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Ross Clark takes a look at the TaxPayers’ Alliance

Seldom has tax featured in the media over the past decade without the lanky figure of Robert Chote of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, or his predecessor Andrew Dilnot, popping up to discuss it. Yet recently the IFS’s monopoly has come under increasingly serious challenge. Whether it be the Daily Telegraph or the Money Programme, there is now a good chance that it will not be Mr Chote giving his hap’orth, but the bespectacled figure of Matthew Elliott of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

In fact, my rather unscientific analysis suggests that this year the Alliance has eclipsed the IFS in just about every media orifice other than the Guardian, and even there it is fast catching up — remarkable for a pressure group which would appear to stand for the exact opposite of the newspaper’s statist values. By mid-September the IFS had notched up 105 mentions in the Guardian and Observer against 90 for the TaxPayers’ Alliance. For the Daily and Sunday Telegraph the corresponding figures are 68 and 200; for the Times 51 and 55. Perhaps most remarkably, the IFS trails the Alliance on the BBC website, by 36 to 50.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance publicity machine would have had Goebbels stunned. This is a précis of the Alliance’s hits for the first week of September: government slated for giving the homeless charity Shelter £100,000 to produce 13 leaflets promoting ‘eco-towns’; Cleveland police shamed for spending £36,000 on two stained-glass windows; Stoke-on-Trent Primary Care Trust revealed to be spending £65,000 on promoting walking routes and employing ‘walk leaders’; Fylde and Wyre council spending £2,130 making a video entitled ‘Recycling made easy’. And so it goes on: no longer is the story ‘Robert Chote says political party’s figures don’t add up’ but ‘Matthew Elliott says taxpayers are being ripped off’.