Endless interventions by state-funded and subsidised sock puppets are dragging the public discourse to the Left, when the country is moving the other way. This may be one reason for the one-sided media environment becoming steadily more detached from public opinion. Take the Today programme: a staple of middle-class metropolitanism, it regularly provides a platform to groups calling for evermore public spending and pushing Left-wing causes.

Groups advocating Left-of-centre and statist policies dominate the airwaves. Leftist think tanks and campaign groups have 37 times as many staff at their disposal, with funding 40 times greater than those advocating lower public spending, according to research by website Guido Fawkes. These figures shine a light on just how outgunned the centre-Right is in Britain. It feels like a miracle that we haven’t already elected a Marxist, declared an egalitarian socialist republic, banned meat and imprisoned successful business people.

We haven’t, of course, because the electorate repeatedly refuse to play ball. But funding this remarkable campaigning client state also means taxpayers have to keep fending them off again and again. The report this week by Tax Justice UK, claiming that “Red Wall” voters want to see Boris Johnson increase capital gains tax, is a perfect example. Quite apart from their misleading methodology – using small focus groups to make claims about what millions want – the report was prepared with funding from the University of Sheffield’s “Internal Knowledge Exchange Scheme”, with input from other taxpayer-funded bodies such as the IPPR and the universities of Sheffield and Birmingham. It’s pushing a nakedly political agenda, mere months from a crushing election defeat. Funding the fighting of these guerrilla wars against the Government has to stop.

Now, all this is not to say that nothing has been done. The anti-lobbying guidelines in government grant guidance were an important and hard-won step, explicitly explaining that “attempting to exert undue influence using taxpayer funding will always be prevented”. Yet the practice obviously persists, not least through the quangos that use and abuse their arms-length freedoms to flaunt the rules and fight the political battles.

At the end of the day, ministers sign off this money. They can question any grant and block any subsidy. Instead of being bounced into compliance by obdurate officials, elected politicians have a duty to ask if these groups merit the money.

With the Government’s election honeymoon just about still standing, and the new Tory Party filled with the spirit of the December revolution, the window to act is open but closing fast. No 10 probably has one year to clean up the state, get control of the cash, and end the taxpayer funded lobbying merry-go-round.

James Roberts is political director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance