Mark Pack

No, I didn’t think so either. Which makes the case of the Yes2AV.org domain name a little curious. Check the official records and you find that it is registered to Matthew Elliott, not the Australian cricketer but the man from the Taxpayers’ Alliance who is going to head up the “no” campaign for the AV [...] »

Start with this pair of sentences: Policing isn’t about communicating with people. It’s about communicating with people. That would be a pretty daft instant contradiction, wouldn’t it? But wait. Let’s say “PR” instead of “communicating”. Because PR = boo! bad! nothing to do with communicating! Policing isn’t about PR. It’s about communicating with people. Doesn’t quite work, does it? So [...] »

Well well well, this is a bit of a rum turn of events in Cornwall. Councillors send tweets during council meeting. Western Morning News runs a story about this, taking a few potshots and quoting The Taxpayers’ Alliance slamming the councillors for this behaviour. One of the councillors then points out that someone from the TPA was actually sending [...] »

Given my love of chocolate, today’s Daily Mirror front page at first made me happy. Four big colour photos of bars of chocolate! And David Cameron in an expenses scandal! But once I read the story, it quickly became clear David Cameron has done nothing wrong. He has interns. They get their lunch paid for. The lunches [...] »

From today’s Guardian: The Taxpayers’ Alliance, a campaign group that calls for tax and spending cuts and claims to represent the interests of taxpayers, has admitted one of its directors does not pay British tax. The Guardian has learned that Alexander Heath, a director of the increasingly influential free market, rightwing lobby group, lives in a farmhouse [...] »

Alex pointed out yesterday the Taxpayers’ Alliance opposition to the public sector using Web 2.o technologies: Taxpayers don’t want more Web2.0. They want an end to wasteful spending. Now, if you think that spending money on Web 2.0 is necessarily wasteful (and that was the full depth of the Taxpayers’ Alliance – no nuanced point about some [...] »

There has been widespread praise for Portsmouth Council after it was discovered that on average its staff only spend 11 seconds a day using Facebook. Despite the huge growth in the number of people using Facebook and the growing number of hours spent on the site by its users, Portsmouth Council staff are barely using [...] »

Mark Thompson has recently highlighted how frequently the Taxpayers' Alliance is quoted in the media. Mark gives some reasons for this, but it's a question highlighted again by a BBC report: Tim Newark, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, accused the council of "experimenting" with public money. This is a rather strange comment because  what's the alternative to [...] »

With all the genuine expenses targets available, you’d have through the Taxpayers’ Alliance would have found a better target than attacking a Plaid MP, Adam Price, for using part of his Parliamentary expenses to pay for his staff to go on training courses. MPs, rightly, get to employ staff via the expenses schemes. (How else, for [...] »