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Ralph Harris, Baron Harris of High Cross

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The Right Honourable
The Lord Harris of High Cross
Born
Ralph Harris

(1924-12-10)10 December 1924
London, England
Died19 October 2006(2006-10-19) (aged 81)
NationalityBritish
Spouse
Jose Pauline Jeffrey
​
​
(m. 1949)​
Academic career
FieldEconomics
Institution
Alma materQueens' College, Cambridge
InfluencesFriedrich Hayek

Ralph Harris, Baron Harris of High Cross (10 December 1924 – 19 October 2006), was a British economist. He was head of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a neoliberal think thank, from 1957 to 1988.

Early life and education

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Harris, the son of a tramways inspector, was "one of four children born to working-class parents on a council estate in Tottenham, north-east London".[1] He was educated at Tottenham Grammar School. He read Economics at Queens' College, Cambridge, graduating with a first-class degree.[1] At Cambridge, he was influenced by Stanley R. Dennison, "who introduced him to the works of Friedrich von Hayek".[2]

Career

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After working at the Conservative Political Centre at Conservative Central Office,[2] Harris was a lecturer in political economy at St Andrews University from 1949 to 1965.[1] He was an unsuccessful Conservative Party candidate for Kirkcaldy in 1951 and for Edinburgh Central in 1955,[1] and became a leader writer for the Glasgow Herald in 1956.[2]

Harris became general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in 1957. He remained in this post until 1988, when he stepped down to become its chairman and was replaced by Graham Mather. Harris was then a founding president of the IEA from 1990 to his death. The IEA was set up by Antony Fisher and Oliver Smedley in 1955. Friedrich Hayek had suggested that an intellectual counterweight through think tanks was necessary to combat the prevailing post-war consensus around Keynesianism and the Butskellism of Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell. Harris, together with editorial director Arthur Seldon, built the IEA and its affiliates of Atlas Network into a bastion of free-market economics and neoliberalism, which supplanted the post-war Keynesian paradigm.[3][4][5] The IEA developed links with Austrian School and monetarist (from the Chicago School) economists, such as Hayek, Gottfried Haberler, Harry Gordon Johnson, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James M. Buchanan, and published many pamphlets and papers on public finance issues, such as taxation, pensions, education, health, transport, and exchange rates. In 1979, during Margaret Thatcher's first few months in power, he was made a life peer as Baron Harris of High Cross, of Tottenham in Greater London.[6] Despite his strong affiliation with Tory free marketeers, Harris sat on the crossbenches in the House of Lords to show his independence from any political party.[1]

Harris served on the council of the University of Buckingham from 1980 until 1995. It was founded in 1976 following a call from Harris and Seldon in 1968 for an independent university. Harris was Secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society from 1967, and its president from 1982 to 1984. He was "a moving spirit in the Wincott Foundation and the founding of the Social Affairs Unit".[7] Although he did not like to be described as a Thatcherite, Harris was a founder of No Turning Back, a group within the Conservative Party advocating for Thatcherite policies and founded in 1985 to defend her economic policies. Harris became a Eurosceptic, and was chairman of the Bruges Group from 1989 to 1991. He was a director of Rupert Murdoch's Times Newspapers company from 1988 to 2001, although he read and wrote for The Daily Telegraph. Nonetheless, Harris described Murdoch as the "Saviour of what we used to call Fleet Street".[1]

Harris helped set up a fighting fund so Neil Hamilton could sue the BBC for libel in 1986 and Mohamed Al Fayed for libel in 1999. He was chairman of Civitas from 2000. He also supported the poll tax. Harris was interviewed about his work at the IEA and the rise of Thatcherism for the 2006 BBC TV documentary series Tory! Tory! Tory! In August 2006, he told Andy Beckett, who interviewed Harris for his book When the Lights Went Out – Britain in the 1970s, that he voted for the Labour Party twice at the two general elections in 1974 because he was angry at Edward Heath's U-turn of 1972, his inability to stand up to the miners, and because if one voted Labour at least they knew what they were getting.[8]

A pipe smoker, Harris was a chairman of smokers' rights campaigners, FOREST, and its president in 2003. He was not convinced that passive smoking was dangerous and published and campaigned against the banning of smoking on trains from Brighton to Victoria station in 1995.[9][10] Harris died suddenly of a ruptured aortic aneurysm at his home in North London on the morning of 19 October 2006.[11][12][13]

Personal life

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Harris married Jose Pauline Jeffery in 1949. They had two sons and a daughter. His sons predeceased him, dying in 1979 and 1992. Lady Harris died in 2017.[14]

Works

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  • Politics without Prejudice (1956)
  • Hire Purchase in a Free Society (1958, 1959, 1961; with Arthur Seldon and Margot Naylor)
  • Choice in Welfare 1965 (1965)
  • The Urgency of an Independent University (1968, 1969; with Arthur Seldon)
  • Choice in Welfare 1970 (1971) ISBN 978-0255360098
  • Down with the Poor (1971)
  • Not from Benevolence (1977, with Arthur Seldon) ISBN 978-0255360906
  • Overruled on Welfare (1979) ISBN 978-0255361224
  • No, Prime Minister! (1994)
  • Murder a Cigarette (1998, with Judith Hatton) ISBN 978-0715628911

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f Roth, Andrew (20 October 2006). "Lord Harris of High Cross". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 1 January 2024.
  2. ^ a b c Lewis, Russell (21 October 2006). "Lord Harris Of High Cross: Founding father of the Institute of Economic Affairs". The Independent. ISSN 1741-9743. Archived from the original on 6 August 2011. Retrieved 1 January 2025.
  3. ^ Mitchell, Timothy (2005). "The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World". European Journal of Sociology. 46 (2): 299–310. doi:10.1017/S000397560500010X. JSTOR 23999581. S2CID 146456853. Retrieved 1 January 2024 – via JSTOR. By that time [1979] what had begun as a fringe right-wing current had become the most powerful political orthodoxy. The neoliberal movement was now trying to extend its network to other parts of the world. In 1981, a close collaborator of Hayek, Anthony Fisher, established the Atlas Foundation for Economic Research. Its goal was to coordinate activities and corporate funding among the network of European and American think tanks, and to extend it by developing and financing a group of neoliberal organizations in Western Europe and the United States.
  4. ^ Salles-Djelic, Marie-Laure (2017). "Building an Architecture for Political Influence: Atlas and the Transnational Institutionalization of the Neoliberal Think Tank". Power, Policy and Profit. Chelthenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 25–44. ISBN 978-1-78471-120-7. Retrieved 1 January 2025 – via Google Books.
  5. ^ Innset, Ola (2020). Reinventing Liberalism: The Politics, Philosophy and Economics of Early Neoliberalism (1920–1947). Berlin: Springer Nature. p. 187. ISBN 978-3-030-38885-0. Retrieved 1 January 2025 – via Google Books.
  6. ^ "No. 47912". The London Gazette. 24 July 1979. p. 9365.
  7. ^ Jamieson, Bill (24 October 2006). "Lord Harris of High Cross". The Scotsman. ISSN 0307-5850. Archived from the original on 7 October 2011. Retrieved 1 January 2024 – via Policy Institute at King's College London.
  8. ^ Beckett, Andy (2009). When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-25226-8. Retrieved 1 January 2025 – via Google Books.
  9. ^ Penman, Danny (26 July 1995). "Peer takes a match to BR smoking ban". The Independent. ISSN 1741-9743. Retrieved 1 January 2025.
  10. ^ "Lord Harris of High Cross". The Daily Telegraph. 20 October 2006. ISSN 1354-7119. Retrieved 1 January 2025.
  11. ^ Knight, Sam (19 October 2006). "Lord Harris of Highcross, economist, dies aged 81". The Times. ISSN 2997-4771. Retrieved 1 January 2025.
  12. ^ Wolf, Martin (19 October 2006). "Obituary". Financial Times. ISSN 0307-1766. Archived from the original on 29 February 2008. Retrieved 1 January 2025.
  13. ^ "House of Lords: Minutes and Order Paper – Minutes of Proceedings". UK Parliament. 24 October 2006. Retrieved 1 January 2025.
  14. ^ Triponel, Angela (10 November 2017). "Harris – Deaths Announcements". The Telegraph Announcements. Archived from the original on 11 November 2017. Retrieved 1 January 2025.

Bibliography

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Primary sources

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  • Ralph Harris in His Own Words, The Selected Writings of Lord Harris. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar in association with the Institute of Economic Affairs. 2008. ISBN 978-0255366212.
  • Robinson, Colin (1 November 2005). "IEA, the LSE, and the Influence of Ideas". Collected Works of Arthur Seldon. 7.
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