Answering our questions this time is Ruth Lea. Ruth is the Director of Global Vision, the campaign for an outward-looking UK in an outward-looking Europe, working for a fundamentally renegotiated relationship with the EU. She is also a Governor of the London School of Economics, and formerly Director of the... Read more...
2008 has already been an eventful year for our activists, and we’re only 3 weeks in! We’ve had our Norfolk campaigners highlight the disgraceful behaviour of North Norfolk District Council sending armies of bailiffs to claim the property from those taxpayers who can’t pay their council tax. In fact we’ve... Read more...
Economist Alex Tabarrok writes, for the Marginal Revolution blog, to describe just what the law of unintended consequences entails: "The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple, it operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short... Read more...
The Government has released new plans to pay people to lose weight. This risks creating an incentive for people to lose control of their weight in the first place and is a bit of a gimmick. As has been pointed out before this kind of problem can be avoided in... Read more...
According to the French Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, the French government is planning to freeze public spending for the next five years to eliminate the country's high budget deficit and bring down spending as a share of GDP. It is not yet clear whether the spending freeze would be... Read more...
Sometimes I wonder if we should not strengthen the rule of "unintended consquences" into "opposite consequences". Recent news that "it's the rich wot is doin' the boozin' " brings to mind a conversation with a local publican trying to ameliorate the consequences of the smoke-free legislation. General early consensus... Read more...
In response to Bromsgrove District Council announcing a whopping 4.45% increase in council tax, Labour opposition leader Coun Peter McDonald has struck back by claiming his party’s alternative budget would make £625,000 of savings without costing the local taxpayer anything. McDonald said he wanted to ‘give services back to... Read more...
It was a busy day for the TPA in Norfolk yesterday. Events started as early as 7am when senior TPA activist Tony Callaghan was interviewed on BBC Radio Norfolk about the story we highlighted last. Tony went to say how unfair it was that North Norfolk District Council sent out... Read more...
Today there is a withering attack on the Government's management of the crisis at Northern Rock in the Times, by Anatole Kaletsky: "The Northern Rock bailout will demolish or, at best, discredit the entire economic policy framework created in 1997. Since the creation of this framework was his one unquestionable... Read more...
The Audit Commission's new 'Positively Charged' report raises some interesting issues today. For the first time it puts a figure on the massive amounts raised by councils through extra charges - on car parking, waste disposal and numerous other services - as a whopping £10.8 billion. To put that in... Read more...
A host of problems are created by centralisation. A few advantages to decentralisation were summarised in our report, Wasting Lives: A statistical analysis of NHS performance in European context since 1981: "It is easier to vary decisions according to local circumstances. It is easier to feed local information... Read more...
How much the Simple Shopper will pay for an electric socket The National Audit Office has just reported on yet another hidden PFI cost. It seems the public sector has been getting ripped off over changes to PFI service contracts. The problem arises because, although public sector requirements... Read more...
Here at the TaxPayers' Alliance we're used to rather unconvincing government responses to our reports. Tessa Jowell produced the memorably meaningless argument that it "is a mistake to view 2012 as a cost, rather than an investment" - as if investments don't have costs. The DFID managed to completely contradict... Read more...
The Telegraph reports that an inquiry by Cambridge University has found that a failure to teach children the three Rs - literacy and numeracy - is hurting economic productivity. They found that there was a significant productivity gap between the UK and France, with 30 per cent higher productivity, and... Read more...
Download the full report here (PDF). A statistical analysis of World Health Organisation data reveals that the poor performance of the NHS is causing 17,157 deaths per year £34 billion of extra spending under Brown has made no difference to UK mortality Using data from the World Health Organisation and... Read more...
In yesterday’s Birmingham Mail Peter McDonald, the opposition leader at Bromsgrove District Council, blasted the council’s spending record in light of the inflation-busting 4.5% rise in council tax they are inflicting upon their residents. According to the newspaper report, taxpayers in Bromsgrove now face the highest taxes in Worcestershire.... Read more...
e Decommissioning kit for the Crock As Brown and Darling dither over nationalising Northern Rock, still trying to find some fudge that will avoid outright nationalisation and hide the costs (eg see this blog), taxpayers should remember the dismal precedent of British Energy. British Energy is the nuclear... Read more...
Today our study on Hate Education in the Palestinian territories was reported in the Express. The report included a response from the Department for International Development: Read more...
Within our grassroots campaigns, it’s my aim to have every activist involved at every stage of our campaigns. From letter writing to leafleting and radio-phone-ins, every bit is as important as the next and yesterday was perhaps the best day of grassroots activism and co-ordination I’ve seen at the TPA.... Read more...
Back in 2000, when 'investment' in the NHS seemed to know no limits, the government felt confident enough to promise all citizens access to an NHS dentist within just two years. A report brought out today though, by the charity Citizens Advice, reveals the impressive extent to which the government... Read more...
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people” If only… TPA Activist Barbara Lockwood contacted me this morning about a council tax story she’d heard on local Norfolk radio. After a little investigation, we found this disgraceful example of tyrannical government:... Read more...
A major role of the TaxPayers' Alliance is scrutinising the Government and the public sector to make sure taxpayers' money is spent properly and is not being abused and wasted. We regularly write to Ministers and public officials to enquire about different programmes and activities. One particularly brazen example of... Read more...
Here we are again. Another week passes us by and we find another local government non-job wasting your money, a job that needn’t exist because it is either done in the voluntary sector or could be done by another government department or body. The latter is the focus of this... Read more...
In the first of a series of papers analysing the effectiveness of expenditure on overseas aid, the TaxPayers Alliance has published a paper looking at the effects of British aid spending in the Palestinian territories. Funding Hate Education reveals disturbing evidence showing how British taxpayers’ money has been spent helping... Read more...