Annual Report 2009/10
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Leadership
Director’s introduction
Dr Madsen Pirie
The Adam Smith Institute is described as a think-tank. Indeed, academic surveys say it is one
President
Dr Eamonn Butler
of the leading think-tanks in the world. Yet I prefer to describe it as a do-tank. Our aim is not to think about policy for its own sake, but to change events.
Director Clear principles help us in that aim: a belief in freedom, choice, competitive markets, smaller
Tom Clougherty
government and lower, simpler taxes. On these foundations, we build innovative but practical
Executive Director
policy ideas. Through well-crafted research, reports, events, articles, appearances, and work
Philip Salter Programmes Director
with politicians and the media, we strive to transform the public debate and create a new reality. We take our name from the great Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723- 1790), best
Dr Tim Evans
known for his pioneering book The Wealth of Nations, which explained the importance of a
Consultant Director
free economy and a free society. Smith was a fierce critic of government intervention and regulation, arguing that they helped particular interest groups but stifled competition and so harmed the general public. Smith would have regarded a government that takes nearly half the nation’s resources, and produces 75,000 pages of regulation a year, as the greatest tyranny. We have a lot of work to do if we are to reinstate his ideals of free markets and free minds today. Yet this is what the Adam Smith Institute seeks to do. We offer blunt criticism of overmighty government. We expose the true burden of taxation through initiatives such as Tax Freedom Day. Our experts show the stark downside of too much regulation. Our reports and media appearances help people understand the importance of markets, competition, and entrepreneurship. And perhaps most importantly of all, our youth programmes help develop the next generation of free-market opinion formers. Ideas have consequences: and every day, interest groups are bombarding governments with demands for more spending and more regulation. We need think-tanks like the Adam Smith Institute to stand up against such demands – patiently and persistently developing different ideas, and arguments and options that will change and improve all our lives.
Dr Eamonn Butler Director
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Tax freedom day
All about Tax Freedom Day The Adam Smith Institute calculates Tax Freedom Day every year with a simple goal in mind: to make it clear to people just how much tax they are paying to support public spending. To many people it means little to say that public spending will account for almost 50 percent of GDP this year. Their confusion is compounded by the fact that Britain now has the longest tax code in the world, and raises a great deal of revenue from indirect and ‘stealth’ taxes. By contrast, it means much more to say that the average UK taxpayer will spend 134 days working for the Exchequer, before they can start earning for themselves. The Treasury hates us for making the tax burden so transparent, so we must be doing something right!
Tax Freedom Day fell on May 14 in 2009. That means that for 134 days of the year, every penny earned by the average UK resident was taken to support government expenditures. The real story in 2009, however, was government debt: if the spiralling budget deficit is factored in, Tax Freedom Day did not come until June 25. This means that the gap between Tax Freedom Day based on actual revenues and Tax Freedom Day based on government spending is now the widest it has been since 1975 – and possibly since World War II.
2009 in more detail All that said, Tax Freedom Day itself was a more complicated affair than usual in 2009. Owing to the recession, tax revenues dropped while public spending rose even faster than before. The budget deficit rocketed to 14 percent as the government borrowed in excess of £20m per hour, every hour, throughout the year. Clearly an enormous debt burden – which could take a generation or more to pay off – was being built up for future taxpayers. But because less tax was being collected by the government, Tax Freedom Day appeared to have moved earlier in the year. In fact, it was the earliest Tax Freedom Day since 1973 and, as such, rather obscured the brutal reality of Britain’s fiscal meltdown. As a result, we decided to calculate and publicize an additional measure for 2009 – Cost of Government Day – which took the budget deficit into account. This day did not come until June 25 – later than in any year since 1984. To put it another way, Britons would have needed to work for another 42 days just to cover the debts their government had run up in 2009.
Tough times ahead for taxpayers So unfortunately our research for Tax Freedom Day 2009 suggests a bleak future for UK taxpayers. Running up deficits is ultimately a form of deferred taxation and unless spending is rapidly brought under control by the next government, the tax burden is likely to rise and Tax Freedom Day is likely to creep later and later in the year. One independent estimate has suggested that without spending cuts, the basic rate of income tax will have to go up by 15 percent to get debt below 40 percent of GDP by 2023. Needless to say, the Adam Smith Institute will be doing everything in its power to avoid such a disastrous outcome.
What might have been Perhaps the most depressing part of all this is what might have been, if only the government had shown an ounce of fiscal responsibility. If public spending had grown only in line with inflation since 2000 – the last time Britain’s books were balanced – public spending would be just £407bn now, some £250bn less than current estimates. That would be enough to wipe out our budget deficit, abolish higher rate income tax, raise the personal allowance to £12,000, and cut corporation tax to match Ireland’s 12.5 percent. If we wanted to boost the economy, what better way to do it!
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Our publications This year the ASI’s publications have touched on a wide variety of issues, from human rights to digital communications and parliamentary reform. However, given the economic climate in 2009, it is no surprise that the primary focus of the Institute’s agenda has been economic policy, with our books, reports and briefings giving particular attention to the causes of the economic crisis, the policy responses to it, and the need for extensive reform moving forward.
The causes of the crisis In June, David Simpson’s The Recession: Causes and cures argued that the recession is the unavoidable result of the credit-fuelled boom that preceded it, and can be traced to a series of government failures: keeping interest rates too low and allowing asset bubbles to build; giving implicit guarantees to the banks and other borrowers; inadequate prudential supervision and financial market regulation; and encouraging borrowing by those least able to afford it. Simpson went on to argue that the best way to bring the recession more quickly to an end is to re-establish a climate of business confidence through lower taxes and greater fiscal responsibility. Later in the year, Credit Crunch: The anatomy of a crisis by John Redwood MP, which was published to coincide with the anniversary of the Lloyds-HBOS and RBS nationalizations, picked up on the same themes, pinning the blame for the financial crisis squarely on bad monetary policy from the Bank of England and misguided regulation and inadequate crisis management by the UK government. Redwood, one of the Conservative Party’s leading authorities on economic policy, concluded his report by making a series of recommendations for the reform of the UK banking sector, calling for the nationalized banks to be split up before being privatized, in order to encourage more competition in the domestic market. And as the G20 came to London, the Institute complemented its extensive media work with a pair of briefing papers by financial analyst Miles Saltiel. What Went Wrong? An Agenda for the G20 argued that the G20 was likely to accomplish little, since it had failed to understand the causes of the financial crisis. Their explanations – over-complex financial products, bank deregulation, excessive risk-taking driven by large bonuses – did not stand up to scrutiny, said Saltiel, and were preventing them from dealing with the real issues, namely inept monetary policy, social engineering in housing policy, the failure of the Basel protocols on core capital, and banks that were ‘too-big-to-fail’. The second briefing, G20: Less Than Meets the Eye, assessed the outcomes of the summit, concluding that it had indeed delivered little beyond a series of photo opportunities.
The regulatory response The ASI was quick to respond to Lord Turner’s ‘regulatory response to the global banking crisis’ with its own report, Regulatory Myopia, which was drafted by regulation experts Tim Ambler and Keith Boyfield with the support of the Institute’s Regulatory Evaluation Group. It argued that regulators must carry much of the blame for the severity of the financial crash, noting that while banks were already minutely regulated, regulators had become so preoccupied with form-filling that they had failed to notice the emergence of systemic risks in the financial sector. The report called for greater clarity in financial regulation, with the Bank of England taking a big-picture, supervisory role while the FSA’s powers were cut back to ‘match its competence’. Later in the year, these conclusions were echoed by the Conservative Party’s own review of financial regulation. A couple of months later, Ambler and Boyfield applied the same forensic approach to the European Commission’s proposals to centralize financial regulation in Brussels. Financial Regulation: What is the best solution for the EU? argued that the lack of EU cross-border rules had had nothing to do with the crisis, and was little more than a distraction from the more important task of improving the supervision structures that failed in individual EU countries, not least in Britain. The EU’s new bureaucracies would be top-heavy and ineffective, the report concluded, and could actually make financial instability worse.
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The Recession by David Simpson
Lord Turner was back in our sights in September, with his suggestion of a ‘Tobin Tax’
While that report argued that some government intervention was needed to deal with
on financial transactions provoking another briefing paper from Miles Saltiel. Regulatory
emerging problems in the energy sector, the same can certainly not be said of the digital
Corporatism argued that as well as being impractical – it could not be implemented
communications industry, which was the subject of a lively report by Eben Wilson. Digital
domestically without driving business overseas – the proposed tax was a lazy alternative to
Dirigisme, which responded to the government’s Digital Britain report, attacked the
undertaking the reforms the financial sector really needed. By guaranteeing governments
government’s proposals for ‘industrial activism’ in the communications sector, and laid out its
a bigger slice of the profits, it would encourage politicians to accept the too-big-to-fail
own vision for a highly competitive, enterprise-driven industry based on a clear framework of
institutions that had emerged in the banking sector over the last economic cycle – “a
property rights and privacy protection. Controversially, the report also called for the phased
corporatist Faustian pact”, as Saltiel put it.
privatization of the BBC.
At the Conservative Party conference several weeks later, the ASI published Cure or disease?
Not just economics
The unintended consequences of regulation, in which Keith Boyfield showed how – perhaps
As noted above, the Institute’s focus this year has been largely on economic policy, but our
despite the best intentions of government – regulation frequently had unforeseen and highly
publishing agenda has also touched on a number of other issues. For example, The War on
damaging consequences. As well as looking at macroeconomic regulation and capital
Capitalism: Human rights, political bias, by legal expert Jacob Mchangama, refuted the idea
adequacy rules, Boyfield drew attention to a whole range of unintended consequences, in
that economic and social entitlements should not be treated differently from classical rights
sectors ranging from agriculture and fisheries to ‘health and safety’.
such as free speech and habeas corpus. His report accused the human rights movement of a
Ten Economic Priorities by Nigel Hawkins
marked political bias towards state involvement in the economy, which was acting as a serious
The importance of tax competition
impediment to the effective promotion and implementation of vital human rights internationally,
Another side effect of the economic downturn, which sent tax revenues plunging all over the
as well as holding back economic advancement in the developed world.
developed world, was a renewed attack on international tax competition by big-spending Credit Crunch by John Redwood MP
governments. In accordance with its belief that tax competition, a process by which
Of course, the parliamentary expenses scandal featured heavily in 2009’s news headlines,
governments compete with one another to attract businesses by lowering tax rates, is a
and this did not go unaddressed by the ASI’s team of policy experts. In Parliamentary Fatcats
vital check on the growth of government, as well a stimulus for much-need tax reform, the
Richard Teather calculated that if MPs’ perks were treated as post-tax income, their total
ASI released two reports defending the phenomenon in late 2009. The Economics of Tax
package would be worth an average £319,165 – nearly 18 times the pay of the average voter.
Competition, by US expert Daniel J. Mitchell, made the general case for tax competition,
Meanwhile Tim Ambler and Keith Boyfield made the case for radical parliamentary reform in
while Richard Teather’s Tax Competition: How tax havens help the poor pointed out that tax
their provocatively titled Knaves and Fawkes: Should we reform Parliament or just blow it up?
competition actually brought benefits to the whole of society, and not just to those who took
which was released on November 5.
Zero Base Policy by Madsen Pirie
advantage of it directly. By encouraging lower taxes and allowing for greater efficiency in international capital markets, tax competition leads to increased economic growth, helping the
The big picture
unemployed to find work, and providing the low-paid with greater security.
While many ASI publications focus on specific policy issues, our work occasionally tackles broader themes of public policy and political philosophy. Two such books have been
Regulatory Myopia by Tim Ambler and Keith Boyfield
Looking forward
published this year. In the first, Zero Base Policy, Madsen Pirie advocated a new approach
In July the ASI published Ten Economic Priorities: An agenda for an incoming government,
to reform. Rather than tinkering at the edges by trying to improve existing policies, we should
in which Nigel Hawkins identified ten key economic issues, and made three simple
go back to first principles, he said, asking what government’s objectives are, and how best
recommendations for each one. The ten priorities were to decrease public sector borrowing;
they can be achieved. Such an approach would allow a clean break from the past, and
to cut public expenditure; to lower taxes; to return to the principles of sound money;
encourage the sort of radicalism needed to transform today’s broken Britain into a dynamic
to pursue new privatization opportunities; to reduce public sector pension liabilities; to
society and a successful economy. Zero Base Policy went on to make a wide variety of policy
unscramble Private Finance Initiative deals; to better manage of government procurement;
recommendations, covering everything from tax and public services, to civil liberties and
to introduce periodic stress testing of the UK’s clearing banks; and to unwind the Asset
constitutional reform.
A Beginners Guide to Liberty edited by Richard Wellings
Protection Scheme. The headline recommendations were that the next government should
Re-energizing Britain by Nigel Hawkins
deliver real terms cuts in public expenditure of 3% per annum, and introduce progressive
And then our final publication of the year, A Beginner’s Guide to Liberty, went right to the
rate reductions in income tax, national insurance and corporation tax as soon as the public
fundamentals, examining some of the key concepts of political and economic thought. The
finances are brought under control.
guide, which is aimed at a wide audience but written so as to be accessible to students, consisted of ten short chapters, each by an expert in their field. The authors – ranging from
Nigel Hawkins was also behind our heavyweight report Re-energizing Britain: Promoting
J.C. Lester on the philosophy of liberty, to Peter Boettke on public choice theory and Eamonn
investment in our energy future, which warned that the UK faced blackouts unless the six
Butler on free markets – showed why individual freedom is essential if people are to lead
major energy companies invested in new nuclear plant and substantially increased Britain’s
prosperous and fulfilling lives, while also pointing to the terrible consequences when politicians
gas storage facilities. It recommended that the existing Renewables Obligation be replaced
and officials get too much power. Our hope is that like 2008’s Freedom 101, this book will be a
with a new Low Carbon Obligation, which would include nuclear power, while also calling on
popular and inspiring introductory text for years to come.
the government to ensure that the energy companies get the planning approval and access to finance they need to upgrade the UK’s energy infrastructure.
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Student programmes
Technology plays an increasingly vital role in our communication with the next generation, whether through our YouTube Channel, Twitter account, or Facebook pages. As was the case with our popular blog, we have been at the forefront of actively embracing technology in order to spread our message.
School Visits Our President, Dr Madsen Pirie, undertakes the majority of the school visits. Always thought provoking, his unique style involves a pithy talk followed by a lively Q&A session. During conversation, Dr Pirie manages to engage and challenge any prejudices against liberty that students receive in their instruction at school, empowering them with ideas and guiding them
Since its founding a large portion of the Institute’s efforts have gone towards putting the case for free markets and a free society to the next generation. For many students, their encounter with the ASI is the first time they are alerted to these principles. As such, this work is invaluable in the ongoing battle of ideas.
towards literature to further their knowledge of free markets and free societies. In 2009 Dr Pirie visited more schools than ever and he has an extensive schedule of schools visits lined up for 2010.
Young Writer on Liberty 2009 saw our first Young Writer on Liberty competition. Students were asked to write three short articles on what they consider to be the three greatest threats to their liberty growing up in the 21st century. The first, second and third prizewinners each received cash awards, seminal literature on freedom, publication of their articles as blogs on our website and work experience at the ASI. The competition attracted a great deal of interest from students and we were pleased to receive many high quality submissions. On the back of this success, we are planning to continue the Young Writer on Liberty competition into 2010 and beyond.
Independent Seminar on the Open Society Twice a year we run our popular Independent Seminar on the Open Society for sixth-form students. ISOS is now an established feature of many school programmes, and is noted for the extremely high quality of speakers that we are able to showcase. ISOS is named after Karl Popper’s ideal, in which challenging opinions are freely expressed in public debate. As such, many of the speakers are asked to cover topics that confront received wisdoms. Half of each talk is devoted to Q&A to ensure that the students have time to question the speakers. 2009 featured our first ISOS debate. For many of the students, it was their first experience of debating, but nonetheless went down as a resounding success. Past ISOS speakers have included: Andrew Marr, George Osborne MP, Vince Cable MP, Boris Johnson, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Andrew Neil, Paul Ormerod, Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, and many more besides. 2009 featured Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP, Lebit Opik MP and Brendan O’Neil (Editor, Spiked Online) amongst others.
The Next Generation The Next Generation group has met on the first Tuesday of every month for many years. Meetings feature a short speech from whoever is interesting and in town. 2009’s highlights included David Davis MP, Peter Kellner (President, YouGov), Brooks Newmark MP, James Tyler (CEO, Tyler capital). The Next Generation – or TNG, as we call it – forms a social setting for the next generation of leaders in business, journalism and public policy to meet and network, and also allows us to bring them into contact with sound ideas about the economy and society. As such, this programme makes a vital contribution to our efforts to build a movement for economic and social freedom.
Internships One by-product of doing so much work with the younger generation is that many people approach us for internships. Unfortunately we get far more applications than we can accept, but wherever possible we like to give talented individuals the opportunity to get more involved with our work and found out what the think tank business is all about. Interns invariably leave us reporting that they had a lot of fun, learnt a lot, and are more committed than ever to the cause of liberty.
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Events
Power Lunches Our Power Lunches continue to be a staple of the Westminster diary. Guests this year included Grant Shapps MP (Shadow Housing Minister), Mike Penning MP (Shadow Health Minister), Mark Simmonds MP (Shadow Health Minister) and Stephen O’Brien MP (Shadow Health Minister). Following a successful Power Lunch with Lionel Barber (Editor, Financial
2009 saw a busy events programme from start to finish. It was also the first year that video recordings of our major events were made available on our website and YouTube Channel. This has enabled thousands of people across the country and throughout the world to view our events online.
Times), we ran a series of lunches with the national newspaper editors. In late 2009 Peter Hill (Daily Express), John Mullin (Independent on Sunday), Ian MacGregor (Sunday Telegraph), Alan Rushbridger (The Guardian) and Geordie Greig (Evening Standard) came through our doors. 2009 also saw a very successful roundtable lunch on the financial crisis and its policy implications. John Redwood MP led the discussion, which also included numerous journalists and policymakers, and a number of notable economists.
The Regulatory Evaluation Group Our Regulatory Evaluation Group, which focuses on issues affecting businesses and the City, also held a number of events. Roundtable lunches were addressed by principal guests such as Mark Austen (Standard Bank) and Sandra Boss (Head of Global Banking and Finance, McKinsey & Company), and the group also hosted two excellent events at the party conferences. At the Labour Party conference, OFT Chief Executive John Fingleton, Finance & Leasing Association Director-General Stephen Sklaroff, and Sunday Times Economics Editor David Smith discussed “The unintended consequences of regulation” asking whether the “cure was worse than the disease”. Fingleton and Sklaroff were back to talk about the same topic at the Conservative Party conference, but were joined this time by Newsnight Economics Editor Paul Mason, and Shadow Treasury Minister Mark Hoban MP.
Seminars In January, Dr Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, spoke on ‘Capitalism without Guilt. The Moral Case for Freedom’. His talk was entertaining, challenging and controversial in equal measure. March saw Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) talk about Seasteading and the Future of Freedom – outlining his ambitious and revolutionary plans to find liberty on the high seas. Later in the year we held a seminar on the importance of tax competition, which featured speeches by Richard J. Hay (Tax Principal, Stikeman Elliott), Geoff Cook (Chief Executive, Jersey Finance) and Richard Teather (Senior Lecturer in Tax Law, Bournemouth University). Other seminar speakers included the Cato Institute’s Dan Ikenson, who presented a strong defence of free trade, and John Redwood MP, who talked about his report Credit Crunch: the anatomy of a crisis. Redwood also spoke at our infamous Bloggers’ Bash – which continues to attract the top bloggers from all over the country – where he was joined by Paul Staines, the man behind the now legendary Guido Fawkes blog.
The Adam Smith Annual Lecture In June Professor Deepak Lal, the President of the Mont Pelerin Society, delivered the Adam Smith Lecture on The Great Crash of 2008: Are governments or markets to blame? In front of a large audience, Professor Lal gave a sophisticated and multi-faceted analysis of the financial crisis, drawing on his experience at the World Bank, as well as the theories of Wicksell, Fisher and Hayek, which left nobody in any doubt as to the multiple government failures that contributed to the crisis.
Patrons’ Dinners Beyond the knowledge that one is giving to a sound and just cause, one advantage of becoming a significant donor to the ASI are invitations to our exclusive Patrons’ Dinners. In 2009 we had three such private dinners, with journalist and broadcaster Andrew Neil, former Chancellor Lord Lamont, and former Prime Minister Sir John Major. In 2010, Patrons’ Dinners will be held with equally eminent individuals.
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ASI in the media
News commentary The ‘bread and butter’ of our media work is news commentary. Practically every day we are called by TV, radio and newspaper journalists seeking comments on current issues. In the course of 2009, Institute spokesmen have appeared on everything from Radio Two and Four to Sky and BBC News, discussing topics like the G20 Summit, City pay, privatization, and even drug policy. We’ve made international appearances too, everywhere from Canada and the United States to Sweden, France and Croatia. Our comments have turned up in all the main national newspapers – from the Daily Express to the Financial Times – as well as a wide variety of local press outlets. The ASI also became regulars on CNBC in 2009, with more than twenty appearances on that channel’s Strictly Money programme – including special episodes on the
Media outreach is one of the most important tasks any think-tank faces, and the Adam Smith Institute takes it very seriously. Every week representatives of the Institute appear in the national and regional press, and on TV and radio, discussing topics as diverse as tax cuts, industrial policy, gender inequality, and international trade. Making sure our arguments are heard as often as possible is a key objective – and one that is all the more important with free markets coming under sustained attack.
budget, the Queen’s speech, and the pre-budget report.
Feature programmes As well as doing regular news commentary, the Institute’s directors have taken part in a number of documentaries and one-off programmes. Eamonn Butler, for instance, featured in two videos in the FT’s ‘Money & Morals’ series and talked about Adam Smith in a documentary for Radio Three. Tom Clougherty, meanwhile, discussed Scottish independence on Dinner with Portillo, the planning system on In Search of Britain’s Green and Pleasant Land, and even set out his political stall in a ‘Prime Minister for a Day’ discussion on Radio Five’s Richard Bacon programme.
Op-ed articles Opinion articles are another important part of our media repertoire, and in this regard 2009 was a particularly successful year, with numerous pieces appearing in papers like the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Yorkshire Post. Additional articles were published regularly on Telegraph.co.uk and Guardian.co.uk, as well as in online magazines like The American, The First Post, and The Register. Topics ranged from tax and the economy to civil liberties, the nanny state, and the environment.
On the internet Back in the 1990s, the Adam Smith Institute was the first UK think-tank with its own website, and ever since then the internet has been central to our communications strategy. In 2009 our popular blog, which is updated several times daily with pithy analysis of the latest news stories, continued to attract upwards of 40,000 readers a month, while traffic on the website as a whole was up 20 percent on 2008. The year also saw a coordinated expansion of our social media capabilities, with the Institute establishing its own YouTube video channel, and adding countless new ‘followers’ on Twitter, and hundreds of new ‘fans’ on Facebook. All in all, our online activities are now the main way in which we take our message to a younger generation, and serve as another example of our commitment to reaching students and young people all over Britain.
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Looking forward to 2010
The Adam Smith Institute sees 2010 as the most important year in its recent history. With the country beset by economic problems and facing a severe fiscal crisis, and with a new government with fresh ideas likely to take office, the next twelve months represent a oncein-a-generation opportunity to inject sound thinking into the political debate. The stakes are higher than ever: despite public spending near 50 percent of GDP and a budget deficit of some £180bn, no political party has yet developed a convincing strategy for bringing public spending under control. Nor have they announced realistic plans to get the economy growing again, or to reduce the unsustainable, long-term burden placed on taxpayers by an overgrown public sector and an unreformed welfare state. The Adam Smith Institute’s job is to address these flaws in the political process, and to come up with radical but implementable ideas to solve Britain’s most pressing problems. We are under no illusions as to the challenge this task poses, but we are absolutely committed to raising our game and making a real difference. We have already honed our structure and boosted our output by 50 percent over the last year, and we aim to do the same again in 2010. Moreover, we have drawn up a target list of policy reforms that would transform Britain for the better, and will be researching and promoting these ideas unrelentingly through 2010 and beyond. On public spending, we are developing detailed year-on-year plans to scale back expenditure over the course of the next Parliament, so that the budget is balanced and the state rolled back to manageable dimensions. We are also working on a far-reaching package of tax reforms, which would dramatically simplify Britain’s tax system, encourage entrepreneurship, and spark renewed economic growth. Just as importantly, we will be pressing for change in monetary policy, financial regulation and the banking sector, so that Britain really can conquer boom and bust. Of course, our job is not just to propose good policies, but also to oppose bad ones. As such we will be continuing our fight against those who think we can borrow and spend our way to prosperity, who believe the way to help the poor is to attack the rich, and who wish to fix tax rates internationally, so that there is no escape from the grasping hand of government. But our agenda is not purely economic. In 2010, we will also be making the case for re-embracing traditional civil liberties and the rule of law, for resisting the relentless rise of the nanny state, and for freeing our schools and universities from the heavy chains of bureaucracy. And above all this, we will be continuing with and building upon our core mission: to educate and inspire the next generation. Whether it’s with our easy-to-read beginner’s guides, with our student conferences and seminars, or with our school visits, we will be trying to reach as many young people as possible, and endeavouring to persuade them that free markets and individual freedom are not just abstract concepts, but rather the principles that should guide the future of our economy and our society. These efforts may not change policy now, but in the long term winning this war of ideas is the most vital task that advocates of liberty face.
Tom Clougherty EXECUTIVE Director
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