Colin Robinson

Where is the Arthur Seldon for our own era?

Colin Robinson, biographer of the sage who so influenced Thatcherism, says that Seldon has no counterpart now — the Tory party is no longer receptive to such challenging ideas

Colin Robinson, biographer of the sage who so influenced Thatcherism, says that Seldon has no counterpart now — the Tory party is no longer receptive to such challenging ideas

Arthur Seldon deserves greater recognition as a central figure in a small group of economic policymakers which started the transformation of the British economy in the last two decades of the 20th century.

Seldon, who was born in 1916 in London into an émigré Russian Jewish family, was orphaned early in life and brought up by his adoptive parents in the Jewish East End in a community in which hard work, self-help and caring for the disadvantaged were the norms. He had early experience of welfare without the state: when Seldon was ten, his adoptive father died but the financial impact was mitigated by his mother’s receipt of death benefits from his father’s friendly society and some help provided by the Jewish community. A surviving essay from Seldon’s schooldays shows that by his late teens he had already started to appreciate liberal market ideas. He then attended the London School of Economics in its heyday in the late 1930s when it was home to great classical liberal economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins, Arnold Plant and Ronald Coase. They reinforced and formalised Seldon’s emerging liberal views and had a profound effect on him. Much of his working life thereafter was devoted to expounding and applying to practical policy the ideas he had formed in his early years which had been developed into economic principles at the LSE.

The turning-point in Seldon’s career came in 1957 when, after war service and a period working in the retail and brewing industries, he was appointed Editorial Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a post which allowed him both to publish his own views and to establish a publishing programme in which economists and others explored the workings of markets and their generally beneficial outcomes.

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