter to the folkright of Anglo-Saxon common law.
Naturally enough, once the fighting started, rebel leaders began to use nationalist arguments, and subsequent historians in the US have tended to play these up. But a majority of the British population sympathised with the grievances of the colonists, as did the greatest British parliamentarians of the age. ‘I rejoice that America has resisted,’ proclaimed William Pitt the Elder, setting out the case against the Stamp Act in 1766. ‘Three million people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest [of us].’ ‘Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American Empire,’ said Edmund Burke in 1775, taking up the cause of no taxation without representation. ‘English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.’ In launching a British tea party movement, I aim to repatriate our revolution.
Daniel Hannan
By email
Bad leader
Sir: when I turned to your editorial (‘The case for Cameron’, 10 April) I expected to read a nuanced piece supporting the Conservatives, not a relentlessly one-sided paean to Mr Cameron. I expected to see a mainly critical but nonetheless balanced appraisal of the present government and its achievements, not a single paragraph of curt dismissal. I expected to see carefully phrased reservations about current Conservative policy, not a single paragraph of timorous dissent about the ‘timing’ of the implementation of future Tory policies. I had never thought of the Spectator as being slavish and uncritical towards anything or anyone, but on this occasion it was just that.
John Hyder-Wilson
Worthing, West Sussex
Sir: Although I agree with your editorial that the benefits system must be changed to make those in work better off than those on welfare, there is another factor which you ignore. Employers will always want to pay their workers as little as possible, and while there is an endless supply of immigrants with lower overheads than British workers and able to undercut them, most new jobs will go to the former. Some system of encouraging employers to hire British workers should be considered by the next government.
Cheryl Hounslow
Middlesex
Labour’s loss?
Sir: James Forsyth (Politics, 10 April) claims that in the event that the conservatives win the election, an argument will break out as to whether tax cuts ‘won it’ or whether victory was the result of ‘abandoning old Tory tunes’. If the Tories win (and it is still if), I suggest that a major part of the reason will have been that Labour dumped Tony Blair, who was the most prodigiously gifted vote winner ever. Despite manifest sleaze, incompetence, cash for honours and the Iraq war, no opponent was ever able to land a glove on him. If the Tories win, it will be to a marked extent Labour wot lost it.
Tom Benyon
Bladon, Oxon
Suffering in silence
Sir: I agree that John McEntee (‘A very Catholic education’, 10 April) was lucky to have been groped, rather than thrashed. I was at a Christian Brothers school in Staffordshire in the 1950s. In five years there I never saw or heard of any furtive touching-up by the staff, but being endlessly belted for minor errors was sufficient abuse. Even among those who have remained good Catholics, and even allowing for the nostalgic glow which suffuses the past as one grows older, it is hard to find anyone who endured the Brothers in youth who now has a good word to say for them. Those most to blame were ecclesiastical authorities and parents who knew perfectly well what was going on but, afraid to seem disloyal to the Church, said nothing. The irony is that generations of brutality have only become clear when many of the religious orders that perpetuated it are almost extinct.
M.G. Sherlock
Colwyn Bay, North Wales
Ghostly insertion
Sir: I fear that Lady Mary Grey does not want us to know where she is buried, despite my best efforts (‘A Tudor mystery unravels’, 10 April). It is surely her ghostly hand that is responsible for the insertion of the phrase, ‘at Chequers’ in a concluding paragraph describing her burial at Westminster Abbey.
Leanda de Lisle
By email
History of china
Sir: If, as Paul Johnson asserts (A question of art, 10 April), the Victoria and Albert Museum has numerous good examples of hard paste porcelain from the early 16th century, that demonstrates Asian cultural superiority — it took almost two centuries longer for Europeans to work out how to make it. As late as 1830, my Maunder’s Treasury (a mini-encyclopaedia) still regards such ceramics as overwhelmingly oriental.
P.G. Urben
Kenilworth
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