Recordar Arthur Seldon

Martin Anderson:

One story perfectly captures Arthur Seldon's indifference to the swish of political power. Mrs Thatcher was one of the politicians of all stripes who called in at the IEA for occasional lunches. On one such visit a colleague of ours, pulling no punches, began to criticise her partial privatisation of British Telecom: by allowing only Mercury to compete with BT, and that in a few restricted markets, Thatcher had in truth increased the number of people with a direct interest in obstructing genuine liberalisation. She was obviously unused to such direct censure and bridled at the attack. Ralph Harris, ever the joiner, tried to pour oil on the waters by calling for "a toast to the best prime minister since Churchill". Arthur raised his glass and said, in a stage whisper: "I'll take a sip".###

An indication of Seldon's standing among his fellow economists can be seen in the fact that, of the ten essays in The Unfinished Agenda, the festschrift I edited for his 70th birthday in 1986, no fewer than four were by Nobel prize-winners. One of them, James Buchanan, wrote that "Arthur Seldon has been able, more than most of us, to combine realism in prediction with continued idealism in vision." The combination produced some remarkable insights. In the early days of the IEA he warned that government would soon raid National Insurance pension funds to bail themselves out of more immediate political difficulties. In 1979 he foresaw that "Labour as we have known it will not rule again". And 1981 he predicted both that Soviet Communism would not survive the century and that China would go capitalist. His conviction that the state would eventually wither away as individuals took steps to avoid its intrusions has so far been proven accurate only in part. What can't be denied is that you have to go a long way to find anyone these days who seriously advocates socialism. And no single individual deserves more credit for that intellectual victory than Arthur Seldon.