Christopher Snowdon is Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs
In June 2012, the IEA published Sock Puppets, a report which looked at the evidence, and implications, of taxpayer funding for the large and growing element of ‘civil society’ that is politically active. This was followed in February 2013 with Euro Puppets, which discussed the endemic use of public money to finance political campaign groups in the European Union. Both papers generated public debate and drew responses from third sector organisations.
Since the first Sock Puppets paper was written, further examples have come to light, both here and abroad. As Ian Birrell reported in The Independent, the Coalition Government’s IF Campaign for increased foreign aid spending was “created by charities in collaboration with the politicians who were the purported target of their pressure”. The campaigns for minimum pricing of alcohol and plain packaging of tobacco have been largely financed by the Department of Health, and both sides of the HS2 debate have been campaigning on the taxpayers’ shilling. Meanwhile, new research from think tanks such as New Direction and the Institute of Public Affairs have highlighted the scale of state-funded activism in the EU and Australia.
Whether we describe this phenomenon as ‘government lobbying government’, ‘funding the cheerleaders’ or ‘propaganda by proxy’, using taxpayers’ money to fund special interest groups is troublesome for many reasons. Aside from the moral argument expressed by Thomas Jefferson that it is ‘sinful and tyrannical’ to ‘compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors’, it is far from clear that this is an efficient use of public money. Moreover, by crowding out grass-roots civil society organisations, the taxpayer-funded bloc of charities, quangos and NGOs distorts the national conversation and subverts the democratic process.
Even the recipients of the state’s largesse do not come away unscathed. I argued in Sock Puppets that a reliance on statutory funding left non-profit organisations vulnerable to a change in government. Sure enough, concerns about charities feeling unable to speak out against the government for fear of losing their grants have increased since the 2010 election, while those on the political right view the charity-quango axis as ‘a kind of government-in-exile’.
This week, we publish The Sock Doctrine – What can be done about state-funded political activism? in an effort to answer the question of what can be done to prevent taxpayers’ money being spent on political campaigning. Don Foster, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at Department for Communities and Local Government, has said that “the government does believe that charities should be able to speak out on behalf of the communities they represent, but not that taxpayers’ money is spent inappropriately on political campaigning or lobbying.” We seek to do no more than that. Amongst the report’s recommendations are the following: