Ralph Harris, Baron Harris of High Cross

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Ralph Harris, Baron Harris of High Cross (December 10, 1924 – October 19, 2006) was a British economist. He was head of the Institute of Economic Affairs from 1957 to 1987. The IEA's brand of free market liberal economics was deeply unpopular when it was founded, but, some 20 years later, Harris was considered to be an architect of Thatcherism.

Harris was the son of a tramways inspector. He was born in north London and was educated at Tottenham Grammar School. He read economics at Queen's College, Cambridge, graduating with a first-class degree. He married in 1949, and was survived by his wife and his daughter. Two sons predeceased him.

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

Harris became general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs in 1957. He remained in this post until 1987, when he stepped down to become its chairman and was replaced by Graham Mather. Harris was then a founder 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 was necessary to combat the prevailing Keynesian consensus "Butskellism" of R. A. Butler and Hugh Gaitskell. Harris, together with editorial director Arthur Seldon, built the IEA into a bastion of free market liberal economics. The IEA developed links with economists such as Hayek, Gottfried Haberler, Harry Johnson, Milton Friedman, George Stigler and James 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 the County of Greater London. He was one of her first appointments and sat on the cross-benches in the House of Lords to show his independence from political parties.

He deeply respected Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations; declining a grant of arms after his peerage on the grounds that the invisible hand could not be blazoned.

He 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 did not like to be described as a "Thatcherite", but was a founder of the No Turning Back group in 1985. He 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. He helped set up a fighting fund so Neil Hamilton could sue Mohamed Al Fayed for libel in 1999. He was chairman of CIVITAS from 2000.

A pipe smoker, he was a chairman of smokers' rights campaigners, FOREST, and its president in 2003. He was not convinced that passive smoking was dangerous, publishing and campaigning against the banning of smoking on trains from Brighton to Victoria station in 1995, although he admitted that he rarely travelled by train himself. He died of a massive heart attack in London.

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