Rees-Mogg on Ralph Harris

The talent of a great journalist is to bring together all the detritus of the world, like a magpie, but to serve it all up as a delicious meal with the talents of a great chef.

Marking the death of Arthur Harris, director of the think-tank Institute of Economic Affairs, William Rees-Mogg, war horse of British broadsheet journalism, tells just how remarkable Harris’s achievement was: to have changed the elite consensus in Britain from the Fabian “Butskellism” of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s in which Britain became the sick man of Europe.

[Harris] converted a whole generation of politicians and journalists to the free-market ideas in which he believed; he converted most economists as well. We are all, or almost all, Harrisites nowadays. I was one of his intellectual converts, became a colleague of his in the House of Lords, and regarded myself as a friend.

Then Rees-Mogg continues with remarkable frankness to write how he himself was a mind-numbed robot of the Keynesian consensus, the conceit that a political elite of experts could operate the levers of the economy through regulation and subsidy.

Most economic theory then taught in universities was Keynesian; industrial policy was based on nationalisation and trade union power. Wartime regulations were still universal; rates of taxation went up to 90 per cent or higher. This was the triumph of the managed socialist economy in a democratic society.

Rees-Mogg remembers discussing ideas back in the late 1950s with Harris and his collaborators at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Even then my own economic ideas, though broadly Keynesian, were not Fabian. Yet, as I listened to Ralph [Harris] and John [Wood], I thought that they were out of touch with contemporary trends, even that they were likeable cranks. How wrong I was. It was I who was trapped in a false consensus from which I had to break free.

You can’t say fairer than that. Then came the crisis of the 1970s.

In the 1960s and early 1970s the IEA moved from the fringe to a position of rising influence, largely as the result of the failure of economic controls. Many free-society pamphlets were published, brilliantly edited by Arthur Seldon. Meetings were held, lunches were given and [F.A.] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman were introduced to a new British audience. The IEA became a focus of criticism when the Heath Government did a U-turn and tried to fight inflation by price and wage controls -- by a policy that I was ignorant enough to support. What folly that now seems.

It is now, as these great men are dying, that we can begin to grasp the enormity of the challenge they faced, and the remarkable achievement of their lives as they succeeded in turning the great ships of state both in Britain and the United States.

Rees-Mogg concludes: “[Harris] deserves a statue: he helped to save the freedom of his country.”

But you could say that the proper memorial for Ralph Harris would the same as that for Sir Christopher Wren, builder of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.

"Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice" ("Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you").