The Conservative Enemy: One – the Taxpayers’ Alliance

By Eduard Bernstein

In recent weeks the Taxpayers’ Alliance has suddenly found itself under fire, and it is plain they don’t like it. But I think it wrong to see them as some sort of shady conspiracy, or even as a trojan horse for PFI contractors (for a start they are just as opposed to PFI as Dave Prentis from Unison, though perhaps for very different reasons).

In fact the Taxpayers’ Alliance are simply the latest and recently most effective manifestation of the beating heart of what makes the British Conservative party more or less unique (as a success) on this continent: the idea that any sort of state spending should be opposed as an assault on freedom and democracy.

(Of course, most continental parties of the right vehemently reject the label ‘conservative’ from thre outset – their conservatives like so many of ours wished to do – sold them out to the Hitlers and the Mussolinis and from that day on the very concept has been dirt.)

The Taxpayer’s Alliance are really no more than the latest fighters in the Conservative Party’s endless class (and race, and sex) war against anybody who has the temerity to tell the rich that maybe they ought to give up some of their income to assist society as a whole in furthering the things – more tolerance, less poverty, better schools and hospitals – that the majority of us want. The case of the progressive left to make the rich pay their share is perhaps best summed up by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1936 acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. Castiagting a “new economic royalty” who sought to arrogate all wealth and power he said:

“For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

“Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government.”

But the British Conservative genius has been to combine the prejudices of the rich with inchoate popular anger: in the sixties and seventies the Tory right could rely on racism and opposition to immigrants (a theme they have returned to recently), today we are being asked to believe, somewhat surreally, that the real reasons why our society has problems is because we pay local authority chief executives too much.

Popular anger at the failure of the state is not difficult to generate, and Labour needs to recall that public service reform is vital (something that seems to have been forgotten too easily, too often lately.) But the point about government is that it is the place where we can come together and compel the wealthy to give back. The Tories reject that idea. They say we should return to voluntarism and charity.Well voluntarism is all very well: who could object to wealthy people giving more to charity? But it is also, well, voluntary – if you have any doubts about its limits, think of Fred the Shred.

And it is the will of the people that the wealthy should pay a fairer share: not that they should be expropriated or that wealth itself is wrong: merely that those with the most to give should give the most. And that is what the right hate and have always hated. The Taxpayers’ Alliance keep their sources of funding well hidden, but I would not be in the least surprised if they included some of the most wealthy individuals in the country.

So why the recent attacks from the Tories? Well, partly that is because there are a few christian democrat types in the party (Kenneth Clarke being the most prominent today). While they will make the required obsequies before the tax cutters’ altar they are rather more likely to be pragmatic and unattracted to a campaign that goes out of its way (for instance) to attack public health campaigns, the Welsh language and, of course, the European Union.

But there are other reasons why I think we should shortly expect the Tory high command to seek a public fissure with the TPA: the populist campaign risks damaging Brand Cameron. They love the fact that someone is out there helping to prepare the ground for the massive spending cuts they want to make, but more than anything else they want to avoid being pinned down – especially over Europe, where the edifice is so flimsy that even a little trouble could lead to complete collapse.

Useful links on the TaxPayers’ Alliance

LabourList on their tacit backing for higher taxes on people who aren’t corporations or super rich;

A much better kind of TaxPayers’ Alliance;

Tax justice network;

Tax research UK;

Richard Murphy