Is the December circuit of boozy Westminster receptions already affecting Guido’s memory? After Scrapbook exposed the reluctance of the TaxPayers’ Alliance to discuss the level of subsidy its charity arm may be receiving from the Treasury, the doyen of attack blogging emerged in the comments: Could he have forgotten his war with the Labour-linked Smith [...]
A charity funding vehicle set up by the right-wing TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) has refused to reveal whether donations to the controversial campaign group have been enhanced by, erm, a subsidy from the tax-paying public. As their own press officers might say: “It’s outrageous that taxpayers could be expected to stump up for this”! The Politics [...]
A supposedly “independent” charity with close links to a string of right-wing campaigning organisations gave 100% of its funding to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, accounts filed with regulators reveal. The Politics and Economics Research Trust (PERT), purportedly founded to “advance the education of the public”, gave 18 grants worth £325,000 to the pressure group. Despite strict controls on political [...]
A Cabinet Office white paper, published on Friday (while no-one was looking) promises wide ranging and controversial reform of essential public services. Specifically it calls for the opening up of services to private providers, so as to tackle the “unfairnesses” of the public sector. So what happens when the commissioning process goes awry, and the [...]
As well as hitting the phones to their friends in the media, the TaxPayers’ Alliance also produce highly dubious “research” to support their right-wing agenda. As this excellent video from the Other TaxPayers’ Alliance demonstrates, however, Matthew Elliott and his libertarian chums have been caught with their pants round their ankles: A so-called study into [...]
On ConservativeHome this morning Mark Wallace has a rather unimaginative pop at the (Labour) leader of his native Lambeth. As Adam Bienkov observes, ”It’s good to see the former campaign director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance is no longer hiding his party allegiance”. Naturally, Wallace’s former boss in Tufton Street cut his political teeth working for a string of Conservative MPs [...]
The document below underscores the central role of the TaxPayers’ Alliance within the Conservative/libertarian right in the UK. The pressure group not only provides tediously repetitive quotes to lazy journalists (“this is a slap in the face for taxpayers blah blah” ) but organises regular off-the-record round table discussions for its right-wing friends. Much of [...]
The TaxPayer’s Alliance website includes a helpful media summary detailing their latest rent-a-quotes: Curiously, there’s one TPA story which is missing from today’s compendium… …the one about being under investigation by the Charity Commission, of course! The TPA set up a charity under a different name to claim Gift Aid subsidy from, erm, the taxpayer. [...]
