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Challenge the TaxPayers’ Alliance
Clifford Singer runs the Other TaxPayers’ Alliance taxpayersalliance.org and is helping to create the False Economy website falseeconomy.org.uk that will challenge the government’s case for cuts. Here he explains the need to challenge the TaxPayers’ Alliance’s media dominance.
During the summer, the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) released a report on speed cameras which appeared to show the introduction of cameras in the early 1990s had made roads more dangerous than they would have been otherwise. Leaving aside the mystery of why speed cameras have joined the TPA’s pantheon of villains, along with the more predictable ‘benefit scroungers’ and trade unionists, the report had several characteristics typical of a TPA publication. It came with a serious-looking appendix that explained its seemingly impartial methodology, it gained lots of media coverage and it had political influence – one month later many councils began switching off their speed cameras following road safety budget cuts.
It was typical in one other way too: it was complete nonsense. While the mainstream media was content to accept the report at face value, some less credulous bloggers pointed out that according to the TPA’s projections, in the absence of speed cameras accident deaths would have fallen to zero by 2013, and then continued into negative numbers after that. If it wasn’t for those automated yellow boxes of evil, we would be enjoying the spectacle of the dead being resurrected within the next three years.
On its website, the TPA states: “We’re not a think-tank. We’re a do-tank”. Pseudo-analysis such as its speed camera report certainly bears out the first part of that statement. But that didn’t stop readers of the influential ConservativeHome website naming the TPA as their favourite think-tank earlier this year. The TPA has also boasted – through ConservativeHome – of the large number of its policies now adopted by the coalition.
Softening up electorate for cuts
Before the election, the TPA played an important role in softening up public antipathy towards public spending cuts. In September 2009 the TPA drew up, with the Institute of Directors, plans for an annual £50 billion a year of public spending cuts.
The alliance, which launched six years ago, describes itself as a ‘grassroots alliance’ of ‘ordinary taxpayers’ despite an academic advisory council of Thatcherite acolytes like Patrick Minford and Ruth Lea.
The most enthusiastic coverage comes from Tory tabloids such as the Daily Mail and Express. But it also gets airtime from the BBC and other broadcasters – who should know better.
It is important to challenge the TPA’s media dominance. The alliance is particularly successful at packaging stories for cash-strapped local and regional media. Of course it helps to have £1 million a year behind you – but the point is that we need to make the case for public services.
Need for transparency in all sectors
The TPA has successfully argued for transparency and accountability in the public sector. Rather than arguing against this, we should be arguing for the same rules to apply to the private sector.
The TPA’s concern with transparency deserts it when it comes to its own finances. Its last full accounts, for 2006, record an income of £130,000 – hardly enough to sustain its current 10 full-time staff and offices in London and Birmingham. Since then, it has published ‘abbreviated’ accounts, meaning income and expenditure are withheld, although the Guardian reported its income last year was £1 million. Donors are kept secret.
One source of TPA funding has been the shadowy Midlands Industrial Council. The MIC was founded in 1946 as a pressure group to fight the Attlee government’s nationalisation plans and to champion free enterprise. It has donated about £3 million to the Conservative Party since 2001, much of it targeted at marginal parliamentary seats in the Midlands.
Why won’t the TPA open its books? As it told MPs who tried to prevent their expenses being published: “If you have nothing to hide then you’ve got nothing to fear.”
Government demonises welfare
It is vital to work together to counter attacks on the unemployed and their benefit.
People on benefits are being demonised while the government launches attacks on welfare. Taxpayers bailed out the banks with £1.3 trillion after they caused the recession which led to the deficit and resulted in people losing their jobs, but people made unemployed by the crisis are under repeated attack. A hate campaign has been orchestrated by the government and the right-wing media, to recast some of the most vulnerable members of society as the new ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor to help clear the ground for the biggest assault on the welfare state in living memory. Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith made a disgusting insult to the unemployed by insisting jobless people in Merthyr Tydfil should “get on a bus to find work”.
Instead of vilifying the unemployed the government should be helping people get back to work and grow our economy. It should also put proper resources into jobcentres to help jobseekers find suitable employment.
Benefits far below poverty levels
Oxfam argues the government must protect universal, non-means tested benefits, recognise social protection is a basic right and ensure benefit levels are not further reduced. In particular, the charity suggests reforms fail to acknowledge benefits are far below poverty levels, and have halved relative to average earnings over the past 30 years, while £18 billion cuts in welfare as part of the austerity measures will damage demand in the economy. If unemployment benefit had increased in line with earnings since 1979 it would be worth £110 per week today not a measly £65.
Benefit fraud is often highlighted through extreme examples in the press but in reality £1 billion is lost through such deception each year while £10 billion in welfare benefits goes unclaimed each year (according to CAB). At the same time £70 billion tax is evaded and £25 billion avoided, by the rich and big business.
Against welfare cuts
The coalition labels benefit claimants ‘work-shy’ but there is no evidence vast numbers of people are suffering from a ‘habit of worklessness’. There is, however clear evidence that there are not enough jobs: only 450,000 vacancies yet nearly 2.5 million unemployed.
Duncan Smith is to introduce US-style compulsory ‘workfare’, under threat of withdrawal of benefits to entire families, whereby claimants carry out tasks such as picking up litter to ‘earn’ their payments. A new ‘claimant commitment’ will include sterner conditions, notably the threat that unemployed people who refuse community work or the offer of a job may lose their Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) for three months, six months or even three years. The government’s work capability assessment is putting more people who are less prepared for work on to JSA and taking them off Employment and Support Allowance.
Workfare does not create jobs
Workfare distracts from claimants’ job search activities and does not create jobs, while the effective hourly rate for full-time work for unemployment benefit – adult rate Job Seekers Allowance – is £1.73 an hour. Research by the Department for Work and Pensions has found the workfare approach is least effective at getting people into work in weak labour markets.
It is morally wrong for companies to make a profit from welfare and yet 15,000 jobs are under threat in DWP, including more than 9,000 in JCP, to help pay for the new private sector-delivered work programme. Jobcentre Plus performs better than the private sector in helping people back to work because staff have years of experience meeting the needs of people on welfare.
Kevin Flynn, chair of the National Unemployed Centres Combine, stressed the need for unions and unemployed workers’ centres to campaign together.
He said: “The TUC unemployed workers centres and PCS are real partners, we both want the best welfare benefits system for claimants and the staff and we both reject attacks on staff terms and conditions and the dignity of claimants. We collectively resist job losses and reduced services provisions and all attempts to give PCS work to private service firms and joint voluntary and community sector privatisation of PCS jobs.”
Facts about poverty and welfare:
