Stephen McPartland MP: My campaign to stop big companies dodging tax

Stephen McPartland is Member of Parliament for Stevenage and has written to the Chief Executives of all the FTSE 100 companies to ask them individually if they are willing to pledge their support for corporate tax transparency and if they will support a new international accountancy standard for country-by-country reporting. The responses are being published at www.taxchallenge.co.uk so that the general public know which FTSE 100 companies are willing to sign up to tax transparency and which are not. Follow Stephen on Twitter.

I took up the initiative after meeting Christian Aid supporters when the Tax Justice Bus visited Stevenage.  The tax justice campaigners believe that tax dodging by international companies costs the UK around £35 billion and developing countries an estimated $160billion per year. Just imagine the dramatic difference such a huge sum of money would make if it was available to invest in public services, infrastructure and other vital services essential for economic growth.

I know that Governments from all around the world will agree with the sentiment of greater tax transparency, but they will struggle to introduce it as every nation competes in the global race. Despite the best of intentions, I believe that in the end it will be up to the companies themselves to lead the way and they will only do that if their customers-the British public-drag them kicking and screaming towards tax transparency and a fairer tax system for us all.

Stephen McPartland: The case for effective urban campaigning

Stephen McPartland is a Party agent in North East Hertfordshire.

People worry about developing the right policies to motivate and enthuse electors in towns and cities to vote Conservative. However, communicating policy rather than policy development is the problem. We often hear that our policy is received well on the doorstep, but who tells voters our policies on the doorsteps in towns and cities? 

The honest answer is this does not happen and we have almost no organisation in many towns and cities other than on paper. The lack of any real representation in northern urban areas provides the starkest example of this problem, but we should not allow ourselves to believe that it is purely a northern problem. Excluding London, we have a serious lack of representation in most urban areas and this is an issue we must tackle not just talk about if we are to form the next government.

We all know the real challenge facing the Conservative Party is to re-engage with the electorate before the next election, but this must also be done on a practical organisational level if we are to achieve electoral success.

The purpose of this article is to provoke a discussion on the need for an "Urban Campaign Unit" that focuses on what practical steps we need to take to achieve electoral success in towns and cities.

The Party does not know how to campaign effectively in urban areas, traditional Conservative campaigning techniques just do not work. There are very few agents who have campaigned in urban areas and even less who have done so effectively. The Party recognises that to campaign effectively against the Liberal Democrats it has to campaign differently and has set up a Liberal Democrat Unit. It is now time to set up an active Urban Campaign Unit to develop the campaigns to make a real impact in our towns and cities.