BLOOMIN' BIAS

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The World Tonight broadcast a report from Jonty Bloom which told us about Britain's present 'historically low' overall burden of taxation and the inevitability of tax rises after the next election. Yes, you read that right. Britain's tax is at a 'historically low' level, according to Bloom's report.
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The report featured three 'talking heads', two of whom were Carl Emmerson of the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies and Peter Fanning of the apolitical Chartered Institute of Taxation. The third, however, was Tony Dolphin, senior economist of the Labour-aligned, left-of-centre Institute for Public Policy Research. Now, in a classic instance of bias-by-labeling - or in this case bias-by-not-labeling! - Bloom did not introduce Mr Dolphin like that. He just presented him to the programme's listeners as "Tony Dolphin, senior economist at the Institute for Public Policy Reseach." If listeners were unaware of the Institute's very close links to the Labour Party (and most would be), they would understandably consider Mr Dolphin's words to be those of another independent/apolitical 'senior economist' rather than the words of someone from a Labour-aligned think-tank.
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Tony Dolphin also thought our current tax levels were 'pretty normal', not high. When were they highest? Can you guess? Tax was "at its height in the early 1980s, when the then Conservative government was trying to reduce the deficit then and it did allow the tax take to go up", said Dolphin. Bloom then joined him in blaming the Tories for everything, here over the many rises in tax on people's expenditure: "Under Margaret Thatcher the V.A.T. rate doubled...". There was no mention whatsoever (from either Dolphin or Bloom) of any of the very many new taxes emanating from the Labour government over the last twelve years. No, only the Tories.
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A Gordon Brown speech was then sampled, but only to mock the Conservatives. And a George Osborne speech was sampled to show that "even" he had "conceded" that the 50% tax band may have to stay for quite a while.
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What's the main problem here? Well, on top of the fact that the pro-Labour IPPR was presented as if it was an apolitical organisation and that its spokesman was given two bites of the cherry (including the last one), where were the voices of the centre-right, of low-taxation, of opposition to the line Jonty Bloom was taking? Where were Reform or the Taxpayer's Alliance? Nowhere to be heard. Why?
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