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Blundell, John

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THAT TIME A TOBACCO TYCOON HALVED FUNDING TO A THINK TANK THAT DARED FIRE HIS CHOSEN BOSS

DeSmog UK’s epic history series recounts the moment when John Blundell was recruited into Antony Fisher’s free-market think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs....

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How a ‘Pro-Climate’ Charity Channelled Cash to a Koch-Funded Think Tank - DeSmog

Friedrich von Hayek, the architect of a Thatcherism defined by its the privatisation, tax breaks and strike breaking, would be officially recognised in December 1984. He had already received the Nobel Prize for Economics—but this was the real highlight.

Hayek was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour by the Queen, on the prime minister’s recommendation, for “services to the study of economics”.

The audience with the Queen was followed by a jubilant dinner with family and friends at the Institute of Economic Affairs. “I’ve just had the happiest day of my life,” Hayek said.

Margaret Thatcher in turn thanked Fisher, Harris, and her sponsors at the IEA during its 30th anniversary dinner at Grosvenor House in April 1987.

Fisher flew over from the United States for the auspicious occasion. He was at this point 72 years old, and finally considering retirement.

He had recently hired John Blundell, a childhood admirer of the IEA and a friend of Thatcher’s, to take over as president of his US-based Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

Effective fundraiser

Blundell was then head of the Institute of Humane Studies, with a reputation as “a highly effective manager and fundraiser”.

Fisher had a lot to celebrate. Thirty years ago his ideas were at the very margins of respectability, and the free market seemed like an economist’s shameful fantasy.

Yet, during the previous year alone, the government had implemented the “Big Bang”, with regulations for the savings and investment industry torn asunder. Then, in December 1986, British Gas was sold off in its entirety for £5.6 billion.

The anniversary dinner was held. Lord Blake told the dinner guests: “No single body has contributed more than the IEA to the long overdue destruction of étatisme and to the recovery of Britain.”

Finally, it was Thatcher’s turn to speak. “Anyone who dared to challenge the conventional wisdom of the post-war consensus was derided, pilloried, criticised, frowned upon, and looked down upon as being either reactionary, pitiful, or ignorant,” she said.

“The IEA dared to challenge that. You did not say, as so many others did so, ‘what can a few people do among so many’.”

“You set out to challenge, to change public sentiment… once you, with your courage, gave expression to other views, others followed… what we have achieved could never have been done without the leadership of the Institute of Economic Affairs.”

John Blundell was in the United States at the time, but soon got hold of the gossip from the night. “I heard she was infuriated at how long the 10 men ahead of her spoke,” he told the author.

Bleeding heart

“She tried to convince Fisher that evening to allow the Tory party to take over the IEA, and he was appalled at the idea, and said ‘no way!’” Lawson, it appears, did not attend.

He was, at that time, working on a project to tie aide to developing countries to Thatcherite economic reforms. As he himself said, “I was not known, for good reason, as a bleeding heart.”

Harris, the indefatigable fundraiser, made good use of Thatcher’s kind words. He wrote to British American Tobacco, British Petroleum, and Esso (later to become part of ExxonMobil), asking for an increase in contributions.

“If you had been at the anniversary dinner and heard the PM say ‘what has been achieved would never have been done without the leadership of the IEA, you would agree we should do all we can to strengthen its work in the decisive years ahead,” he wrote in a note to Patrick Sheehy, the non-smoking BAT chairman.

“You have been among our strongest supporters over the years, and are already entitled to share the tributes paid to our success. I question whether I dare address a further appeal to you for the fund of £600,000, to acquire the freehold of 2 Lord North Street or an alternative permanent address. Before going public, I’d like to collect pledges for at least £200,000 from a dozen or so special friends.”

Internal documents released after legal action show that BAT agreed to pay £10,000 to the appeal. “We didn’t get anything out of it except we got some ideas, and we talked about free enterprise and the market economy and things like that.”

Capitalist environment

“They got a lot of support from us,” Sheehy told the author. “The benefit to shareholders is that, in a capitalist company, you would want a capitalist environment to thrive… The less regulation the better. Although there’s obviously got to be some, but it’s got to be a minimum.”

British Petroleum, then 31 per cent owned by the state, agreed to donate £20,000 on top of its annual subscription of £10,000 a year. Esso paid considerably more, according to Clive Wright, who was the director of corporate affairs at the time.

The chairman, Norman Foster, attended Malborough Grammar with Harris, and the two were lifelong friends. “When I was there, we were big supporters of Hayek. We gave them a major donation when they wanted to buy the premises at Lord North Street,” Wright recalled.

“I met Ralph quite a lot at a lunch couple of times in the House of Lords. Very interesting man, very lively and in depth, very much a free thinker. The last thing I want to give you is an impression of anything improper.”

He went on to add: “We had a very strict policy that we did not get involved politically… of course we are free market company, so naturally we believe in the free market. Yes, we didn’t like state control, particularly in something as sensitive as oil.”

The IEA, at the height of its influence and long before climate change was an issue, was bankrolled by Big Oil and Big Tobacco as both industries fought regulation and taxation.

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John Blundell is the Director General of the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs and Vice President of the Mont Pelerin Society.

He was educated at King's School, Macclesfield, and at the London School of Economics from 1971 to 1974.

His roles have included:

He is a Director of Fairbridge, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (UK) and the International Policy Network. He is chairman of the executive committee of the board of Atlas Economic Research Foundation (USA).

He is also a board member of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA; of the Institute of Economic Studies (Europe) in Paris, France; and of the Mont Pelerin Society.

He is on the advisory council of the Tax Payers Alliance.

"Wonk Whores"

A scathing opinion column on corporate-funded think tanks work such as the International Policy Network and the Demos Institute cited Blundell dismissing them as "wonk whores". He says: "Global companies are buying up think-tanks left, right and centre. Large cheques come attached to particular policy recommendations and senior corporate types sit on committees ready to ‘candle-snuff’ dangerous ideas," Paul Staines reported in The Times.[1] In a subsequent letter to the editor, Blundell, who is a trustee of IPN, stated that "the purchase by companies of 'particular policy recommendations' from groups pretending to be independent think-tanks is disgraceful. That is why International Policy Network, a UK charity of which I am a trustee, has a strict policy of not allowing its donors to influence the conclusions of its policy work, and a strict conflict of interest policy."[2]

External links

References

  1. ↑ Paul Staines, [http://www.spinwatch.org/content/view/2267/9/ "You want policy? In cash?", The Times, December 20, 2005.
  2. ↑ [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article782081.ece "What price liberty?", The Times, December 23, 2005.

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DeSmog UK’s epic history investigates how the former Institute of Economic Affairs director general, John Blundell, recruited British students with a flair for free market economics to the USfor internships at Koch-funded think tanks.

By the early 1990s John Blundell was a well established founder and supporter of several American free-market think tanks. So to help grow the neoliberal network, he organised eight-week paid internships in the United States each year for 30 British students who had demonstrated flair and a keen interest in free market economists.

Blundell asked the think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), supported by the Kochs, to take on some of the young hopefuls. “Fred Smith at CEI agreed but only if he could have Roger Bate,” Blundell confirmed.

Roger Bate (pictured above) was sharp, energetic and almost fanatical. He had met Smith in 1992 at the week-long “Université d’été des Nouveaux Économistes”  in Aix-en-Provence, France.

Now a free-market economist, Bate was around this time completing an MSc in environment and resource economics at University College London (UCL). Bate was influenced by Jimmy Sheehan, a CEI “staffer” who was working on a book about the global environmental movement and a monograph for the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London.

Cross Pollination

Bate would, in turn, recruit his friend Julian Morris to the climate cause. The two men would have a profound influence on the germination and cross pollination of scepticism in London and around the world.

Morris was the handsome, charming and well spoken son of a chemical engineer from Epping. He first became interested in free market economics when he was a 22-year-old student completing an MA at the highly regarded Edinburgh University in 1991.

He read a startling and challenging article in the Financial Times which was based on a monograph by professor Sir Douglas Hague published by the IEA which called for the privatisation of universities.

Morris also read free-marketeer Friedrich von Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Societyand attended events at the IEA, where he met Blundell and Linda Whetstone, the daughter of IEA founder, Antony Fisher.

Naive Environmentalist

“I was myself a naive young environmentalist,” Morris wrote some years later. “I had just written a paper on how to establish a global system for restricting emissions of carbon dioxide and was about to embark on a masters course in environment and resource economics run by Professor David Pearce at University College London.”

At the time, there was much buzz about a conference due to take place in Rio de Janeiro that was being hailed as the 'Earth Summit' and global warming was a hot item on the agenda.

It was during his masters at UCL that Morris became close friends with Bate and became increasingly immersed in free market ideas and the think tank world.

“I am not dogmatic in my approach”, Morris told me. “I care deeply about the environment.”  

Blundell would later arrange for Morris to fly out to the United States through the Charles G Koch Foundation, taking up a short internship at the Atlas Foundation - both of which Blundell worked for.

“Charles and David Koch are two of the finest, most upstanding businessmen and philanthropists in the world,” Morris told me during an email interview.

While in the US, Morris completed his research for his IEA monograph The Political Economy of Land Degradation in 1995. On his return, he set up shop as a consultant economist and worked for the European Environment Agency, Save the Rhino International and the World Wildlife Fund.

But over the coming years Morris would make considerably more money running think tanks that challenged the science of climate change and attacked policies that would reduce carbon emissions.

Coming up in January: The DeSmog UK history series continues with a look at how fossil-fuel funded scientists launched a full-scale attack against the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prior to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

@Brendanmontague

http://www.desmog.uk/2014/11/29/blundell-missing-link-between-oil-baron-charles-koch-and-british-climate-denial

John Blundell is welcomed into the inner circle of the Koch elite at at time of inner-family squabbling and political scandal. He soon gains insight into an empire run by obsession and apparent deception. This is part two of DeSmogUK’s history of Blundell and Charles Koch.

Blundell was offered a well paid job at the**Institute of Humane Studies**(IHS) in April 1982 - a hardline neoliberal think tank funded by the oil billionare Charles Koch.

He resigned as spokesman for theFederation of Small Businesses and as a councillor at a London borough and moved to California in the United States with his wife Christine and their three-month-old baby boy, Miles.

He was still working at the IHS when it moved to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, one of the many front groups and free market think tanks to benefit from Koch funding.

Blundell was very close friends withAntony Fisher, founder of Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs. The 72-year-old chicken farmer knew that he was dying and asked Blundell for help recruiting a replacement as president of hisAtlas Economic Research Foundation.

Blundell recommended a good friend, a retired businessman and fierce exponent of the free market. But Fisher discovered that the appointee spent rather too long on the golf course. “Later he realised that Blundell, a highly effective manager and fundraiser, met the criteria more exactly than any of the other contenders,” according to Gerald Frost, director of the London-based Centre for Policy Studies during the early 1990s.

Blundell took up the job. He moved Atlas over to Fairfax so he could act as president while still running the IHS. He recalled: “I first met Fisher at the IEA in the 1970s and then again when I was living in Menlo Park, California and he was up the road in San francisco.”

Handed the crown

“He was totally obsessed with building new IEAs. I was already running the Institute For Humane Studies.” Blundell continued. “Fisher knew he was about to turn up his toes. I worked with him on finding somebody to take over Atlas but San Francisco was not that appealing and the think tank was turning over $250,000 a year, so not much at all.

“I said I could do it part time in Virginia easily and that this was a better location by far. He agreed as long as he had an office to the day he died. So for eight months we had two offices.”

Blundell at this time became increasingly aware of the small number of scientists and free market think tanks that had started to challenge the emerging science of climate change.

Asked about global warming, he said: “I recall that as president of Atlas I would put free market-oriented environmental thinking on our workshop agenda in order to make sure it spread outside the USA, or at least to make sure think tanks around the world were at the very least aware of this work.”

Blundell was handed the crown when Fisher died and paid tribute by founding the Sir Antony Fisher memorial awards.

He was also becoming a senior member of the Koch cortège, appointed president of theIHS and also became a member of theMont Pelerin Society, the neoliberal society founded byFriedrich Hayek andMilton Friedman, among others.

Meanwhile, Charles Koch desperately needed people around him he could trust. A long-running family feud had gone toxic.

Tax Deductible

Koch siblings were accusing each other of syphoning off the family fortune. One had even gone to the extreme of hiring a private eye with the purpose of finding dirt.

This resulted in a full-blown Senate hearing, in-part based on the muck the investigator had raked up.

Koch Industries, the senators were told, had trained its staff to “mis-measure” oil bought from Native Americans, effectively “stealing” $30 million over three years in the process.

The scandal appears to have remained contained in reports in the Mohave Daily Miner but demonstrates the levels of suspicion and distrust at that time.

At the same time, Charles Koch was watching Blundell's career with keen interest and was extremely impressed by his dedication and quiet determination and decided he was a man who could be trusted.

In March 1991, Koch offered him the prestigious post as president of the Charles G Koch andClaude R Lambe Charitable Foundations from where he would be responsible for distributing millions in tax-deductible philanthropic donations.  

The extent of Blundell's power and the scale of the Koch network of think tanks at this time are revealed in a private letter he typed from his Washington offices to his contact William Orzechowsi in Fairfax, Virginia, in November 1991.

The letter was highly confidential. Blundell was helping recruit the highest generals and the foot soldiers for a huge army of free market detachments and vanguard units.

This included the executive vice president of theCitizens for a Sound Economy, a privatisation policy analyst at the Reason Foundation and two executive directors for the “non-partisan” National Taxpayers Union.

Directors of development were also needed at the Cato Institute, Institute of Humane Studies and Institute for Justice.

One job advert ran: “A citizens action group is seeking a field director to coordinate fundraising, petition drives, media relations, and coalition building with various state level non-partisan campaigns,” adding, “experience in ballot initiatives and petitioning is preferred.”

The list of think tanks included “free market advocacy groups promoting economic freedom” and “lower taxes” working in the fields of social security, medical care, poverty, welfare, education choice, regulation, trade, labour relations and the environment.

He asked for specialists in lobbying, media relations, recruiting students and visiting scholars and “mobilising grassroots support.”

Blundell’s overarching seat would establish the foundations for his direct role in the growing climate denial movement.

@brendanmontague

eSmog UK’s epic history series continues with a peek into the intimate friendship between free-market libertarian John Blundell and the Koch brothers.

“Without… Charles and David Koch… without their far-sighted commitment, we would not be here today and we would not be witnessing a world-wide move toward freedom and free markets,” John Blundell once wrote.

The free-market libertarian had just been recruited as the new director of the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). Handing in his notice at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) – a hardline neoliberal think tank funded by oil billionaire Charles Koch – Blundell booked a flight to England.

But this transatlantic move did not cause the Koch–Blundell relationship to fade. In fact, the friendship extended as far as Blundell continuing to do Koch’s bidding from the IEA’s London offices.

Retirement Funding

Soon after arriving at Lord North Street, Blundell received a call from his former patron in the United States. Margit von Mises, the widow of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (pictured), was now a 102-year-old facing destitution.

“Margit had hocked all she owned and was facing spending the rest of her years in a charity home,” Blundell told the author. “Margit’s only family was in London and I had just reached London. The family were themselves quite old and into retirement and could not reasonably fund Margit.”

“Charles and his right hand man Rich Fink asked me to run a quick operation. They put up a sum and asked me to get it matched. They knew I knew all the folks who could and would do so. It was anything up to $120,000. Anyways, I bashed out a bunch of letters and we got the match. I forget where we ran the pot from but probably had to be a 501(c)(3) in the USA as all the donors were American.”

Private Philanthropy

Blundell succeeded in raising the extra money and opened an account, paying Mrs Mises enough each month to cover her living expenses. After she died, there was still some money remaining.

“When I raised the money I said that as she might well pass on during this first year, would people nominate to whom the balance should go if that indeed did happen. I recall IHS being the main one.” He added, “I did that as director general of the IEA but cannot recall if the dosh passed through us or somewhere else.”

Blundell recalled fondly: “Charles was very like Thatcher in that he did and still does strongly believe in quiet private acts of philanthropy.”

This remarkable act of selflessness demonstrates how close Blundell remained with the oil billionaire when he arrived in London and established the first climate sceptic outfit in Britain.

Next time, our epic history series investigates how Blundell challenged the young Roger Bate to set up an environment unit within the IEA.

@brendanmontague

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