Society for Individual Freedom

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The Society for Individual Freedom (SIF), founded in 1942 in the United Kingdom, is an association of libertarians, classical liberals, free-market conservatives, and others promoting individual freedom.

The SIF was established by a merger of the Society of Individualists (which dates to the 1840s) with the National League for Freedom. It is politically independent, and advocates personal freedom and less state control generally (e.g. it is opposed to censorship and identity cards), and a genuinely free enterprise economy including low taxation and no state subsidies to industry. Its membership tends to be strongly Eurosceptic.

In 1967 the Young Libertarians, the youth organisation of Society for Individual Freedom, broke off to create the Libertarian Alliance. Relations between the LA and the SIF remain good and there continues to be an overlap of members and officers.

The SIF is perhaps most notable for its campaign for the institution of the UK's Parliamentary Ombudsman, beginning in 1959, and publication, in 1961, of the first English language book on such institutions, Occasion for Ombudsman: Is a Grievance Man Necessary for Britain?, by noted journalist T. E. Utley. The campaign for the Ombudsman system - for an unelected adjudicator to help prevent bureaucratic maladministration - eventually succeeded. In 1967 the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration was instituted.

In 1994 the SIF published The Power to Destroy, a study of the British tax system, by Professor D. R. Myddelton.

[edit] SIF activities

The Society for Individual Freedom regularly offers public meetings with notable speakers, and holds occasional luncheons at the Houses of Parliament.

The SIF has two related campaigns. Tell-IT calls for information technology to be used to provide information on outcomes of drugs and treatments and to make it known and available to doctors and patients alike. Choice in Personal Safety campaigns against compulsion in seatbelt laws and other related matters.

The SIF also publishes a journal, The Individual.

[edit] External links

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