http://conservativehome.blogs.com/localgovernment/2008/12/publicity-spend.html

and

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/centreright/2008/12/cllr-ken-meeson.html

If you have a press office you should probably sack them now. If you don’t you should probably watch that episode of the West Wing where Josh gets involved in a slagging match with the Drudge Report because, frankly, this thread doesn’t make the Tax Payers Alliance look a very clever or serious organisation.

In this thread and in the one that Matthew thingie-gummie mentioned in comment 12 (http://don-paskini.blogspot.com/2008/11/taxpayers-alliance-fact-check.html) the senior researchers at the TPA seem to have admitted that they pick the economic measures that they score research against pretty much randomly from a bunch of options (”Now, you can make a reasonable case for using the GDP deflator or, I believe, the RPI. Neither is really right or wrong.”). This doesn’t exactly give the impression that the organisation does serious, hard-core research.

No doubt I’ll get responses citing very serious-minded stuff with lots initials/acronyms and calculations. I don’t care. In fact, I’d like to get a response like this from the TPA because it will demonstrate my point more eloquently than I can manage.

The fact that TPA researchers have nothing better to do than post on blogs, in between whipping off the odd press release that fails to mention what measures their research is scored against, suggests the TPA’s comms people aren’t maintaining an adequate control over the message. In turn, this suggests the TPA comms people are pretty shit.

It is possible that posting on random blogs, getting suckered into debates that appear to expose the weakness of the TPA’s research, and looking like a bunch of geeks that have nothing better to do at 1am is part of the organisation’s deliberate comms strategy. If so I think Don Paskini and his mates can rest easy.

After all, people want real help right now. The public’s not so interested in do-nothing whiners.

I’m glad you’ve taken the blinkers off for a second to actually see reality. Welcome to it, maybe you can actually contribute to this site now.

Wow, Lee has finally said something I agree with. He has managed to climb off the fence and make a stand.

Well, claiming you believe something is pretty hard to carry out in practice.

They might, but in reality whenver they get the chance to say “this tax needs to be cut, why are we paying tax?!” they say it. It’s never got a deeper message, it’s always “cut tax, we don’t want to pay!”

Claiming to be a libertarian is the easiest thing in the world. Any half wit can do it. Actually carrying it out , well that is the interesting bit.

FFS, don’t you see how daft a position that is?

Is Chomsky lying when he calls himself a libertarian? Chris Dillow? And how is “there’s no such thing as a real libertarian” helping your point about it being impossible to be a Lib Dem and a libertarian?

Did you even bother to read the top results of my links? The stuff by Dillow (who writes here regularly) is a fairly good overvue.

Several contributors to this site are libertarians. I’m a type of libertarian. It’s a label applied to a certain outlook, and can have left wing, right wing and lunatic fringe adherents.”

Sorry, but I don’t believe anybody who claims they are a libertarian. I have met many such people, quite a lot in America, but they quickly show that they are not when you start asking them basic question about how much of the state they want to get rid of. Libertarians are usually all for getting rid of things they don’t approve of, but keeping their own pet projects or beliefs going.

Sorry, but I don’t believe anybody who claims they are a libertarian. I have met many such people, quite a lot in America, but they quickly show that they are not when you start asking them basic question about how much of the state they want to get rid of. Libertarians are usually all for getting rid of things they don’t approve of, but keeping their own pet projects or beliefs going.

Most so called libertarians are sanctimonious hypocrites in my opinion.

Why, for example, other than for historically contingent reasons, must rubbish collections be organised by local government when food provision isn’t

Everyone needs to eat. Not everyone feels the need to dispose of their rubbish properly.

Fly tipping remains a public health hazard, even with free council waste tips—my local council is looking into extending opening hours and putting signs up with maps in prominent fly tipping problem areas.

If you have to pay a private contractor to collect your rubbish, why not instead throw it over the nearest cliff or into someone else’s back garden? It became a duty of councils to collect waste when it was obvious too many people were ducking their responsibility to dispose effectively, and enforcement was pretty much impossible.

I would love to be in a society where everyone truly took responsibility for such things. But we’d need to start with things a lot closer to things people won’t obviously shirk on first.

One approach might be to mandate manufacturers and bill them for collecting their waste regardless of where it ends up—pretty sure deposit schemes on a lot of packaging, especially bottles, would soon become the norm. But even then you’d have some stuff you couldn’t deal with in that way.

I think you are seeing things in a slightly two dimensional way there though. It is not just a question of more efficient services but also of which services can best be provided by government, and also EVEN IF government has to be involved in some way, whether it should be in the sort of unitary way that services are provided now with a ‘council’ organising everything from rubbish collections to Christmas decorations.

Why, for example, other than for historically contingent reasons, must rubbish collections be organised by local government when food provision isn’t. And to be against government spending/taxation isn’t to be opposed to the environment either. The TPA might just favour private property solutions to pollution and other environmental problems, the sort of solutions that can only emerge if government disengages. The assumption that you need government and a large bureaucracy to manage all these problems has to be challenged.

Matthew:

“The view that you are better than everyone else leads to aristocracy or the kind of nannying socialism that the TaxPayers’ Alliance very much stands against.”

The trouble is that the taxpayers’ alliance isn’t asking the government or councils to spend their money better, they’re asking to be taxed less. There is some middle ground to be found on waste, but I’ve never seen the TPA be reasonable in their demands for taxation cuts. As such it’s very much seen that you are essentially wanting to keep your “own money” at the expense of those that rely on welfare and services, and potentially at the expense of things like the environment.

If that isn’t a statement of your individual needs being more important than other people’s, and thus that you are better than them, I don’t know what is.

One such case – although I’ve no idea whether Friedman ever considered it – is that of the destruction of potential wealth by act of gift. The most obvious case is that of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and html, without which none of us would be talking to each other

This and the following paragraph is utterly nonsensical. I say this only because you seem like a fairly intelligent person who can learn from his mistakes, but you’ve basically just publicly put your name to a whole set of opinions which bear no relation to reality.

TBL didn’t invent HTML out of nothing; the concept of hypertext had been around for quite a while, and HTML itself is merely a vocabulary of the pre-existing SGML standard. Creating an open standard out of it was not a special act of public spiritedness and nor did it have anything to do with his status as a public sector worker (it is hard to imagine that HTML would have been worth anything if he had sought to own the intellectual property, even if it would have been possible to do so). There has long been a system of standardising data formats for data interchange, much of this work done by corporate vendors. Would you give the same praise that you give to TBL for gifting HTML to the world to JP Morgan for doing the same with AMQP? Or were you just trying to score a point in the hope that nobody who actually understands this stuff was reading it?

If the Taxpayers’ Alliance had any analyses or guiding principles that might make it easier to achieve such savings, that could be a valuable contribution to local governance. Having looked at their website, however, I am disappointed. I could find nothing that addressed the real issues of finding efficiencies in local government.

The only study I could find that was relevant was their analysis of publicity costs. This has a number of basic flaws: most egregiously, it ranks councils by absolute spend rather than spending as a proportion of total budget, and it compares years apparently without adjusting for inflation.

Furthermore, it presents this data without any insight into what this money might be being spent on. A council which is taking on extra streetsweepers to provide cleaner streets will spend money to advertise these positions – is this something the TPA object to? A council that is forced to freeze recruitment due to massive financial mismanagement will spend less money on advertising jobs – would the TPS approve of this council? Or, to pick an example from my own experience, when I introduced a new waste and recycling system to Cambridge, it was important to spend money on publicity so that people would be informed about the changes and would be able to use the new system. That meant an increase in publicity costs, even though the changes on the whole introduced significant efficiency gains. Does the TPA disapprove of the extra publicity costs, or approve of the efficiency gains? It can’t have both.

This analysis, as a whole, is laughably bad and I would be disinclined to take advice on governance from anyone willing to put their name to it. If I were still an executive councillor I would oppose any effort to bring the TPA into budgetary decisions, not for any ideological reason, but simply because they are obviously crap at it.

Several contributors to this site are libertarians. I’m a type of libertarian. It’s a label applied to a certain outlook, and can have left wing, right wing and lunatic fringe adherents.

Do try to at least know the basics of what you’re talking about? It’d make the world easier. Google is your friend

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=left+libertarian+“chris+dillow”
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=left+libertarian

Of course he is not being consistent.

If he is a libertarian then he should not stand as a Lib Dem politician. He is certainly not being consistent if he stands as one thing (Lib Dem) and then acts like someone from the tax payers bullshit party.

Also, if you look Gavin up, you’ll find he’s well known in Lib Dem circles for being, well, a committed libertarian with a tendency to annoy his colleagues (he got expelled from his council group recently for being, well, a libertarian).

I disagree with Gavin, and he’s nowhere close to the mainstream of the party, but he’s a lot less disreputable than, say, having John Reid or Ruth Kelly in your party. At least he’s consistent.