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.
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
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]
^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. JSTOR23999581. S2CID146456853. 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.
^Jamieson, Bill (24 October 2006). "Lord Harris of High Cross". The Scotsman. ISSN0307-5850. Archived from the original on 7 October 2011. Retrieved 1 January 2024 – via Policy Institute at King's College London.
Ralph Harris in His Own Words, The Selected Writings of Lord Harris. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar in association with the Institute of Economic Affairs. 2008. ISBN978-0255366212.
Robinson, Colin (1 November 2005). "IEA, the LSE, and the Influence of Ideas". Collected Works of Arthur Seldon. 7.
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