Alex pointed out yesterday the Taxpayers’ Alliance opposition to the public sector using Web 2.o technologies:
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).
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24 Comments
Yes, yes BUT – in the case of councils, that’s *taxpayers* money, and therefore completely different standards must apply (gives smug, “knowing” TPA look)
In TPA-world it seems taxpayer-funded bodies must use vellum and quills, and let the rest of the world pass them by, in order to save tuppence-hapenny on the rates.
Do you really not get it, or are you pretending to be stupid? The point isn’t that private individuals might choose to spend their own money in a certain way, the point is that public bodies shouldn’t choose to waste our money. Is that really too complicated to understand?
I think the TPA must have a machine now that spits out a soundbite that sounds vaguely connected to the topic, without thinking about what they are actually saying. Similarly, yesterday the TPA were quoted criticising councils for continually wasting taxpayers money, yet the whole point of the article was that the council concerned were saving taxpayers money by abolishing something unnecessary. Maybe the TPA just don’t think government at whatever level can ever do anything good.
Let’s be honest, if the Taxpayers Alliance had been around 20 years ago they’d have been complaining that Councils were wasting money on providing staff with computers, and if they’d been around 100 years ago they’d have been insisting that electric lighting was a dangerous luxury in government offices…
The Orator, one presumes that it is you that does not ‘get it’. Public bodies who waste money through inefficient management or incompetent procurement should be taken to account, that is certain, but claiming that a particular vision of delivering public services is ‘wasting money’ is a partisan standpoint, and not one with which all taxpayers will agree.
The TPA provides a valuable service inasmuch as it holds inefficient public sector bodies to account, but when it presumes to speak for all taxpayers, without any sort of democratic mandate – as it does above – it begins to look ridiculous.
It’s never claimed to have a ‘democratic’ mandate, although as of September 2008 (and I’ve no reason to suppose this number has since gone down) it did have 20,000 registered supporters. It doesn’t hold public bodies to account, it exposes their waste in order that we can choose to hold them to account.
There’s a very good point in here about the media’s extraordinary attitude to the TPA, but it’s kinda lost under a quite silly point. If we’re so sure the TPA don’t have a democratic mandate, why are we trying to prove their “hypocrisy” as if they do, just in order to have a snipe? Let’s not turn into Liberal Conspiracy.
But the TPA does claim to speak on behalf of all taxpayers – hence the sentence “Taxpayers don’t want more Web2.0”. It claims it knows what they want, all of them, as a unanimous group. This is a ridiculous position, given even half a second’s thought. My reference to democratic mandate implies that the only body who can claim to speak for taxpayers is one elected to spend money on their behalf, or indeed elected to hold that money-spending body to account. That provides legitimacy – anything else is merely empty rhetoric. Your point about the subject of accountability is the facile pedantry of someone who’s lost an argument.
And Alix, I must disagree. Contemporary politics and the dispositions of voters therein is formed by the information they have access to and that which is provided for them. Therefore, anyone attempting to influence the opinions of the electorate is a political player, and as such, fair game. This includes the media – would you object to anyone pointing out the hypocrisy of the Sun?
That said, this particular article is gutter sniping, and as such not really effective. Take them to task for the areas of public service provision they consider to be wastes of money, not silly little slips like this one.
“would you object to anyone pointing out the hypocrisy of the Sun?”
I think the nature of the hypocrisy being pointed out here is a bit different. The Sun treats different stories inconsistently in accordance with their political stance while maintaining the appearance of being a pure information outlet. The TPA treats public expenditure differently to private expenditure in accordance with their political beliefs while maintaining the appearance of being… an organisation devoted to treating public expenditure differently to private expenditure in accordance with their political beliefs. It’s all on the table. I certainly agree they’re fair game, particularly for some of the risible nonsense they come out with regarding inheritance tax, but what’s being reported here isn’t a “slip” at all. It’s all quite in accordance with their stated beliefs, whatever you think of those.
Alix: I think there are two problems with the line of argument you suggest.
First, it’s not in fact the one the TPA use to defend themselves. For example, in the previous thread about the 11 seconds on Facebook being a shocking waste, the TPA’s defence was that 11 seconds is too much anyway. They’re happy to defend the 11 seconds figure as being wrong.
Second, if you follow through the logic of your point you end up in some rather strange places. So let’s say that taxpayer funded staff spending 11 seconds a day on non-work stuff is wrong, but (because it’s funded differently) staff in a private company spending 11 seconds a day on non-work stuff is ok. In other words, you’re saying that it is ok for the private sector to be less efficient than the public sector. But wait, if that’s the case, then surely the answer to delivering public services effectively overall is to, er…, nationalise lots of things. It’s an ironic flipping of the usual argument that the private sector is more efficient, but who knows – perhaps the TPA is then really a Communist front…
I can’t decide whether you’re wilfully obfuscating or just totally missing the point here, Mark.
The TPA exists to hold strong opinions about public money and what happens to it, right? That, whatever we might think of it and however they go about it, is their avowed cause. They do not exist to hold any particular view on how private companies should go about delivering efficient communications. The “hypocrisy” here is meaningless. There is no contradiction between being a pressure group concerned with getting public money spent a certain way while, as a private organisation, spending your own money that way yourself. The TPA might well, for example, object if everyone in the NHS was given a year’s supply of chocolate on the taxpayer as part of their salary arrangements, but that wouldn’t make it hypocritical of them to offer that benefit themselves to their employees. Because it’s private money. It’s up to them what they do with it. And from their point of view, expenditure of public money is subject to different rules.
Neither Alix: I just think your distinction doesn’t wash. The TPA argues that staff spending 11 seconds a day on Facebook is wasteful (even if it is during their lunch hour). How does whether the salaries of staff are paid for privately or publicly alter the question of whether 11 seconds is awful or trivial? If doing a full time job isn’t compatible with those 11 seconds, then that applies to anyone who is employed to do a full time job.
The hypocrisy comes in because I bet you many TPA staff spend more than that amount of time doing non-work things during their time in the office, but do you think they say to their funders, “Yup, we waste your money at work?”
You’re thinking too abstractly. 11 seconds isn’t OBJECTIVELY better or worse depending on whether the money allegedly wasted is public or private at all. The point with private money is that it’s up to the private organisation how they waste it, and the consequences rebound only on them. If the TPA don’t crack down on their staff going on Facebook they will suffer whatever consequences may be. It’s got nothing to do with the rest of us. Their relationship with their funders are their business. With public money the consequences do rebound on the rest of us – it is our business.
Alix: supposing someone says to me, “You are an immoral person for eating chocolate” but they eat chocolate themselves, paid for by their own money. Even though their own consumption of chocolate doesn’t directly affect me (assuming they are not buying up the world’s supply!) and I’m not paying for their chocolate, it would still be hypocritical for them to tell me that something is wrong despite them doing it themselves. On the logic of your last comment though, you would have to say that is not hypocritical, and doing one thing whilst telling other people to do something else is fine.
That analogy does not work. You and the hypocritical person telling you off for eating chocolate are both using your own money and your eating chocolate does not adversely affect the other person. In effect, the analogy assumes that public and private money are the same. If, on the other hand, you were the government and were using public money to buy chocolate, and the TPA has a go at you for it even though they spend a lot on chocolate themselves as a private organisation, then no, they are not being hypocritical. They are rightly treating public expenditure as something that has to be scrutinised and where necessary criticised – because with private money that scrutiny and criticism will come automatically in the shape of the market (or, in the case of the TPA, the funders).
Alix: Let’s say I was a donor to the TPA and you worked there. If I said “I don’t like that you are wasting my money in the same way that my taxes are being wasted” what would your response be to me?
But that’s their business, Mark, that’s the point. It’s their money. They presumably think they have good reasons to have decided to spend their money on web 2.0, just as they presumably think they have good reasons to suggest that local councils shouldn’t. Now, you can take issue with either of those positions (not that you’d have the information necessary to tackle the former), but what you cannot do is state that they are hypocritical, when one position concerns public money and public decisions and the other concerns private money and private decisions. If Sir Richard Branson was called in as a govt adviser, and suggested that it would not be a good idea for local councils to start running airlines, would you call him a hypocrite?
The consequences for the expenditure of private money will rebound directly on the spender. The consequences for the expenditure of public money rebound on, well, the public, when it wasn’t their specific direct choice to spend the money. If the TPA spend their money badly, their funders will call them up and say “We don’t like how you’re spending the money we give you, so we’re withdrawing it.” If the govt spends our money badly and we try the same thing, it’s called tax evasion. We have no opt-out. And if the govt spends our money badly and then needs more to cover the shortfall, they tax us some more. It is a closed market. There is no built-in mechanism for regular and timely feedback for public expenditure in the same way that there is for private expenditure. The nearest thing (neither regular nor timely) is voting, and of course part of the point of pressure groups like the TPA is to influence votes.
I think what this is really about is that you disagree with the TPA’s position that public spending on web 2.0 is a waste of money. In which case, well, why not just own that opinion and convince people of it? (I’m sure you could convince me, for example). Instead you’ve tried to “catch them out”, and in a way that doesn’t work at all.
Alix: I think your first paragraph gets to the heart of what we disagree on. (Hurrah! Finally we’ve got there!)
You say, “they have good reasons to have decided to spend their money on web 2.0, just as they presumably think they have good reasons to suggest that local councils shouldn’t.” But my view is that the way in which they criticised Web 2.0 and the way in which they criticised people spending time on Facebook didn’t make this distinction.
In both cases they made a blanket criticism which didn’t give any reason as to why it would apply to councils but not to a private organisation. Had they done that, it’d be a different matter, but they didn’t – they made blanket comments.
“In both cases they made a blanket criticism which didn’t give any reason as to why it would apply to councils but not to a private organisation.”
Actually, it did. It wasn’t, as represented in your piece above, “opposition to the public sector using Web 2.o technologies”. It was a specific criticism of the proposed creation of a new post associated with Web 2.0, at a salary of £75,000+ a year, and it specifically cited the record debt of the public sector as a reason why there was a need for economies.
Quite possibly the Taxpayers’ Alliance doesn’t have a record debt (or, perhaps, any debt at all), and feels it can afford to employ someone in a £25,000+ position with a Web 2.0 “component”.
“…which didn’t give any reason as to why it would apply to councils but not to a private organisation.”
Apart from HB’s clarification of the original statement, why would anyone expect the TPA to give such reasons? One of the first things I pointed out was that they are an organisation which exists to discuss public expenditure. It’s in their name. Why would you assume by default that everything they say applies to private expenditure as well? They don’t include a disclaimer with every press release saying “This statement does not apply to French public expenditure” but you wouldn’t assume that therefore it did.
Alix: given the TPA’s position is “here’s something our own staff do, but we think it is wrong for other staff to do”, I think that gives a pretty clear answer as to why they should give a reason for treating these two situations differently. (And as you may guess, no – I don’t think the question of where the money for those staff comes from makes for a decent explanation.)
A footnote: I’d use this parallel. Imagine two receptionists in a hospital. Both have the same job descriptions, responsibilities and hours of work. One is in a BUPA hospital, one is in an NHS hospital (ie one is privately funded, one is state funded). They both are employed to work an 8 hour day, with an hour of lunch, but spend 5 hours a day on Facebook doing non-work things. That’s wasteful, for both of them. If one was to say to the other, “It’s awful – you are wasting too much time on Facebook”, that would be hypocritical. It might also be true, but it would also be hypocritical – and the fact that they’re funded differently doesn’t make a difference.
Another inapplicable analogy.
Bupa is not an organisation that exists with the aim of commenting on the behaviour of the state. The TPA is. Therefore it does. And it is quite permissible and logical for it to make a statement about public expenditure that differs from how it views and goes about its own private practice, as explained in my previous two comments. I don’t really know how to put this any more simply.
A secondary reason, and a revealing one, for this latest analogy not working is that it brings the argument down to the level of individual morality (like your original chocolate one). We all expect individuals to keep the same moral code as the one they preach – that’s obvious. Because we believe that all individuals are equal and the same. But public and private entities are not the same. They do have a different relationship with those who create and/or sustain them, as I have explained above.
The BUPA analogy could highlight the TPA argument. If the BUPA receptionist said to the NHS receptionist: “You’re spending 5 hours a day on facebook is wasting my taxes, this is unfair”
The NHS receptionist says ‘YOU too spend 5 hours on facebook!” but that doesn’t cost the NHS receptionist a dime (assuming he’s not a BUPA shareholder or customer, so why does he care?)
Fundamentally though it’s not hypocrisy because the TPA is not a local council and technology is wasteful or useful depending on the cost and the context.
Web 2.0 (aside from being a stupid buzzword) is generally used to mean technology making use of user generated content. Amazon reviews tend to get highlighted as a shining example of ‘pre web2.0 web2.0 tech’.
So the argument should be do councils need to spend 75k on technology that allows tax payers to share information? Whilst the local council could run a wiki or something to promote local business / attractions / parks and possibly request comment on changes to policy?? I am pretty dubious that this should cost them 75k.