The TaxPayers’ Alliance: Your Toxic Solutions
It’s been known for some time, for those who want to look, that the lobbying organisation the Taxpayers’ Alliance is not what it says it is. On its website the TPA presents itself as a ‘non-partisan, grassroots campaign for lower taxes, government transparency and an end to wasteful government spending.
Founded in 2003 by Matthew Elliott – the future chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign during the referendum – the TPA is one of various astroturf lobbying organisations based in Elliott’s 55 Tufton Street stable. Its influence has grown in the last few years, thanks to donations from some wealthy Conservative Party supporters, in addition to undisclosed donations from American donors.
For all its ‘grassroots’ pretensions, the TPA is a strictly top-down outfit. And if you want to know what kind of organisation it is, consider its attempts to stop Southampton City Council from enforcing a low-emissions Clean Air Zone (CAZ), in Southampton city centre. Some context here. The CAZ is an attempt to address the fact that Southampton is one of the WHO’s top 11 most-polluted urban areas in the UK and Ireland, where Public Health England figures in 2011 attributed 6.3 per cent of adult deaths in the city to air pollution.
Last year the government’s Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP) estimated that between 28,000 and 36,000 people die as a result of air pollution every year in the UK, and the UK was one of five countries referred to the European Court of Justice for breaching legal limits on air pollution levels and failing to introduce ‘credible, effective and timely measures to reduce pollution as soon as possible, as required under EU law.’
Southampton is one of the cities that breaches EU legal limits. In 2011 Public Health England attributed 6.3 percent of adult deaths in Southampton to air pollution. As part of its Clean Air Zone project therefore, Southampton announced last autumn that it would charge some diesel vehicles to drive in the city centre.
In October the TPA began to protest these proposals, which it described as a ‘stealth tax’. Nothing surprising about this. The TPA also opposes proposals to tax sugar and processed meat, regardless of the consequences for public health.
The TPA reached deep into its grassroots support base and dispatched…four activists to Southampton Football Club, where they wore Saints shirts and held up mock £100 cheques made out by ‘ A. Taxpayer’ – to support their claim that the charge would prevent Southampton fans from entering the city centre.
The scheme was also opposed by local Tory MP for Southampton Itchen Royston Smith as a threat to ‘jobs and livelihoods.’ Last month, the City Council announced that it was removing plans to impose £100 charges from its CAZ.
And today, the TPA has been bragging about its victory as part of an ongoing attempt to raise its profile further, with messages like this:
That feeling when a new tax is defeated
