An interesting piece by Rupert Darwall in today’s Wall Street Journal explains how tax has once again become political centre-stage…

"The first signs of a taxpayer revolt came last October. With Mr. Brown poised to call an election to capitalize on his momentum in the polls, the Conservatives announced they would exempt the first £1 million (U.S. $1.95 million) from inheritance tax. It sent an electric shock through the electorate. Mr. Brown called off the election and his poll numbers tanked.

"The tipping point came in March. Through the winter, Labour had clawed back some of the Conservatives’ poll lead. Then came the annual budget. Steep hikes in annual car taxes – dressed up as measures to help cool the planet – took the levy on some family cars up to £400 a year. Labour’s ratings started to slide. They went into free-fall when people realized that Mr. Brown’s abolition of the 10% starter rate of income tax actually had the effect of raising taxes on the lower paid.

"Something big is happening in British politics: Taxation has re-emerged center stage. And as an issue, taxes favor the Tories. Conservative leader David Cameron was quick to exploit the change in the public mood, giving a speech with the Thatcherite theme of making government live within its means. And the policy lessons come more naturally to the Conservatives. Instead of squeezing the tax base and (as the Laffer curve predicts) collecting less revenue than you’d hoped, do the opposite. As happened under Conservative governments in the 1980s, tax reforms that cut people’s marginal rates and create far more winners than losers are good for the economy – and for winning elections."

…and gives the Tories some apt advice: avoid green taxes:

"Harder for the Conservatives to square with voters is their support for green taxes. The public is beginning to realize that there is no pain-free path to a low-carbon nirvana. Unlike Labour, though, the Conservatives are in the happy position of not having to reverse tax increases they’ve already announced. Raising the car tax cost Bill Clinton his first re-election as Arkansas governor. Having been forced to make concessions on the 10% band, Labour will also have to draw the sting of its higher car tax. While politically necessary, such concessions won’t help the prime minister. Voters can see the only reason the prime minister is responding to their concerns is because he is unpopular. Reward Gordon Brown with another term, and their leverage is gone."

With the latest polls showing that only 2 per cent think they don’t pay enough tax, the political party that sets out a plan to rein in government spending and substantially reduce the overall burden of tax will reap the electoral rewards.

The Times reports that successful schools are going to be given the right to expand a little.  This will mean more places in successful schools and a bit more pressure on poor performing schools to up their game.  Unfortunately, schools have only been allowed an extremely limited amount of new freedom.

Expansion is still severely limited.  Being allowed "up to 26 extra pupils a year above their official limit" does not leave a lot of room to grow.

More than that, this only allows schools freedom in one direction.  The Government have now gone some way towards accepting the principle that the right response to a shortage places at the best schools is to ensure their are more such places, instead of dreaming up new ways of rationing quality education.  Why are they restricting educational freedom to the expansion of existing schools?

There are good reasons to think that the best schools are small ones.  By only allowing good schools to expand we might put them in the unfortunate conundrum of either staying small and not offering opportunities to more children or expanding and risking their standards.  A better solution might be for new schools to be established.  Beyond that, why are we assuming that the best providers of new school places are necessarily existing schools?

What if a business can run a great school effectively, or a co-operative of teachers, or an existing school wants to support a new institution in some kind of franchise arrangement?  A successful innovation system would encourage a diversity of providers and real innovation in the way schools are run.  Swedish-style school reforms can put power over the education system in the hands of parents and allow any organisation to set up a new school and respond to parental demand.

In yet another call for lower taxes from a Labour politician, Alan Milburn told a charity conference in London that the Government must shrink the size of the state and called for measures to improve social mobility, including "cutting taxes for the low paid." He said:

"The old top down approach to governance will no longer work. It is not just that the public have reached the limits of what they will pay in taxes, although they have. People in low and middle income families are under pressure and feeling the pinch."

Quite right! It won’t be long before more in the Labour party recognise political reality. A benign "Dutch auction" between the parties on tax at the next election is exactly what hard-pressed taxpayers need.

The Freedom of Information (FoI) Act has been one of the greatest innovations in British political history in the way it has opened up Government to the public, allowing us to see a great deal of what is done with our money behind closed doors. It’s not perfect, it’s not comprehensive enough and it’s not backed up by sufficient punishments for those public bodies that flout it, but even the sneak peek behind the scenes that it allows means public servants can no longer operate secure in the knowledge that us poor chumps will never find out what they are doing with our money.

We make great use of FoI requests both in compiling large research papers and in uncovering one-off instances of waste, which in turn attract media attention to the fact that all too often our money is poured down the drain. Increasingly, our activists are sending off their own Freedom of Information requests to uncover waste around the country, so I thought it could be handy to provide a quick anatomy of a successful use of the Act.

May 22nd

We noticed that this company listed the British Council (taxpayer funding = £200m) as a satisfied customer – having apparently commissioned a tailor-made typeface from them, "British Council Sans". In the words of Tony Bains, Head of Design at the British Council,

Commissioning our own font was the best investment we could have made in our identity

This struck us as: a) completely unnecessary, b) probably very expensive. Just about every publicly funded body is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and a quick look at the British Council’s web site revealed their FoI department’s contact details.

The key thing with writing an FoI request is to get the wording right. It should be clear, functional and unequivocal about what you want to find out – don’t worry about it being boring, repetitive or too pernickety. Whilst many FoI Officers are perfectly happy to release information, some are expert at wriggling through cracks in peoples’ requests and if the information you’re after is particularly sensitive they may well be under a lot of pressure to find an excuse not to tell you. Make the wording precise, though, and they will find it difficult not to. Remember, too, to specify you are demanding the information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000!

In this instance we asked:

I would like to know details of

i) how much money was paid by the British Council to Monotype Imaging for the production and design of British Council Sans, the British Council’s font.
ii) in what financial year this transaction took place.
iii) what font the British Council used in its documents prior to the introduction of British Council Sans.
iv) please send me a copy of the British Council Sans font.

Once you’ve made your request, they have 20 days to reply. Mark it in your diary (in this case June 19th) sit back and wait!

June 11th

Dear Mr Wallace
Apologies for the delay in responding to your request.

The British Council paid £50,000 overall for the production and design of ‘British Council Sans’.  Payment was made after receipt of two invoices: the first payment date for £30,000 was 26/3/2002 and a second final payment of £20,000 on 25/7/2002.  I understand that the old fonts were Century Schoolbook and Univers.

Please find attached a copy of the font.  To my knowledge, no similar requests have been received by the British Council…

Our suspicions were proved right – £50,000 for a typeface is ridiculous to say the least. Here it is, in all its £50,000 glory, the font that cost taxpayers more than a year’s salary for three soldiers:

So, we phoned media contacts, sent a press release to the newspapers and kept our fingers crossed for the next day…

June 12th

The Daily Mail and The Sun ran the story – waste has successfully been revealed, and public servants held to account!

Of course, it doesn’t always run so smoothly. Sometimes you’ll find that the waste you may have suspected didn’t occur, or the body you are investigating may try to block your request, in which case you may want to appeal to the Information Commissioner.

We’ll provide tips on how to squirrel out information under those more difficult circumstances another time, but in the meantime, why not try putting in your own Freedom of Information requests? You can look at your local council, Primary Care Trust or Regional Development Agency, a Government Department or any one of 1,162 quangos and other agencies we recently uncovered. This is about throwing open the way the state spends our money, so go to it, and if you uncover taxpayers’ money being wasted, let us know!

Flying in the face of their already questionable claim to “an enviable reputation for forward-thinking and fiscal discipline”, Birmingham City Council have made the front page of today’s Birmingham Post due to the fact that they are currently advertising for seven (yes seven!) ‘Assistant Directors of Finance’.

Whilst trying to comprehend this move you may well fall into the trap of presuming that each of these ‘directors’ will take a division of duty (and you’d be correct), and so naturally they’d each be paid a proportion of the wages that might be paid to one presiding director, or perhaps two senior directors’ salaries might be split between them, or even three.

How very wrong you’d be on the latter assumption.

Each of these seven Assistant Directors of Finance will be paid up to £85k, plus relocation package. And Birmingham City Council certainly aren’t shy about any additional perks as more than a wink assures that successful candidates (all seven of them) will be very well looked after, as the advertisement boasts:

“Bring us the qualities we’re after, and in return we’ll reward you significantly. You’ll receive a salary of up to £85,000 per annum, a final salary pension scheme and a range of attractive benefits”.

According to deputy council leader, Paul Tilsley, they’re advertising to take on a whole team, and all of these positions existed beforehand. So even though they’ve been surviving with less than £595,000 per annum’s worth of finance directors up until now, and despite the fact they’re supposedly looking for ways to economise, they still thought they’d blow the lot and replace every last member of staff.

Does losing seven finance directors really mean you have to hire seven in replacement? Do the employers in our council really lack the dynamism to see that this was a perfect opportunity to cut costs and save local taxpayers’ money?

As for how one department could so rapidly morph into the Marie Celeste of local government, and what actually became of the original gang of seven assistant finance directors, well that’s really anyone’s guess. There’s a novel in there somewhere.

Birmingham City Council now has one standard deflection, and though it can take on different guises those familiar with their press statements could recognise it instantly, paraphrased it amounts to “We’re spending money to save money”. And this, of course, is exactly what they said of the IT invoice processing system, and what a wonderfully successful money-saver that proved to be with 30,000 outstanding payments owed to various contractors who had to wait literally months for them to be sorted (presumably manually in many cases).

Set to be part of their own Birmingham City Council ‘business transformation project’ the ethos behind hiring these seven finance directors is completely riddled with contradictions; they say they’re ‘transforming’, but they’re just hiring replacement staff; they’re looking for “suitably qualified private sector high-flyers” and that’s why the salaries are set high, but nevertheless “there will be a number of candidates who are internal”; they want to economise, but they’re flaunting their ability to offer final-salary pensions and "significant benefits", and perhaps worst of all is that they don’t even seem to recognise the irony of the fact that they’re hiring seven finance directors complete with inflated salaries and perks a-plenty “to make sure departments do not over-spend”.

With only one constituency left to declare, and only nine having voted "yes" (and one of those only doing so by 6 votes) it seems the Irish electorate have voted solidly to reject the EU Constitution Lisbon Treaty. It is imperative, not only for democracy but also for any sense of accountability that politicians in Brussels and in every EU capital city accept the result and listen to the people.

The EU, and the national politicians who are so much more keen on integration than their constituents, have an awful track record for ignoring referendum results.

In 1992, Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty, but instead of accepting the No vote and ditching the Treaty, it was put to another vote in 1993. Back in 2001, Ireland voted No to the Nice Treaty, but again another referendum was swiftly scheduled and it passed. Most recently, in 2005 the French and the Dutch voted No to the EU Constitution but instead of killing the document, it was reincarnated as the current Lisbon Treaty and brought straight back, this time without referenda in any country other than Ireland, despite being an almost identical document.

The EU cannot – and must not – continue flouting the law and the express will of the people. This Treaty has been rejected by the only people who have been given the opportunity to vote on it. In its previous guise as the Constitution it was roundly rejected by both France and Holland, both key EU players, and the British Government have chickened out of holding the referendum they promised in their 2005 manifesto because it was clear the British people would vote No. Legally it should die as soon as any one country refuses to ratify. And yet what is happening as a result of the Irish vote?

Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the Commission, has called for other states to continue ratification.

Gordon Brown has phoned President Sarkozy to assure him the UK will press ahead with ratifying the Treaty in Parliament.

The Dutch are continuing with ratification, despite the express wishes of their voters in 2005.

There is a clear divide regarding the European project – the people repeatedly vote No when they are asked about continuing integration, but the political class seem dedicated to forcing it through regardless. This cannot continue. The EU spends billions of pounds of our money, and controls an estimated 80% of our new legislation. The taxpaying and voting public cannot continue to be frozen out of the legislative and public policy arena – it is antidemocratic and offensive to the 450 million people who live in EU member states.

The collective leaders of the EU and its member nations should listen to the message being sent to them by the Irish people today. Judging by their track record, and their early responses, though, they won’t listen and will do their best to ride roughshod over our express wishes. If that happens, taxpayers’ money will continue to be spent inefficiently and unaccountably behind closed doors, screeds of unscrutinised legislation will continue to flow from Brussels into Whitehall, British business will continue to be throttled by red tape and public resentment of the undemocratic way the EU operates will continue to grow. One thing is sure – we cannot go on like this.