BRITAIN is under attack. Our culture, our way of life, our institutions, our democracy – all are being threatened. But don’t look for bombs. Don’t blame those whose religion may be at odds with your own. Don’t look at immigrants, foreign food or the colour of people’s skin. Don’t look towards the frontiers of Iran and North Korea, or to the ever-increasing power of China. Because the threat comes from within. And it is sinister, manipulative and destructive . . .
Just of late, things have become more apparent. A force is stirring. Take a look at this story from Saturday’s Daily Express:
THE disgraceful scale of benefits Britain was laid bare last night after official figures revealed that 100,000 households are raking in handouts worth more than the wage earned by most workers.
Shocking Government statistic show that some benefits families are pocketing at least £23,244 – the average UK salary – every year without lifting a finger. Five million people in Britain are on some sort of benefits.
Nothing wrong with that, if you trust the Express and its figures. Typical Express story, you might say. And further down we have a typical Express quote from a typical Express source:
Matthew Sinclair, research director at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Hardworking taxpayers will be shocked to learn that tens of thousands of claimants are getting more than the average annual wage in benefits.
“This is yet more confirmation that our disastrous welfare system is leaving too many people in a situation where there isn’t any real financial incentive to work.
“We need to make drastic changes to save taxpayers’ money and ensure that it is worthwhile for people to take the opportunities that will be created as the economy begins to recover from the recession.”
Again, nothing out of the ordinary. At least, not out of the ordinary in the slightly wonky world of Express-shire. Let’s have a peek at another Express story from the same edition:
BRITAIN’S “astounding” public sector sicknote culture was exposed yesterday after research claimed that workers at some of the biggest councils take 11 days off ill every year.
What we have here is the Express doing its thing: bashing public services and the public sector. Like bashing benefit scroungers, I suppose someone’s got to do it. Here’s some reaction from further down the story:
Last night, Taxpayers’ Alliance spokesman Mark Wallace said the data was “absolutely astounding”.
He added: “The really worrying thing is council staff are taking far more days off than the private sector. Either council red tape or bad management is making people ill or managers are letting staff get away with throwing ‘sickies’.”
Hmmm. Let’s move on to see what Saturday’s Daily Mail has to offer.
The Mail, too, has the benefits scandal story. And, in step with the Express, it has quotes from Matthew Sinclair at the Taxpayers’ Alliance – in fact the same quotes. So to round things off, here’s his final paragraph from the Mail:
‘Most taxpayers are sick of seeing tens of billions of pounds of their money wasted every year on a welfare system that is trapping people in dependency.’
Let’s click further through the Mail to see if we can find anything else of interest. Here’s something:
Taxpayers are spending almost £60,000 a day on legal aid for convicts demanding release from jail, softer punishments or compensation, it emerged last night.
Well, the scumbags can demand what they like. They’ll get what they’re entitled to according to the law and nothing else. But that’s not the point. We’re talking tax here. My tax. Your tax. Everybody’s tax. So has anyone got anything to say on the matter?
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: ‘Legal aid for prisoners is not a core front line service which the Coalition should be protecting when it comes to the Spending Review.
‘Instead of sending fewer people to jail to save money, the Government should cut out other areas of waste in the prison service, including parties and unjustified legal aid bills.’
Anything else on the Mail’s website?
Ministers tonight ordered a crackdown on the ‘corrosive and wasteful’ use of private sector lobbyists by councils and government quangos.
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said he was determined to end the use of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on political lobbyists.
There is no quote from the TaxPayers’ Alliance in this Mail report. But if we nip to the TPA’s website and cast an eye over research director Matthew Sinclair’s blog, we stumble upon this:
Great news today as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles has announced new restrictions on taxpayer funded lobbying at councils and quangos in his Department. Our report Taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning is cited a number of times in the DCLG release that has been posted on Conservative Home.
So, lobbyists at the TPA have lobbied successfully to prevent councils and quangos lobbying. Sounds a bit rich, but I suppose it saves the taxpayers money. There again, if I was to put on my cynical head, I might argue that it clears the way for certain sections of the business community to move in on council and quango services and make a killing. No? Take a look at this comment from the Local Government Association:
John Ransford, chief executive of the Local Government Association, said councils sometimes needed help to navigate their way through the bureaucratic maze of Whitehall to get things done.
He added: “Local authorities only use public affairs agencies to win government support for major projects that are of vital importance to their residents . . .
“The delivery of these projects, and the resulting increase in jobs and investment, far outstrips the costs of employing these agencies.”
Mr Ransford’s comment was circulated to the national press by the Press Association. It did not appear in the Daily Mail’s report.
So that’s not a bad tally for a quiet Saturday. Plenty of publicity for the TPA. Plenty of light shone on its key campaigns – but not a glimmer on the agenda that might lie behind them. Let’s have a look at yesterday’s catch, starting with the News of the World:
DOZENS of fat-cat civil servants are sitting on gold-plated pensions worth over £1million each. New figures show the value of their publicly-funded retirement pots has soared in the past year despite a pledge to curb excessive pay.
Fair game, you might say – fat-cat civil servants. No one would shed a tear if they were culled and their pensions slashed. What’s interesting about this story, though, is the NoW has gone to only one source for comment:
Emma Boon, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “It is a disgrace that taxpayers face subsidising these public sector elite while watching the value of their own pensions tumble.”
The argument for huge bonuses, lucrative pension schemes and obscenely high salaries in the private sector – banking, for instance – is that if you don’t provide the best package, you don’t get the best people. Apparently, this cardinal rule of economics applies only when the circumstances are convenient. Meanwhile, still at the NoW:
This is a story about councils distributing money to community groups such as morris dancers, and funding health and musical events for children. Some of the items are rather bizarre – though one councillor is quoted as saying that his council “is putting a stop to this kind of waste”. But like the curtain coming down at a Punch and Judy show, the NoW has to end the entertainment by bringing on a puppet with a big stick to deliver the final line:
Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers’ Alliance said: “Councils need to stop frittering away money.”
Which brings us full circle back to the Express – or, rather, its Sunday stablemate – with a story about taxpayers, benefits and migrants:
THE £115,000 a week spent on translators to help immigrants claim benefits in Britain is facing intense scrutiny.
The Sunday Express then brings on what a visitor to these shores might mistakenly believe is the voice of the nation, so ubiquitous is it becoming:
A spokesman for the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “With translation costs on the rise it’s more important than ever that the government insist newcomers learn English. Negative attitudes towards immigration are fuelled by these sorts of overheads. The cost of document translation has increasingly started to look like a very expensive exercise in politically correct PR”.
And on it goes. A continuous and relentless drip-drip of negativity, undermining our confidence in our ability to govern ourselves, finance our public bodies effectively, run an efficient country.
So, you out there – the ordinary man or woman in the street. You, Mr or Mrs Public: you have your bins emptied by the local authority, your health needs provided by the NHS, and your children educated by that much maligned entity we call the State – the same entity that guards our shores, patrols our skies, fights our wars, pays our police, provides our firefighters. What do you know about the TaxPayers’ Alliance? This organisation claims to represent you. You are, after all, a taxpayer. And this extremely vocal group claims to be an alliance of taxpayers. Let’s see what Wikipedia says:
Although the TaxPayers’ Alliance is not officially affiliated with any political party, it has been accused of being a Conservative Party “front”. “Th
is is an arms-length Tory front operation run by big powerful business interests who want to remove themselves from paying tax by poisoning the well of public debate around the issue,” said Labour MP Jon Cruddas. Polly Toynbee in The Guardian and Kevin Maguire in The Daily Mirror have also levelled this charge, although the group’s leadership has denied it. All three founders, and a number of TPA staff members have associations with the Conservative Party and have strong links with the Freedom Association.
(The Freedom Association was founded in the 1970s to provide support for employers and non-unionised workers against trade union action during industrial disputes.)
The inference here is that the TPA is politically as well as financially motivated. Get rid of the public sector and grassroots democracy by undermining faith in public organisations and their ability to deliver services (poisoning the well of public debate, as Jon Cruddas so eloquently puts it), and you get rid of a huge drain on taxes. So the taxpayers pay less.
Or do they? Doesn’t that cash get funnelled instead in a new direction, to the private sector companies that then ease themselves in to provide many of those services – companies that, as private bodies, are not accountable and not open to the same levels of scrutiny and transparency as their public sector counterparts?
We have already seen in the space of one weekend how the TPA has penetrated the press, to the extent it has become a national name – despite the fact the vast majority of the public remains ignorant of its true nature. Let’s now have a look at what some of the TPA officials say in their blogs on the TPA website:
Fiona McEvoy, writing about local authority vacancies and under a headline “Non-Job of the Week”, has this to say (August 4):
Who’d have thought that, at a time when frontline services are under threat, our authorities would go and prioritise equality and diversity positions?
Well, for a start, our frontline services are under threat only because people like McEvoy are threatening them. And while she cites a managerial job with a salary of £300-£450 per day in Sheffield, she also attacks positions at the other end of the scale:
Burnley Borough Council want to build their casual pool of “Healthy Lifestyle Tutors” (£11.38 per hr) to stop people smoking, that’s right, just like the NHS.
Ignoring the rather pertinent fact that huge swathes of the NHS budget are spent on treating smoking-related illnesses, the message here is that ALL public sector jobs are a waste of taxpayers’ money. Equality and diversity – that’s a waste of money, old man. We don’t need equality. We’ve managed for centuries without it. The rich don’t need it; the poor are too concerned with hanging on to their jobs. And diversity? Ha.
Then we have this from Jennifer Dunn, under the headline “Strike Ban is an Option” (August 6):
I blogged this week about the looming autumn of discontent – the unions’ attempt to stop essential cuts to restore the public finances to health and condemn taxpayers to even more years of debt repayment.
Of course the advice to the government was to be tough with unions and to make it clear that strikes are futile. And we are not the only ones making these kinds of suggestions. Today the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) said strikes should be banned if there was an upsurge of industrial unrest.
Dunn shifts the agenda from champion of the taxpayer to champion of the employer, with the unions as the main target. Considering that most, if not all, union members are taxpayers at source (unlike some sections of society, which are in a position to fiddle or avoid paying taxes) it leaves us wondering just what sort of an alliance we have here. And to clarify a point, the CIPD has called for a strike ban in essential services only.
One of the most revealing contributions, though, comes from TPA research director Matthew Sinclair and concerns a letter from former Labour MP Tony Benn and union leaders that was published in the press. The letter, its content and the signatories do not concern us. What we’re looking at is the language in this piece headlined “Letter to The Guardian with Tony Benn Reveals Union Extremism” (August 4):
The letter in the Guardian today from Tony Benn – inventor of the seatcase – and seventy-three of his comrades is quite revealing. Most of the signatories are the usual suspects, washed up socialists with little relevance to the practical debate over how Britain deals with a serious fiscal crisis.
I may be wrong, but I get the impression the word “comrades” has been written with a sneer. However, the use of the phrase “washed up socialists” leaves us in no doubt as to which side of the political divide this man is on. This is the language of the class war. This is “them and us” and no bones about it.
And so the drip-drip goes on – the endless press releases to the national papers that are reproduced verbatim because it’s easy and it suits them; and the regional papers too, they all carry TPA stories about government departments paying so much for office equipment, the NHS spending so much on paper clips, local councils lavishing so much on environmental improvement managers.
We live in a nation where the public is told – the taxpaying public – that public bodies and public services are bureaucratic, inefficient and tangled in red tape. The public is being told it is incapable of looking after itself. Local authorities which are elected by the public, run by members of the public and employ members of the public – every single one of them a taxpayer – are providing unnecessary services and are a burden on the public. What the public is not being told is what will replace these organisations and these services once they have gone.
This is nothing to do with an alliance of taxpayers. This is everything to do with remoulding society in a way that would benefit the few to the detriment of the many.
FURTHER READING:
- Who is behind the Taxpayers’ Alliance? By Robert Booth in the Guardian,
October 9, 2009 - Wikipedia on the Taxpayers’ Alliance
- Kevin Maguire on the TPA in Tribune, September 18, 2009: Right-wing ranters would tax the patience of a saint
- TaxPayers’ Alliance home page
