You were right: The TaxPayers' Alliance were the 'one to watch'

Last year ConservativeHome readers voted The TaxPayers' Alliance the 'One To Watch' in the first Conservative Movement Awards.  It's certainly been a good year for the TPA.  Its long campaign for the abolition of inheritance tax has been taken up to a large extent by the Conservatives (and to a lesser extent by Labour).  Last night - at the Stockholm Network's Golden Umbrella awards - the TPA won the Innovator of the Year accolade.  An analysis of media hits for September, October and November 2007 (based on a UK search of Factiva) also suggests that the TPA is top of the London think tank league although media hits is only one (probably over-rated) measure of a think tank's impact.

All of the major centre right think tanks' media hits are listed in the graphic on the right.

The TPA achieved 133 media hits (not broadcast media) in November.  That compares with the 341 for George Osborne, 165 for William Hague and the 125 for Michael Gove in Iain Dale's 'Media Tarts' list.

Comments

[Conservative Homer]

Surprised MigrationWatch Isnt Further up the table, they certainly seem to have had the most exposure recently to me. Cant argue with statistics though.

[James Sproule]

Congratulations, to the TPA for leading an absolutely vital debate. Lest it be forgotten Conservative candidates were forbidden from supporting the TPA at the last election!

[HF]

TPA good year?

Like their response to Brown's spring budget?
:-)

[Merry Tricious]

Perhaps next year they could provide some proof that we're currently on the wrong side of the Laffer curve

[Bexie]

Reduction in corporation and income tax revenue? that would be a good one...

[Iain]

I too am surprised that Migrationwatch isn't higher up the table , if not top. Could it be that their migration stance is now being aired by many others, and while many more people are arguing from the Migartionwatch perspective it means aren't getting the credit/hits. This might just explain the TPA heading the list, for there has been few people standing up for lower taxes, and as the lone voice representing people on this issue they are getting all the hits!

[Robert McIlveen]

While the TPA has undeniably done a good job on media coverage, it seems a bit unfair to compare it to some of the other think tanks - institutions like the Adam Smith Institute or Politeia are much more influential than the media hit scale would suggest, while I would suggest MigrationWatch is higher profile with the public but less influential with policy makers.

[ACT]

While those 'facts' from Factiva are pretty much worthless (try Lexis or any papers' own cuts for a rather truer picture), that graphic's got one thing right: the absolute and total sinking without trace of the CPS. Well done Ruth Lea.

[TPA Supporter]

TPA is a campaigning organisation, like the Countryside Alliance and NO2ID, not a think tank. It has tens of thousands of members.

The low figures for the IEA, ASI, CPS and Politeia show that the old think thank model is out-dated. Think tanks have little influence unless, like Policy Exchange, they have direct access to the Party leadership.

I have stopped all my think tank subscriptions as they were a waste of money. Campaigners like the TPA and TFA (Better Off Out) are more effective and worth backing with time and money.

And unlike certain European "free market" think tanks, they do not focus on policy agendas of multinational donors like Pfizer, Microsoft and Exxon Mobil! Hint - look for publications against drug counterfeiting, stopping parallel trade and supporting intellectual property dominating their websites.

[Deputy Editor]

Mark Wallace was good on BBC 24 before praising the H&F tax cut.

Coventry Council have responded to their campaign on publicity costs and said they will cut them as a result.

[HF]

The TPA has not changed the ability to talk about tax cuts like Migrationwatch has successfully done on immigration?

We still have the media using words like investment to talk about Government spending.

There is no effective comparison of council spending set out in league tables produced by the TPA.

[TPA Supporter]

HF, Migration Watch cannot claim all the credit for us being able to debate immigration. One organisation cannot change the climate of opinion on its own. TPA has contributed significantly our renewed ability to talk about tax cuts. George Osborne's IHT announcement at party conference reflected that.

The fact that we could not talk about tax cuts for several years reflects badly on the more established think tanks (such as those mentioned in my earlier post). The IEA model is at least 10 years out of date in the new multimedia world. Where are the new Hayeks and Friedmans to lead the fight for liberty?

The free market and Conservative think tanks across the globe thought that they had won when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Left took advantage of their complacency and reinvented itself as the environmental movement. Cameron's blue green nonsense demonstrates how the environmental left have been winning the ideological battles of the last decade.

The TPA is a young campaigning organisation, founded and run by young champions of freedom who are filling the vaccuum left by the old guard. They, like NO2ID, need our support not criticism for the errors and mistakes of their predecessors.

[Thom]

HF seems to have been watching a completely different Taxpayers' Alliance to the rest of us - they've been doing a great job.

What do you mean, they've done "no effective comparison of council spending"? Only the other day there was the launch of some studies doing exactly that - and it seemed to get a lot of media coverage. (http://devilskitchen.me.uk/2007/12/tpacouncil-spending-1.htm)

And when you sneer about media coverage rather than Westminster Village influence, remember this is about winning the argument in the whole country too. As TPA supporter says, the IHT shift shows the TPA has Wesminster influence, as well.

[Drusilla]

If we're still allowed to mention his sacred name, surely Policy Exchange's numbers were artificially bumped up by the sheer number of time Nicholas Boles has been tagged as 'former chief executive of Policy Exchange' etc, not least during his truncated mayoral campaign? Suit yourself, but to me, anyway, this seems a curiously haphazard way to measure a think tank's impact, let alone its value to conservatism more broadly.

[Rod Sellers]

TPA have done a great job but for sheer courage and persistence I am amazed that MigrationWatch are not higher up the table. They kept going when everyone else was too embarrased and were proven spot on. Another pressure group that deserves more praise is the Optimum Population Trust www.optimumpopulation.com At the end of the day it is massive artificially induced population growth that will do for us all.

[Editor]

I'm on record for worrying that another Eurosceptic think tank/ campaign group was of doubtful value but I take exception to ACT's remarks about Ruth Lea. Few people have been such articulate exponents of conservative beliefs over the years. I'm also confident that Jill Kirby will take the CPS forward in very new and thoughtful ways.

[BruxInsider]

The think tank movement/civil society could be a revolution in British politics if it manages to get the right momentum. Our main political parties are either too scared or too exhausted to pursue the big ideas of the day in any meaningful fashion. It is Open Europe, under the brilliant leadership of Neil O’Brien, which has done the running over the European Constitution. It is Global Vision, with Sara Rainwater and Ruth Lea, who are setting the parameters of debate about the future of Britain’s relationship with the EU. Bill Cash’s European Foundation must also take some credit, for a spirited, if low-profile impact. At a time when the Tories are calling for a referendum on the European Constitution only as a “matter of trust” (and deliberately NOT as a matter of principle), these folks are the people leading the conservative debate. The Conservative Party continues to fiddle while Rome burns.

[sarani]

The TaxPayers' [sic] Alliance should drop the pretense that it is a grassroots movement and become a political party. It should look to New Zealand, where the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT) spawned a separate political party ACT New Zealand, which advocates much the same policies.