I was fortunate enough this week to spend a sunny morning outdoors, and doing the best thing one can do outdoors: hitting the pavements to spread awareness of our latest campaign War on Waste.
After an obligatory team photo, five of us left TPA HQ for South West London in our brand-new T-shirts, with rather nice co-ordinating TPA-branded hemp bags to carry our mounds of leaflets. Our first campaigning stop turned out to be St. James’ tube station. In the queue to top up my Oyster I stood behind an American family whose little daughter appeared to be called Reagan. It occurred to me that parents who name their child after a President would be very susceptible to the TPA’s messages of reducing government waste and taxes. After chatting for a few moments about how they were from Chicago (like Milton Friedman, no less!) I pressed a leaflet upon them, leaving them for our next stop with good luck wishes in our ears.
We got out at Gloucester Rd. and began to pound the streets. The public generally reacted well to the campaign, thinking that cutting government waste is a common sense policy which politicians across the spectrum should aim for. Every taxpayer, will after all, benefit from a reduction in taxes if less government money is spent on llamas and fig trees.
Walking through a leafy square of white stucco houses, a voice called down from scaffolding on a house above us. Looking up it was a builder working on the external plasterwork, cheering us on. How novel, I thought, to be shouted at by a builder about taxes.
After a full morning of trekking around, chatting to people and dropping leaflets in the hot sunshine, we all flopped for lunch together, feeling thirsty, stronger for carrying all those leaflets, and cheered by the knowledge that the TPA’s mission is well thought of by so many people.