RSS

Contact us

Monday 23 November 2009

The No. 1 tax detective agency

Ross Clark takes a look at the TaxPayers’ Alliance

Chote himself says he is unfazed. ‘We’re doing different things,’ he says. ‘They’re a campaigning group, we’re a research body. We’re not concerned with whether we should be a high-tax economy or a low-tax economy, but whether the government is raising enough money to meet its spending commitments.’ No sooner has he put the phone down than he scurries off and does his own media scan, claiming that Google News gives him 1,900 mentions in the past year compared with 1,090 for the Alliance.

The political parties, he adds, are fighting on increasingly narrow turf: all agreeing that taxation should be in the range of 40 to 42 per cent of GDP. And that, perhaps, is the nub of it: the TaxPayers’ Alliance has scored its publicity coup because the main parties have so little of interest to say on tax, making redundant any scholarly analysis of their spending plans. In vain does Polly Toynbee protest that the Alliance is a ‘Tory front pumping out anti-tax paranoia’. There is something on this subject for everyone: the Guardian was particularly grateful when the TaxPayers’ Alliance revealed recently that Gary Hoffman, the new chief executive of Northern Rock, is to be paid £700,000 a year plus £400,000 to compensate for lost bonuses from his previous employer, Barclays.

As the founder of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Matthew Elliott, a 30-year-old LSE graduate who has worked for the European Foundation and for Tory MEP Timothy Kirkhope, showed considerable skill in identifying a hole in the market for a British equivalent of US taxpayer representation groups. But no one could say his job is especially difficult. ‘A lot of the time we are using the government’s own statistics against it,’ he says. ‘The Freedom of Information Act has massively opened up the possibilities. I just wonder whether the government would have bothered had they known what would happen.’ Trawling speculatively through government reports and filing Freedom of Information requests in search of waste is something which newspapers could easily do themselves — had they retained sufficient reporters. Instead, the whole subject has been contracted out to the TaxPayers’ Alliance.    

More articles from: Ross Clark | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink   |   Comments (1)

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

Back to top

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2009 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved