Um… Sunny? Where do the BBC admit ‘excessively plugging’ the TPA?

The BBC say in the letter you cite that “The Taxpayers’ Alliance have been used reasonably regularly by BBC News on issues around taxation and public spending” which would appear to be in direct contradiction of your headline.

This story might more accurately read “BBC admit they ought to have said that the TPA and the Drivers Alliance are sister organisations”, because that’s really all you can draw from it.

This will be of no surprise to anyone who has watched the BBC move to the right over the last few years.

They hope this will curry favour with the tories when they win power. It won’t, so they are wasting their time.

Tim – The TPA and other sister organisations are of the same stock. So plugging both in the same report, without pointing out they are related, is giving them excessive platform. Hence the headline.

So does this mean they’ll be introduced as the “right-wing Taxpayers’ Alliance”, much the way the Spectator is introduced as “right wing magazine, the Spectator” – even though the BBC never put the “left-wing” classification on anything they introduce.

The BBC as ‘left-wing’? Hah! Only when compared to the AIDS denialism promoting Speccie

So presumably the next time someone from Alcohol Aware appears on the BBC with their latest scare story, flawed survey or illiberal initiative, they will be introduced as

“a representative of a fake charity set up and funded by the Department of Health to use your hard earned tax money to lecture you, publicise health issues relating to alcohol consumption and generally soften up public opinion for the draconian legislation that is planned to be implemented by Government.”

Good.

What puzzles me is why the BBC doesn’t use the excellent and non-partisan publications of the Institute of Fiscal Studies more often, such as the IFS Survey of Public Spending in the UK, the IFS Survey of the UK Tax System, both recently updated, or this topical paper: Loosening public services squeeze requires tax rises or welfare cuts
http://www.ifs.org.uk/pr/fiscal_squeeze.pdf

IFS links for reference:

IFS A Survey of Public Spending in the UK
http://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn43.pdf

IFS Survey of the UK Tax System
http://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn09.pdf

A valuable resource for international comparisons between the relatively affluent OECD countries is the annual OECD Factbook:

OECD Factbook 2009
http://oberon.sourceoecd.org/vl=5792865/cl=19/nw=1/rpsv/factbook2009/index.htm

This source is fairly well known to academics, journalists and civil servants but seems to be largely unknown to the public at large. Professional politicians, in so far as they know about it, tend to be discrete because many comparisons are hugely embarrassing for political causes. For instance, one such is that Denmark and Sweden regularly rate highly compared with other OECD countries on quality of life indices despite having relatively high tax burdens.

Have fun digging.

Bob- The IFS are serious economists, and not a Conservative front group unlike the Tax Avoiders Alliance. They do not provide good “Public sector workers are greedy leeches and parasites on society” quotes on every story. They provide more boring stories.

The Tory’s in disguise Alliance exposed.

I can’t believe that they have got away with it for so long.

[5] Sunny

Was that aimed at my comment?

To clarify, I wasn’t suggesting the BBC is left-wing (that’s a different argument). I was saying that the BBC seem quite ready to introduce as ‘right wing’ anyone they deem to be so, but they never introduce left-leaning panellists as ‘left-wing’. I was pointing out the inconsistency, not saying the BBC is left-wing.

They always swallow the women’s pay inequality line whole as well, no matter how tendentious the stats backing them up. The BBC seem to provide an equal opportunity both for silly right wing and left wing stats to get a platform. I am guessing it has something to do with how efficient their press offices are.

3 – Incidentally Sunny, it really doesn’t follow that because the BBC didn’t mention that the TPA and the DA are sister organisations that they have admitted excessively plugging either. In fact they specifically rejected this interpretation by saying that they have used the TPA a “reasonable” amount.