Tea Parties Go Overseas

Audio from todays Glenn Beck Program:

GLENN: Daniel Hannan is on from Europe how are you sir?

DANIEL: Glad to be here.

GLENN: First of all, I want to talk a little bit about a tea party, is it this weekend in England.

DANIEL: Tomorrow in Bryson. But obviously this being England, we'll be serving tea at it rather than dumping it into the channel.

GLENN: How many people are you expecting to show up at the English this is the first time this has ever happened, a tea party, if you will, in England.

DANIEL: First time we've ever done it in this way. I don't huge it to be huge, honest. As I understand it as the case in the U.S. when they started in 2008 they began initially as a trickle. Then they became a flood. But I'm confident that they will grow. We have a government, this is the amazing thing, you're protesting with nothing like as much to protest as we have. We have a government that has taken a trillion pounds in additional taxation since they took office. More than we would have done if my party had been in power at the same rate. 111 tax rises since 1997. And this is unbelievable, with all these extra tax rises, we're running a deficit of 12.6% of GDP. We have the same deficit Greece has. Where has all the money gone? And that's something that you don't have to be kind of a strong conservative to have concerns about.

GLENN: In the EU, Daniel, because you are a member of the EU parliament, right?

DANIEL: Correct.

GLENN: How concerned are you about I mean this is a domino. Man, you've got Greece, Spain is in this mix. Portugal is in this mix. Ireland. All of Europe and the United Kingdom seems to be in real peril.

DANIEL: Well, we would be if we had joined the Euro. Thank heaven we kept the pound. Because, like I say, Greece's deficit is 12.7. Ours is 12.6%. The only thing that saved us from a Greece like collapse is the fact we were able to have a devaluation of our currency instead of having that devaluation in output and jobs. You guys wouldn't want to swap your problems for Europe, as severe as your problems are with the way things are going there. But I'll tell you another thing. We've got, when you say we're stealing your idea about the tea parties and stuff. The warcry of tax without representation doesn't really apply so much these days in the U.S. Yes, your taxes are too high and they're rising but at least they're set by people you can vote for. Increasingly, the European Union is starting to levy, if you like federal taxation, and so the protest of no taxation without representation is now much more relevant in Europe, because we feel that we have impulse being levied on us that we can't get rid of.