The Taxpayers’ Alliance

I missed yesterday’s announcement that former Telegraph and ConHome writer, Jonathan Isaby had been appointed Political Director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

The Conservative party and the Taxpayers’ Alliance have always had a very close relationship. The appointment of Isaby as Political Director, apparently responsible for ‘building links with Ministers, MPs and MEPs’, means the partnership will become cosier still.

This appointment brings to mind an occasion in 2006 when I visited Conservative Central Office at its former residence in Victoria Street. During the meeting, our group were informed by Mark Clarke, who was then the pompous Chairman of Conservative Future, and Ian Oakley, at the time a Conservative candidate in Watford, that the newly formed Taxpayers’ Alliance were simply a front organisation set up by the Tories to attack Labour on tax.

The ‘brilliant idea’, so we were told, was to create a separate organisation that could attack Blair and Brown on economic issues, meaning the Labour party, BBC and print media couldn’t just dismiss the complaints as being irrelevant because they had come from the Conservatives.

I even recall mention of how the organisation was to be funded by existing donors to the Tory party and indirectly, the Conservative party itself. At the time I wrote a blog entry on my website making note of a few of these remarks on the TPA, and criticised Mark Clarke and Ian Oakley for being slimy and insincere. Not long afterwards Clarke contacted me by email to ask that I withdraw the article, not, so he said, due to the personal criticism, but for revealing matters about the workings of the TPA at a private meeting in CCHQ. Naturally I refused, and that was the end of the matter as far as I saw it. Furthermore, in subsequent years my observations on the disgraceful Ian Oakley were rather vindicated by events.

Thus, from its inception, the Taxpayers’ Alliance existed as a Conservative sanctioned group used to indirectly assault the Labour administration over their economic incompetence, high tax policies and runaway spending habits. Of course, now that Labour are no longer in office and the Tories (and Lib Dims) have replaced them, the situation has somewhat changed.

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Practice What You Preach

Greg Easterbrook of Reuters wrote a serious, if at times mildly amusing article about some proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy in the United States.

He noted that while rich individuals such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett declare that the wealthy should pay more in tax, then they do not practice what they preach. Indeed, he says, Barack Obama falls into that category, earning considerably more than the average American:

If Obama is in earnest about wanting increased taxes on the wealthy, then he should send the United States Treasury $182,998. That’s the difference between his Form 1040 Line 60 (“This is your total tax”) and what he would have owed at the higher rate (plus limits on itemized deductions) he himself advocates.

So why doesn’t he tax himself more? The Form 1040, after all, only stipulates the minimum tax an American must pay. More is always welcome. Obama should write a check to the United States Treasury for $182,998.

This very much reminds me of a local debate that I attended just before the General Election. During questions from the audience, a local Methodist Minister stood up and declared that he had earned £18,500 for the previous financial year. He was happy to declare this he said, and had even brought his documents so he could tell us exactly how much tax he had paid, which he then duly listed.

Later, when he eventually got to the point (funny isn’t it how during questions from the audience, more often than not, those who raise their hand seem to feel the incredible urge to give us their long winded opinion rather than actually ask a question?), he said that he was very happy to pay that tax and he got good value for it. He went on to say that he wished he paid even more tax and would be happy to pay it for such excellent public services, etc…

That was his opinion and while I do not share it I did not have a problem with him expressing it in the public forum. My immediate verbal suggestion to him was that he make a voluntary donation to the Treasury. No doubt it would be well spent on some worthy cause I told him. This he did not like.

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Given No Choice

While the Liberal Democrats are highly unlikely to win the next General Election or win more seats than either Labour or the Conservatives, if there is a hung Parliament then they will most likely play a role in helping to form a coalition Government.

The BBC is reporting that the Liberal Democrats are going to drop their pledge to cut the overall level of tax at the next election. This, I think, is significant because it now means that none of three major political parties in Britain will be promising to reduce the increasingly crushing burden of taxation placed upon the British electorate at the election next year.

Our political class from all parties have conspired to remove any semblance of electoral choice over this highly important issue. If you believe that the tax burden should be cut, as millions of British voters do, then you are now left completely unrepresented by any political party that has a chance of forming a Government.

Furthermore, the usual excuses that party spokesman predictably parrot about how cuts in taxation are somehow ‘implausible’ or ‘irrational’ during the current economic climate are left completely uncontested. They never explain why such high levels of taxation are ‘rational’ or why it is right that the Government and state should waste so much of our income on frivolous pursuits and egotistical political projects.

The real reason why none of our political class will advocate any other alternative to what already appears to be the status quo is that they either genuinely support ever higher levels of stifling taxation, or that they have become so intellectually lazy that they have chosen not to make the case for a less expensive state.

When politics has been reduced by the political and media class to being about personalities rather than policies, should we really expect any different? Once again we have been given no choice.

Taxing Our Patience

It is not all that surprising that David Cameron’s Conservatives are now decidedly unenthusiastic about their pledge to raise the threshold for inheritance tax which they made two years ago.

This obvious reluctance is why so much ambiguity surrounds the issue and why the party leadership will not, if they can help it, be pinned down on the matter.

In late 2007 it became clear that Gordon Brown was readying the Labour party for a snap election. At the Conservative conference in Bournemouth there was an atmosphere of worriment and discontent. Opinion polls were consistently showing that the Conservatives were many points behind Labour when they needed to be quite a few points in front, and that as a result they were likely to lose any coming General Election.

Defeat would have condemned the Conservatives to another five years on the opposition benches and made it an unprecedented fourth election defeat in a row for a political party who were once considered the ‘natural party of government’ in Britain.

At that time the Cameron project was still very much a work in progress. In many ways it still is. However, before the party conference in 2007, David Cameron had seen little success in actually attracting the wider electorate to vote Tory. Despite all the hoodie-hugging speeches (okay, so he never actually said that) and pledges that marriage could, in his view, be between a man and a woman, a man and man, and a woman and a woman – the electorate were still not all that interested.

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