Private Sector Wonks Under Fire from Public Sector Wonks
A new report has claimed that left-wing think tanks are more transparent than their right-wing counterparts. New left-wing pressure group Who Funds You awards an A-rating to the likes of left-of-centre campaigns IPPR, Progress and Compass, while laying into the right-of-centre Adam Smith Institute and the Taxpayers’ Alliance for their supposed lack of openness. Ignoring of course that right-of-centre think tanks don’t usually take public money from the taxpayers. Left-wing think tanks benefit from a lot of taxpayers’ money, IPPR for example got £800,000 of taxpayers’ money via the EU…
UPDATE: The ASI have hit back:
Great news – the Adam Smith Institute has been ranked top for respecting donor privacy: whofundsyou.org—
Adam Smith Institute (@ASI) June 21, 2012
For the avoidance of doubt, we don't take money from the state. All donations are voluntary. Wish all think tanks could say the same.—
Adam Smith Institute (@ASI) June 21, 2012
Touché…
Clearly wank tanks.
Adam Smith Institute @ASI:
For the avoidance of doubt, we don’t take money from the state. All donations are voluntary. Wish all think tanks could say the same.
Absolutely nothing against ASI for that very reason.
To think we are paying for this other stuff makes me want to emigrate… Oh! I have.
something about sunshine and disinfectant…
surely that’s the deal to play in the public policy/influence space.
Just out.
The Quantum Universe: Everything that can happen does happen
Does the fact that Prescott and Pickles would never turn down a second pie undermine quantum theory?
Complete balls. Adam Smith International, which purports to be independent of the Adam Smith Institute, in reality is as independent as a toddler from its mother – and is heavily funded by government funds from the international development budget. Personally I think most think tanks of whatever bias are playthings for failed academics, but lets not pretend any one of them is cleaner than the others.
Of course the ASI didn’t say no to the several millions that were received from DfiD between 1999 – 2003 for work carried out by AS International (yes I know the organisations are now separate)
Bunch of fucking hypocrites.
A.F.Q. Keeping the educated Fools in a Job., Couldn’t make profit,. Making a profit is the only way to get rid of these fools. Because they cant.
Doesn’t the ASI get subsidised by the US taxpayer, being at 501c3?
Doesn’t the US taxpayer subsidise ASI? It’s a 501c3 over there (ie effectively a charity that gets tax breaks).
The left benefits from extorting money from you
We need a WhoBenefitsFromExtortingYou.com
And this morning Al JaBeeBa via its Toady programme referred to the disgustingly rabid Leftoid IPPR as a plain ‘thinktank’ whereas Policy Exchange was referred to as being a ‘rightwing thinktank’. No bias there, of course!
No wonder these leftist think tanks argue for a larger state, they want more money to pump out more bilge.
And how much say are taxpayers given as to how tax-payer funded think-tanks spend their money? NONE!
Can we have a list of all the taxpayers funding the IPPR, please?
Jimmy Carr ???
Presumably the EU is funding stooge think-tanks on other countries, too, and the IPPR is not the only one.
That’s alright then!
Why does this amaze anyone. Most of these trendy lefties, champagne socialists are very clever in putting their collective hands into the public purse. Cherrie Balir and Michael Mansfield, Geoffery Robinson. All of them have made great wealth on being paid by the state for what they do. What makes it worse is their do as I say not as I do attitude. For a perfect example of how to get along in life with no real ability but get paid by the state are the Kinnocks. What a dynasty of people promoted way above their paygrade and now they are helping themselves to the European pig trough!!!!
Thats the socialist way, tell the plebs what you think they want then bleed them of everything you can pretending spending on your mates in the unions is actually investing.
Agree entirely, and extend it to the Tories. Daddy Cameron effectively stole from both the state (pension funds) and the private sector through insider dealing whilst the Osborne family have indulged in tax planning on a scale that shows Carr up for the amateur he is.
It’s fine when tory boys do it.
Pretty shocking to read about 800,000 going to IPPR. It’s bad enough the EU paying the BBC to spread their propaganda.
Anyone else notice that whenever there is a cut it’s always the police force or nurses? We should just abolish every racial awareness or diversity outreach post in the country. Then the equalities thought crime department. Just scrap the lot and put the money towards policemen, nurses, armed forces, fire brigade etc.
Totally agree. We’re stripping police response resources to the bone while diversity managers continue to get fat salaries for contributing nothing of any value.
The transition to a fairer society costs – it is only fair that the progressive forces that are bringing this much need change are properly financed to counter the reactionary old order.
Fairer for who, exactly?
Jimmy’s dream
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
Kurt Vonnegut
LOL I’m sure Lenin made a similar argument when he was setting his mates up with cushy jobs and giving them houses confiscated from the bourgeoisie.
I say again, it is getting really difficult to tell fake Jimmys from the real one.
The fakes find it harder and harder to come up with shit that is even more preposterously wrongheaded than the genuine article.
That to me is ‘progress’ – when the once moronic-but-unchallengable-in-polite-society is sounding more and more like simply what it is. Moronic.
Little Emperors, clothes etc.
Not really a problem; the real Jimmy stinks of hypocrisy. The fake Jimmys stink of horse shit from Ascot.
Well I think we’ve certainly nailed that old canard about imitation being the greatest form of flattery.
Why not put the lot towards reducing taxation?
After Allegro Stratton’s ‘threat’ on NN last night, VD on her 5 Live programme, welcomes a message from a listener who says that since Cameron has opened up the issue of tax morality, he and the Governement should now come under scrutiny. ‘We shall see over the next few days,’ she says.
Looks like the BBC will be seeking revenge now that one of their own has been outed.
Left wing public sector parasites attacking the free market forces that supports them financially?
Without the private sector, there is no public sector.
The left wing wank tank, the BBC, is not very transparent and it gets £3 billion a year of our money.
Not to mention secret soft loans from a foreign Government – the EU.
Why wont the BBC tell the British people what these loans are for?
So left wing it has endless programmes featuring Jeremy Clarkson.
Jeremy Clarkson brings in a huge amount of revenue for the BBC. Since when have the Left ever put principle before profit?
Er, thought the far right whinge about the BBC was that they were subsidised by the taxpayer.
Guido you’re really having a desperate time at the moment. the quality of evidence is getting more and more paranoid and today he defending Think Tanks that do not declare their funding on the basis that they don’t receive Taxpayer funding.
It’s not a problem who doesn’t fund them, Guido.
In the 2005 general election the three-quarters of the 33 Conservative candidates who ousted Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs received cash from a Conservative Party donors’ fund worth over £2m. The funds came from 3 donors, Lord Ashcroft, Lord Steinberg, and the Midlands Industrial Council
No doubt a foreign-government sponsored ‘advisor’ in the Office of the Minister for Defence was acceptable as he was funded privately?
Come on Guido you used to be worth reading once.
Free Market thinkers should understand that, like markets, reasoned decisions in a democracy can only be made when full disclosure is forthcoming.
As opposed to New Labour funnelling a tens of millions of taxpayer cash to the unions that then fund the Labour Party?
Yeah, right, really transparent.
Being a rightwing fuckwit you obviously have comprehension problems.
Buy a dictionary. Pay someone to read to you.
Yup, that was the guiding belief of bliar, campbell and the balloon (not sure what Millies belief is, its Balls of course! ) – tell it as they want you to think it is. Its called spin, the parasitic left wing luddite unionised labour party could not survive without obfuscation.
Hey, I hate New Labour more than any Tory they destroyed virtually everything I believe in but when a ‘respected’ organisation argues against plain packaging on cigarettes and receives funding from tobacco companies, or argues for tax cuts and is funded by people living abroad or funding income through Belize or the Cayman islands or receieves funding from sources sponsored by foreign states then nobody who puts democratic acountability above partisan advantage can reasonably argue that disclosure is not in the public interest.
Can’t respond to Millies balls as I speak several languages but gibberish isn’t one of them.
You’re on the wrong site.
This one is for low IQ vermin to talk bollocks and for visitors to laugh at them.
I’m doing Gove a favour – he said he wants everyone to be educated but he’s busy at the moment taking us back to the golden age of Socrates and Plato
When reason and intellect trumped political indoctrination.
But you must be low IQ vermin because you are on here all the time, and always talking Bollox!
Cretinous in the extreme. Think tanks don’t generally conduct their activities behind closed doors – they publish their views in pamphlets and blog posts. Fixating on funding leads to vapid conspiracy theories and is just another prop for the mentally negligible. If you can’t construct a counter argument to the policies you disagree with and can’t pick apart the statistics that they are founded on, then this is simply another ad hominem attack.
Think tanks don’t generally conduct their activities behind closed doors
As the Fox-Werrity scandal unfolded, it emerged that Werrity had been using Fox’s taxpayer-funded office in the MPs’ block at Portcullis House as the official headquarters of a supposed charity called “Atlantic Bridge.” Fox had founded Atlantic Bridge in 1997 to promote the “Special Relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom, and named Werrity its Executive Director. Fox stepped down as a trustee in May, 2010, when he became defense secretary. In 2001, the American Legislative Exchange Council set up a sister charity by the same name, reportedly offered benefits to those donating to the British charity, and directly funded Fox’s Atlantic Bridge with at least $44,000 USD (£28,528 British pounds) in the past four years.
American Legislative Exchange Council link corporate members to legislators the corporations write draft laws for the legislators to take away to pass – one idiot even forgot to remove the ALEC heading before presenting the legislation ! http://www.commonblog.com/2012/01/31/alec-exposed-for-24-hours/
They do meet behind closed doors.
The leftoid IPPR produced statistics which ‘proved’ (on the last misgovernment’s orders) that all of the Poles who came here since 2004 had returned home, that’s how reliable their statistics are.
If a private organisation wants to give money to another private organisation then it is their business.
There is an issue with monied lobbyists having influence though. Sort that out and your gripe will probably solve itself anyway.
However, a big problem arises when a supposed Charity/Think-Tank/Ex-Labour-PM-Tax-Avoidance-Vanity-Vehicle is getting hosed with public money by organisations that are supposed to be spending it providing services, not on lobbying for even more loot to be diverted their way.
University think tanks- I wonder how right wing they are………?
A bit sad actually.
We are better than you because we disclose who we get our money from, the fact that Joe Public has no say in who he gives his money to is irrelevant.
City Councils making donations to think tanks?
Pity they can’t educate our children first.
Although an educated youth is not what the left wing want, robotic youth more likely, all nodding their heads in tune with some crap song and finger painting some shit picture.
Oh yes! Then they go and work in that august organisation the BfuckingBC.
Rant now ends……..
Perfect example of that here. Keep em dumb boys, keep em dumb.
http://tinyurl.com/c4gvrem
The left, skewing reality and truth, near you, since 1917.
It’s the old ploy, so beloved of the left, that they just have to try and belittle anyone or anything, that is not for them or of them.
This sort of commentary, by “WhoFundsYou”, will backfire.
We should perhaps remind DC and Gideon, of their promise to burn the Quangoes, and cut public funding of politically motivaTed entities.
If the left wants skewed propaganda then let the Unions pay for it, once the membership have voted as to whether they should pay for it out of their subs.
How can doctors justify strike action. An annual salary of at least £110,000, some earn £250,000. A pension of at least £68,000 a year.
It beggars belief.
Perhaps they feel their employers should honour their contracts, signed in good faith?
I know that’s what I expect.
Shouldn’t the doctors be honouring their’s then?
Or does their hypocritic oath only count when it doesn’t involve their personal gain?
The taxpayer does not employ Doctors.
If the twats who offered up these contracts – who are probably in like Flint with the beneficiaries – want to pony up the shortfall out their own pockets, then I am happy for your point to stand.
Otherwise, stroll the fuck on.
If they strike, sack the lot and let them reapply for their jobs on say 65K a year. If they can do better elsewhere, good luck to them.
Genius! What could possibly go wrong with that plan.
The world has changed get over it, we all need to move on, things have to be done that are pretty shit, employees have to be made redundant to protect other employees, it may break my heart but it gets done for the greater good and all that crap!
Doctors are special we all know that, they look after my kid when she is sick, it does not mean they should be given preferential treatment.
Not when it is an unfair contract which should never have stood in the first place. The tax payer was massively ripped off when labour gave this shitty contract to doctors. Paying them a lot more for doing a lot less!
Fuck the doctors. They tend to kill more people than they save and are a only pimps for the pharmaceutical industry anyway.
There are also a lot more of them now.
One of Labour’s “successes” was to increase the number of medical schools and, with the massive increases in doctors’ remuneration, it now means that we have more doctors than we can afford to employ.
But, having spent so much to train them – £250k – we employ them anyway.
Supply and demand doesn’t work when you look at health provision in Britain.
State-funded think tanks are just another way to get the taxpayer to pay for political parties. All think tanks should be funded from voluntary donations, or by a published contract from both private or public sectors to carry out a specific non-party political task.
Come on now guys just calm down, we’re all in this together.
“The Sunlight Centre for Open Politics is committed to helping the public to be their own watchdog by improving access to existing information which is difficult to obtain and digitising this information and thus fostering greater transparency and openness in the British political system.”
So, who are you donors?
Rich tory boys with a mission to harrass people on the left while occasionally briefly mentioning someone on the right so as to pretend to be ‘libertarian’.
So obvious.
“right-of-centre think tanks don’t usually take public money from the taxpayers”
No, they take secret payments from rich foreigners in return for all their work to destroy Britain for the benfit of rich foreigners.
Guillotine the lot of them.
Evidence, evidence oh! What I would give for evidence.
Go Jimmy Carr yourself!
How about the IEA?
5. Donations from the USA
If you are in the United States, you can make your donation through American Friends of the IEA, an incorporated 501 (c)(3) charitable body. This allows US taxpayers to claim tax relief on charitable donations.
Please make your cheque payable (in USD) to AFIEA and send to:
Professor Leonard P Liggio
President, American Friends of the IEA
1201 L Street NW
Washington DC 20005
hmm that address seems popular
Copyright © 2011 Atlas Network. Developed by The Liberty Lab
1201 L Street NW, Washington DC 20005 | 202-449-8449
Evidence? The rightwing think tanks – or most of them – won’t tell us who funds them. What are they hiding?
That’s because they’re lying hypocrites.
We all know what they’re up to though.
Hmmm
Their website lists http://whofundsyou.org/about one of the members of the team as
Karin Christiansen
Is this her
http://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/team/karin-christiansen
or this
http://labourlist.org/2012/05/great-results-but-labour-needs-more-voters-and-an-organisation-that-can-find-them/
or perhaps one and the same?
Funny old thing – I note the second link’s information does not feature on the WFY website
I wonder why?
Tells me all I need to know about this lot’s ‘independence’
Furthermore cliffor singer
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/clifford-singer
and
http://www.sparkloop.com/about/clifford-singer
and
http://liberalconspiracy.org/author/cliffords/
and
http://mydavidcameron.com/about
keeps his politics pretty ambiguous
At least one of the people behind Who Funds You is a Labour activist – Karin Christiansen
Who cares.
The TaxPayers Alliance is subsidised by the taxpayer. It gets grants for its propaganda from a ‘charity’ called the Politics and Economics Research Trust. Should we rename it the Scroungers’ Alliance?
The Charity Commission’s report on its investigation into the Politics and Economics Research Trust
The Guardian newspaper published a front page article on 29 Dec 09 asserting that the Politics and Economics Research Trust (PERT) was being used as a vehicle to channel funds enhanced by gift aid to a campaigning body, The Taxpayers’ Alliance.
This was followed up by a complaint to the Charity Commission by Mr John Prescott MP.
The Charity Commission carried out a very thorough investigation, including requesting Mr Booth of the Guardian to provide further information. Mr Booth confirmed that they had no further information to provide. The Commission published its report on 21 Feb 2011.
The Charity Commission’s conclusions
“The Commission had not seen any evidence to support the allegation made that the Charity had been used as a vehicle to channel funds enhanced with gift aid from the Midlands Industrial Council, to the Alliance. Further the Investigation did not identify any evidence to support this allegation more generally.”
oh dear how trolltastic
Maybe. But the TPA’s latest loopy report on income tax is paid for by a charity ((PERT). if the Charity Commission wave that through as being ok, virtually anything goes.
The central point is valid: the TaxPayers Alliance is subsidised by the taxpayer.
The central point is not true
The charity commission said there was no evidence and you have presented none – or is simple assertion now evidence?
All I’m saying is the TPA is subsidised by the taxpayer because it gets a lot of its funds from a charity called PERT. PERT gives nearly all its funds to the TPA.
The TPA IS subsidised by the taxpayer.
Further
The ‘loopy report on income tax’ was not paid for by PERT directly
As I understand it wasa joint project between TPA and the IOD
They seem to have made their point – airy dismissal as ‘loopy’ may count as academic rigour in some places (the LSE no doubt) but I think it deserves a little more consideration, especialy as its main premise that the tax system is far too complex and counterproductive, seems to be shared by most people (except tax lawyers and accountants and until recently Jimmy Carr)
Look at the report. It acknowledges that PERT paid for it (or at least some of it).
Bollocks. There’s no reason for any think tank not to be transparent about where they get their cash. It’s absolutely right that publicly funded think tanks should be obliged to own up to where they get their money (and they should get less of it, if any at all). But privately funded ones should be completely transparent so we can judge what they say by who paid for them to say it. If the message is right, the paymasters won’t detract from it.
Quite right. We should know who ‘think tanks’ are fronts for. Most of them have charitable status anyway, so we should demand some transparency in exchange for giving them tax breaks. Even non charities like the Taxpayers Alliance get donations from charities, so they’re subsidised too.
Is anyone interested in anything the little twerps in any of these self-regarding little wank tanks say?
‘… Great news – the Adam Smith Institute has been ranked top for respecting donor privacy……’
Which of course means we can’t trust a damn word these right-of-centre think tanks say.
How do we know the conclusions they draw haven’t been influenced by their donors in the background?
Think I will trust these secretive think tanks an awful lot less in future!