Ralph Harris Architect Of Thatcherism - Road to the Middle Class

THEY ARE DYING off, one by one. The great lions of the conservative renaissance, the men that provided the intellectual horsepower that drove the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, are going to their rest.

On October 19, 2006, Ralph Harris, Baron of High Cross, died. And we honor his towering achievement.

Today the bien-pensant left talks occasionally about building their own think tanks—as if the planet isn’t already groaning under the weight of left-liberal opinion—but when Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon, and chicken entrepreneur Antony Fisher opened the Institute for Economic Affairs in 1957, it was a joke.

Antony Fisher had read a condensed version of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and was determined to do something about it.

For ten years the IEA was a shoestring operation, young and cheeky. Said Harris, as quoted in The Daily Telegraph obituary

A lot of our thinking was deliberately intended to affront [the establishment] and to wake them up.

But with Harris’s charm and fundraising abilities the IEA was able to secure funding to achieve financial stability. Then in the disastrous 1970s conservative politicians like Keith Joseph, Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher began to pay attention to the IEA and its ideas.

When Thatcher was elected British prime minister in the election of 1979 it was the intellectual output of the IEA that provided the agenda for reform.

Today, of course, Reaganism and Thatcherism seem like an inevitable force of history. At the time, of course, they seemed more like Forlorn Hopes charging against the massed ranks of the left-liberal establishment.

And what these noble warriors inspired in their adversaries was hate. We all know about the foaming hatred of the Bush bashers. It was no better in Britain during the Thatcher years. The lefties hated Margaret Thatcher, hated her with every fiber of their beings. According to The Times obituary

[Harris] confirmed the extraordinary emotions she incited. “I see chaps in the House of Lords whom I know, who were contemporaries of mine at university. They won’t talk to me, and I’m not even Thatcher. I didn’t like Harold Wilson as Prime Minister, but I never felt the hatred and animus towards him that they have towards her. Itching to kill.”

It says something about our liberal friends that, faced with an honorable and spirited foe, they so easily descend into hatred and often find respectable support in their political parties and in the intellectual elite for their barbarism.

It is a tribute to men like Ralph Harris that they never allowed themselves to descend into the gutter with their opponents.

We shall not see their like again.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

mysql close 0