Today marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, when 30 men boarded three East India Company vessels in Boston Harbour. They broke open 342 chests of tea and, carefully avoiding causing any other damage, dumped about 90,000 pounds of tea overboard.

The pointed destruction of a cargo worth over £1 million in today’s prices was no random vandalism. It was an escalation of an ongoing struggle over civic rights between a British government 3,000 miles away and thirteen of its North American colonies. 

Since war with France had ended in 1763, trouble had been brewing. Conquest had  dramatically expanded British possessions in North America, but at considerable cost. To raise revenue, George III’s ministers raised taxes on the colonists through a Stamp Act, arguing that their security had thereby been enhanced. 

This shocked the colonists. At issue was not just money, but the question whether the king’s power could be checked by the people, or were they unlimited, as Stuart kings had asserted a century earlier? Colonists were not directly represented in Parliament and believed they were losing their fundamental right to have a say in their government. They responded to the taxes with widespread protest. 

In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act but claimed for Parliament “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” This act echoed the 1719 Irish Declaratory Act, which asserted that Ireland was subordinate to the British king and Parliament that also imposed new taxes.

Over the next few years resentment turned to unrest and British officials sent troops to Boston to restore order. They shot into a crowd, killing five.

Parliament relented and removed all but one of the new taxes—the tax on tea—but trouble continued to simmer. A threat to extradite colonists to England for trial seemed to the colonists to prove the British government intended to strip them of their civil rights. 

Then, in 1773, Parliament tried to bail out the failing East India Company by giving it a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. To the colonists, it seemed the plan was to convince people to accept the tea, thereby establishing Parliament’s right to govern without colonists’ input.

Ships carrying the East India tea sailed for the colonies, but mass protests persuaded most captains to turn back for England. In Boston, however, the governor was determined to land the cargo. He refused to let ships loaded with tea leave the harbour until the tax was paid. 

So a group of colonists hid their faces as Indigenous Americans. They boarded three ships and dumped the tea to make their political statement.

Parliament responded by closing the port, moving the seat of government to Salem, stripping the colony of its charter, requiring colonists to pay for quartering redcoats in Boston, and demanding payment for the lost tea.  

“We must work together to advance a constitutional opposition to tyranny”

—Boston leader Samuel Adams.

Americans would find an answer to the question of tyranny from a king’s omnipotence in a Declaration of Independence and eight years of war, culminating in British humiliation at Saratoga.

Unfortunately, the British government has “form” on this behaviour. Once a colonial power, it was understandably reluctant to see its empire diminished. But, while colonies dominated by other cultures have been granted independence with tolerably good grace, America is an example of fighting it tooth and nail when the culture is an attempt to “make the world England”. 

Another is Ireland. After centuries of imposition of English rule, that involved treating natives like disposable chattels, suppression of multiple revolts and indifference to a famine, in which a million died and another million emigrated, civil chaos forced Britain to grant independence in 1922.

But, at what was otherwise the height of Empire, the British government could not resist holding on to a fig-leaf shred of empire by retaining the Six Counties. The subsequent unrest and bloodshed there stands in stark contrast to the peace and prosperity of Eire. Do these examples of the USA and Eire form a pattern, where Britain holds on most fiercely to those that prosper more when they escape?

Because another example seems to be brewing. Over the last decade, the the British government has ignored Scottish requests from a duly elected government, backed by 50% of those polled for a referendum. This wilful deafness echoes earlier bouts of haughty hubris exemplified by the above.

What is particularly tragic about this case is that so far, unlike the American and Irish examples, no-one has even been hurt, let alone killed, in this cause. Such unrest as there has been in Scotland has been democratic and civilised. There have been no incidents of gallons of London gin being poured into the Forth, probably because it is distilled in Fife.

But 81% of Scottish MPs are rendered as powerless as Parnell’s Irish MPs were a century ago trying to sway the 84% of MPs who are English. As in the case of America and Ireland, non-English MPs have little chance to undermine self-interest among the English majority.

But such self-interest is foolish, and counter-productive. Even the most virulent Little-Englander praises the “special relationship” Britain now enjoys with the USA, and admires (albeit privately) that Eire’s Celtic Tiger economy puts the economic backwater of Northern Ireland in the shade. So Scotland’s case should be self-evident. It need not take dimming the power sent south, nor rendering Faslane inoperable—let alone violence—to see offering the Scottish people a democratic choices evades the animosity that poisoned relations with the USA and Ireland for decades.

#1087—940 words