The Purpose of this Website
(Updated Thursday the 25th August 2021)

The 1970s were a time of intellectual change in British politics. Since about 1940, the consensus had been that an enlarged an active state was necessary to maintain full employment and economic growth. An agreed secondary object was equality of access to healthcare and education. By 1975, it was clear that this enlarged and active state was not able to achieve these objects, or that it was doing so less effectively than had been expected. Those areas dominated by the State were inefficient. The effort to dominate these areas had led both to unsustainable levels of tax and to rising public debts that were routinely monetised to bring about a continuous and sometimes severe inflation. By 1975, unemployment, which had been the announced justification for enlarging the State, was above one million for the first time since 1940, and was not expected to fall again in the foreseeable future.

In mainstream politics, the response to these difficulties was a renewed interest in free enterprise and a monetary policy that focussed more on the price level than on full employment. The Labour Government of the day, though socialist in other areas, was willing to pay attention to monetary aggregates. The arrival of Margaret Thatcher as Leader of the Conservative Party created a suddenly more radical opposition that promised a greater emphasis on market solutions than had been seen since the 1930s. The election of a Conservative Government in 1979 was a rejection by the British people of the old economic consensus and a mandate for change.

Though cried up by supporters and opponents alike as wildly radical, the Conservatives were seen by one group of young intellectuals as rather timid. This group, that had come together in the earlier part of the decade, included Chris Tame, David Ramsay-Steele, Mark Brady and Judy Englander, together with David Farrer, Davis Davies, David McDonagh and a shifting cast of others, welcomed the new emphasis on economic efficiency and stable prices. But it regarded free enterprise not as a tool of government policy, but as one aspect of human freedom. For these young intellectuals, freedom was defined as the right of an individual to do whatever did not involve aggression against another individual – regardless of how distasteful this might seem to others, and regardless of how harmful it might be to the individual himself. In 1979, at a flat in Woking, they set up the Libertarian Alliance. This would spread the libertarian message by holding public meetings, by engaging with the media and by publishing. Its mission is summarised on the first page of the first edition of its journal, Free Life:

What we want is a government so small that it doesn’t matter where it is, what it does, who’s in it, or how they got there.

A fuller statement is given in its pamphlet, The Purpose and Strategy of the Libertarian Alliance, first published in 1981. The Libertarian Alliance would, by focussing attention on the intellectual classes, seek to bring about a long term shift of belief from statism to individualism. This would be a shift not marked by mass-membership or won elections, but by the quality and volume of publications, and by the effect of these publications on those who formed the opinions of the masses. No one expected the shift to happen all at once, or even in one lifetime. But it could happen. If it were to happen, now was the time to begin the work.

The Libertarian Alliance was something new and radical. It was also uniquely willing to denounce the Thatcher Government not for its radicalism, but for its lack of radicalism. From its beginning, it gained much attention in the media. This attention was never seen as an end in itself, but largely as a means of reaching out to intellectual recruits. If a radio appearance led to one telephone call, or if ten appearances led to the recruitment of one new writer, that justified all engagement with the media.

The Libertarian Alliance always worked best as a partnership of two. The first partnership was between Chris Tame and David Ramsay Steele. This fell apart in 1983 in circumstances that have no place in a brief overview, and that are perhaps best forgotten. The result, however, was a split from which two Libertarian Alliances emerged. Without insisting that either was the true successor organisation of what had been formed in 1979, this overview is concerned with the organisation led by Chris Tame.

The next partnership in the organisation’s history was between Chris Tame and Brian Micklethwait. Brian’s contribution, other than his notable skills as a writer and speaker and media performer, was his reworking of the Libertarian Alliance as chiefly a publisher. His early an increasingly confident use of computer technology brought about an immense expansion of the number of pamphlets. Sometimes just a few pages, sometimes really substantial works, these soon reached into the hundreds. Their clear, minimalistic design was and remains a model of its kind. Their purpose was to provide a medium in which libertarians could reach out to each other and to intellectuals in general. The pamphlets cover every subject relevant to the libertarian message – economics, philosophy, politics, culture, foreign policy, religion, science, and much else. They are the main content of this website.

The next partnership, after Brian moved to other projects was between Chris Tame and Sean Gabb. This ended in 2006, with the early death of Chris Tame. After this, Dr Gabb continued for five years with Timothy Evans. After 2011, Dr Gabb continued the Libertarian Alliance under his own undivided leadership.

In 2016, Dr Gabb suffered an illness that might have been fatal. On his recovery, he decided that it was time to pass leadership of the movement to a younger generation. In 2017, the Libertarian Alliance gained a new and younger leadership, and was renamed Mises UK, in honour of the Austrian economic Ludwig von Mises.

In 2021, following the unexpected strains of the Coronavirus, and with the redirection of Mises UK towards purely economic activism, the Libertarian Alliance was re-established as an entirely independent organisation under the restored direction of Dr Gabb.

As re-established, the Libertarian Alliance is no longer a campaigning organisation. It refuses media invitations. It holds no meetings. It brings out no new publications. This is a policy that may change. For the moment, however, the Libertarian Alliance chooses merely to exist. Its continued existence is important, as it is the present link in an institutional chain that leads back to the Liberty and Property Defence League of the late nineteenth century, and its duty is to maintain that continuity.

In August 2021, Dr Gabb decided to mark his restored leadership by rebuilding the Libertarian Alliance website. He had begun this in 1999 as an HTML/CSS site. In 2011, he rebuilt this in Drupal 6 – a serious mistake, as this was a content management system that required greater coding skills than he has ever possessed, and from which upgrades were effectively impossible. Rebuilding the site in WordPress enables an appearance and functionality that was always desired, but never achieved.

The purpose of this rebuilt website is to make all the publications of the Libertarian Alliance easily available. These will be joined by all the recordings made of talks and conferences speeches, plus photographs and much else. Now that death has removed most of those involved in the 1983 split, it is hoped that the website will eventually hold material by both Libertarian Alliances.

This website is a work in progress. It will be supplemented and otherwise improved as often as time allows. If you, one of our visitors, find a broken link or some other error, please send e-mail to director@libertarian.co.uk.