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 let’s throw in something about the nasty internet:

Policing isn’t about PR and fancy websites. It’s about communicating with people.

Ah, that’s better. Second sentence is still a bit contradictory though. So let’s add in something about cutting crime. Cutting crime and communicating aren’t contradictory of course, but it might just hide the meaning a bit…

Policing isn’t about PR and fancy websites. It’s about keeping people safe and communicating with people.

One final touch, let’s change that communicating bit:

Policing isn’t about PR and fancy websites. It’s about keeping people safe and reassuring the public.

And voila. Let’s hope no-one reading that thinks, “Hang on a minute. The public keep on telling researchers they are more reassured the more they know about what the police are doing in their area. So surely reassuring people is about PR and that pair of sentences doesn’t add up?”

Because that would just make it sound like we’ve gone for the easy jibe the media will love and to hell what boring stuff like the evidence that communicating with people does reassure them.

And that of course is something the Taxpayers’ Alliance would never do, isn’t it?

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 them messages on Twitter during the meeting asking them questions.

But TPA then say, no – they weren’t being hypocritical for criticising councillors for tweeting whilst also encouraging them because the quote they gave the press was in fact in response to being told tweets had been sent containing “sexual innuendo too explicit to print in a newspaper”. So the TPA was slamming the sending of such tweets, not tweeting in general from council meetings.

Yet the newspaper has not published any such tweets and there’s no record of anyone having sent such tweets. (Plus denials all round about there having such tweets.)

So back to the Western Morning News on this…

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 reclaimed and featured in the report were all very modest in their total cost. But – shock! Some interns decide to eat chocolate! Cue Daily Mirror outrage and a quote from the Taxpayers’ Alliance. (Yup, you guessed it – they too were outraged.)

But neither the Mirror not the TPA objected to Cameron employing interns. Or to them eating lunch. Or to them getting their lunch costs back.

No, it was specifically the inclusion of chocolate that the Mirror and TPA object to. Vegetables – no complaint. Chocolate – complaint. 45p on a Galaxy bar gets a front page photo. 45p on a piece of broccoli would have gone without comment.

So the story is really about how the Mirror and Taxpayers’ Alliance are happy not just to criticise the personal diet choices of interns, but think that Parliament’s rules for expenses should forbid certain diet choices.

Just imagine a world in which such micromanagement is let free. After all, why only ban interns from choosing chocolate? There’s other much less healthy food out there. And is a flapjack dipped in chocolate, chocolate or not? Or what about a jaffa cake – chocolate or not? That’d be one fun Parliamentary rule book: “Definitions of chocolate for Parliamentary finance purposes”.

And if such a book was published, what’s the betting the TPA and Mirror would then criticise it as a case of bureaucracy gone mad…?

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 in the Loire and has not paid British tax for years…

“The least we can expect for an organisation that purports to represent the interests of British taxpayers is that it is run by people that pay British tax,” said Jon Cruddas MP.

You can read the full story here.

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 Web 2.0 technologies, or some projects – it was just this blanket opposition), you’d have thought the Taxpayers’ Alliance would apply the same standards  to themselves?

In which case, they really had better shop themselves to their funders for wasting money as, er…, their own website is build on Web2.o technologies. As Simon Dickson points out:

I was interested to find out more about TPA’s view of ‘Web2.0′… so I visited their website. Or specifically, their Typepad-hosted blog. How very ‘Web2.0′ of them. I wonder do they know about the various government websites which have also used Typepad for its cheap hosting, instant availability and high degree of configurability. I haven’t heard them praising it, so maybe not.

But (and if you are a Taxpayers’ Alliance donor, you really should look away now) it’s worse than that. Because the Taxpayers’ Alliance ran a job ad for themselves earlier this year looking for someone specifically to work on Web2.0 projects for themselves:

The new venture will have an exciting Web 2.0 component, so a general familiarity with UK politics on the internet is essential and an understanding of Web 2.0 campaigning would be extremely beneficial. (Hat-tip: @otherTPA)

Not quite consistent with blanket opposition to using Web 2.0 technology as always being wasteful is it?

Mind you, one thing the Taxpayers’ Alliance has got right is their handling of the media (or, conversely, one thing the media has got wrong is the handling of the Taxpayers’ Alliance). I say that because this is only the latest in a series of increasingly extreme, verging on the absurd, comments – nearly all of which have been reported by the media at face value. Far more moderate comments from other pressure groups across the political spectrum are regularly accompanied by critical counter-quotes from others. The TPA, thought, usually gets a free ride.

Here’s a quick reminder of some of those other extreme comments: if you spend 11 seconds a day at work doing non-work stuff, it’s a terrible waste (even if you spend that time in your lunch hour), public sector bodies should never change their financial policies (a bit weird, you might think, give the TPA’s policy is to call for change, but hey ho) and training staff is a waste of money (the one exception where there was some comment back).

[Ed.: Stop! That's not how these stories are meant to be written. Rewind. Add all the numbers up to make it sound as big as possible. Rewrite. And here we go again...]

Facebook is going to be banned at Portsmouth Council after new figures outrageously revealed that its 4,500 staff waste an average of 413 hours a month in total on the site. The Taxpayers’ Alliance is outraged: “People are employed to work hard for the taxpayer and this is clearly a waste of public money”.

[Ed.: Much better. That's just how The Telegraph or Daily Mail would write up this sort of story. Think you've got the hang of this now.]

A cynic asks: do you think anyone at the Taxpayers Alliance spends 11 seconds a day on Facebook? Or The Telegraph or the Daily Mail? Just wondering.

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 "experimenting" with public money? It's to only do things that you are nearly certain will work. Anything else, well that is an experiment.

Yet we're surrounded by challenges that the public sector has faced for years: how to provide good quality health care without costs spiralling upwards, how to raise literacy levels amongst the the most deprived communities, how to cut repeated offending amongst criminals and so on.

In each case, if there was a sure, solid answer we'd have cracked the problem years ago. Far from experimenting being a bad thing, it's vital. The alternatives are either to think that doing what we've always done will somehow start working - or just to give up in despair and believe that nothing can be done better. It's incredibly arrogant to think that either all our public spending patterns are perfect (and so no need to experiment with any changes) or to think that your plans for changing them are so 100% certain surefire winners that no experimentation is involved in them.

Back in the real world, trying out different approaches is a good move, not a bad move.

It's also rather ironic for the Taxpayers' Alliance to be against "experimenting" with public money given that their overall approach to public spending would, if implemented, be a massive break with the past. In other words, it too would be an experiment. Somehow I doubt they really meant to say that it would be wrong to put into practice their own policies...

MPs, rightly, get to employ staff via the expenses schemes. (How else, for example, would an MP deal with the hundreds of letters and emails that many get each day?) If people are being employed to work for MPs, then in return MPs should be good bosses. Part of that involves identifying training needs for their staff and making sure they get that training.

The training Adam Price arrange wasn’t something completely unrelated to this job his staff have to do. If he’d been sending staff off on courses in knitting yogurt or melting chocolate, then fair enough. But the courses were directly relevant, covering topics such as dealing with the media.

So what does the Taxpayers’ Alliance attack amount to? It amounts to saying, “It’s outrageous that MPs are being decent employers! How dare they! We want bad staff!”

Yes, well.

Hat-tip: Peter Black on Freedom Central