Heroes who fight to keep tax bills down for us all
IT’S A shocking fact that British taxpayers are handing over a higher proportion of their hard-earned money to the Government than at any time since Labour’s Harold Wilson was in power. That was the 1960s, a period of swingeing taxes that led Ray Davies of The Kinks to open his song Sunny Afternoon with the line “The taxman’s taken all my dough”.
With a Marxist Labour Party keen on re-nationalising industries and bringing back sky-high taxes if they ever got into power, we could indeed be heading back to the 1960s and ’70s – but without the fabulous music.
It’s good news, then, that the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA), the campaigning group set up to battle for fairer taxes in this country, is celebrating its 15th anniversary next month. Without it chipping away at various taxes we could be paying even more.
It’s also fought hard to get government to cut back on wasting our money on barmy projects and provide greater transparency on spending, especially on those gold-plated civil service pensions and taxpayer-funded jollies abroad.
I once helped them campaign in the West Country to cut the cider duty escalator that automatically adds tax to a pint. With family and friends, I drank my way around county fairs and festivals, raising a petition of 2,000 signatures from fellow drinkers and makers. It was a tough task but someone had to do it.
Handing the petition into the Chancellor, the TPA and I were rewarded with a freeze in cider duty and, in the following year, a cut by 2p.
A small victory but it all adds up and this is what the TPA has been good at, taking on particular taxes (and battling away at them with grassroots support) including stamp duty, inheritance tax, petrol duty, air passenger duty, business rates, workplace parking levies, lifestyle taxes, clean air zones and more.
It is a depressing fact that the UK has one of the world’s longest tax codes and this has more than doubled in recent years. The TPA has long argued for a lower, less complicated tax system.
It’s also the team behind the annual Public Sector Rich List, highlighting the most highly paid managers in local and central government, each earning £150,000 a year with a generous pension, all at our expense.
It was Matthew Elliott and Andrew Allum who launched the TPA in 2004 with The Bumper Book Of Government Waste, packed full of examples of bureaucratic profligacy.
An instant hit with the media, it gave journalists the ammunition to highlight reckless government expenditure. Especially when the TPA boiled down the figures to reveal that government waste had hit £2,000 per family, enough for a holiday abroad.
Unlike the usual heavyweight think-tanks, the TPA’s special talent was to make dense information and complicated data simple for the taxpayer to understand and object to.
Quickly the TPA became a major presence in Westminster circles, putting the case for lower taxation. So much so that some top politicians got a little overenthusiastic about sharing their success.
Matthew Elliott told me he once had a meeting at No 11 Downing Street with then Chancellor George Osborne. “It appeared the Chancellor was having a bit of a late afternoon slump,” says Elliott, “so he wasn’t quite as focused as he might have been. We discussed grassroots campaigns and the models established by the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the Countryside Alliance.”
OSBORNE then interjected rather grandly: “I was involved in the creation of both those campaigns.” There was a pause in the room and he then must have realised who was sitting opposite him – the actual founder.
“Quickly he followed up,” recalls Elliott, saying: “Oh, of course, I know you had a lot to do with it as well.”
Interestingly, the recipe evolved at the TPA (“diligent research revealing big figures that demonstrate the impact of public policy”) has since been applied to other campaigns. When Prime Minister David Cameron announced a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, Elliott became chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign, alongside his old friend Dominic Cummings as campaign director.
Leading up to the 2016 vote, it focused on the message of saving £350million a week in EU contributions that could be better spent on the NHS.
“Remainers hated it,” says Elliott. “But it was undoubtedly one of the strongest arguments of the successful campaign that resulted in 17.4 million people voting to exit the EU. Lessons learned at the TPA had been successfully applied to a significant political event.”
Although there is still a great deal of work to be done cutting back on the desire of the state to take more and more of our money, one of the most significant achievements of the TPA is that it is now commonplace for journalists and politicians to discuss policy in terms of not wasting taxpayers’ money.
“We helped make that shift in narrative,” says Elliott.
Next month the body marks its 15th anniversary with a gala dinner and Jacob Rees-Mogg giving the celebratory speech.
Long may the TPA’s crusade continue!
‘It is now common to discuss policy in terms of not wasting money’