The Proud Briton
The Balloon Drop at the 2009 National Convention in the red, white, and blue of the British flag. Whilst many commentators at the time were impressed by Gregory Tatton's slick organization, they missed the increasingly overt nationalism that was to become a signature of the rejuvinated National Party.
Gregory Tatton 2006-2016
National Party
The Proud Briton
Historians, especially, have been deeply critical of Tatton's invocation of a nationalist view of the past. His avowed statement, during the 2006 Presidential Debates, that "Britons should not be ashamed of the valiant defence they launched of their country during the war" was waved off as a misphrasing by sympathetic pundits afterwards, but from around 2009 onwards Tatton's Party took a decidedly right-wing bent. The closure of the British Wartime Museum, whose planning had been initiated under his predecessor Cronin, was a warning flag for many - Tatton had criticised the "lukewarm and self-depricating tone" of the Museum which had aimed to tell a rounded story of the horrors visited both on Britain by its foes and by Britain on others during the war years. Tatton's unapologetic rhetoric and increasingly overt nationalism alarmed some but thrilled others who felt that Britain had unjustly shouldered the blame for what had been, essentially, a defensive war.
Underpinning all of this was Tatton's energetic reconstruction of the National Party. Moving it from the Centre-Right to a more socially conservative place of the spectrum, he was in part inspired by President Brownback's grassroots upset of the 2008 US election, although his more judicious cuts to government taxation and spending were less disastrous than Brownback's own. In a slick piece of political maneuvering, part back-handed party games and part mass-movement mobilisation, Tatton succeeded in marginalising or forcing out the Centrists of the National Party and replacing them with his own supporters. His campaign was a mixture of red-meat for traditionalists, savaging the welfare programs put in place by Cronin, but with enough spice to appeal to a more populist audience, including trade protections and the occasional forays against the "Liberal business elite". Successfully keeping Britain outside of the emerging EEZ, Tatton's legacy, since the aggressive bowel cancer that has effectively removed him from public life, has been a more divided Britain. Whilst some site his leadership as heralding a new pride in Britain and British values others have seen him and his newly defined National Party as the biggest threat to the progressive democracy that emerged post-war since the war itself.