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Ross Clark takes a look at the TaxPayers’ Alliance

Seldom has tax featured in the media over the past decade without the lanky figure of Robert Chote of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, or his predecessor Andrew Dilnot, popping up to discuss it. Yet recently the IFS’s monopoly has come under increasingly serious challenge. Whether it be the Daily Telegraph or the Money Programme, there is now a good chance that it will not be Mr Chote giving his hap’orth, but the bespectacled figure of Matthew Elliott of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

In fact, my rather unscientific analysis suggests that this year the Alliance has eclipsed the IFS in just about every media orifice other than the Guardian, and even there it is fast catching up — remarkable for a pressure group which would appear to stand for the exact opposite of the newspaper’s statist values. By mid-September the IFS had notched up 105 mentions in the Guardian and Observer against 90 for the TaxPayers’ Alliance.