THATCHER Ctr Pol Studies
this refers to her also
see centre for policy studies
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truss modelled herself on maggie, shortest MP in history 44 days, empirical fail voodoo
Liz Truss's think tank allies said mini-budget was 'fantastic'
https://www.opendemocracy.net › liz-truss-kwasi-kwart...
Sep 29, 2022 — Truss's think tank backers said her mini-budget would get the economy ... None of the think tanks discloses its funders, but the IE
when the UK’s new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced a raft of tax cuts for high earners last week in his mini-budget, the response from the markets was damning. The pound fell to its lowest level against the dollar since decimalisation, and the cost of government borrowing jumped sharply.
But the announcements were cheered on by a group of secretive think tanks closely connected to Liz Truss and her advisers. After years of lobbying, a Conservative government had finally adopted their proposals to scrap the top rate of income tax, remove the cap on bankers’ bonuses, shelve a planned rise in corporation tax, and pledge a fresh crackdown on unions.
The Adam Smith Institute, where Truss’s political secretary Sophie Jarvis was head of government affairs, said the plans were “a welcome first step to getting the British economy back on track”.
The mood was particularly buoyant at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), whose director general Mark Littlewood greeted the announcement by claiming: “This isn’t a trickle-down budget – it’s a boost-up budget."
truss and Kwarteng have faced accusations that their proposals are inspired by ‘trickle-down economics’, a term for a set of policies adopted by the former US president Ronald Reagan that cut taxes for the richest in the belief that wealth would then filter down to the poorest. The theory has been discredited by both the International Monetary Fund and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
None of the think tanks discloses its funders, but the IEA has received donations from BP and ExxonMobil and, along with the Adam Smith Institute and the Centre for Policy Studies, the tobacco industry. The IEA and the Adam Smith Institute have also received millions of dollars from US funders of climate denial.
Later, speaking at a post-budget briefing, Littlewood was asked by journalists if he was anxious about his policies being put to the test.
“We don't write policy ideas just for them to sit on the shelf – we write them in the hope that one day they're enacted,” he said. But he also admitted that: “If it turns out that these don’t work, I think the IEA has got a lot of hard thinking to do.”
Tim Montgomerie, a former adviser to Boris Johnson, wrote on Twitter that the budget was a “massive moment for the IEA”. “They’ve been advocating these policies for years,” he said. “They incubated Truss and Kwarteng during their early years as MPs. Britain is now their laboratory.”
Truss is particularly close to the IEA, having founded its parliamentary wing FREER in 2011 and hired its former communications director Ruth Porter to run her campaign, later rewarding her by making her deputy chief of staff.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance, which once shared a Westminster office with the IEA, predicted that the budget would boost economic output by £99bn over the next ten years and said it was the “most taxpayer-friendly budget in recent memory.”
The economic projections were produced in collaboration with another think tank, Europe Economics. Andrew Lilco, the organisation’s executive director, was later asked to respond to criticism that the budget would benefit the rich more than the poor in an interview on Sky News.
“I have no interest in equality. I think it’s an incorrect policy objective. I don’t think it’s morally or economically sound as a policy objective,” he said.
The Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank co-founded by former Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher, also claimed credit for many of the policies announced in Kwarteng’s budget.
Tom Clougherty, its ‘head of tax’, said on the
earlier this week that: “I think that frankly both the overall message and the specific announcements contained within [the mini-budget] are fantastic. Exactly what we would have hoped for and what people like us have been calling for for a long time.”
The reaction from the markets and financial institutions has been in stark contrast to the celebratory rhetoric from Truss’s allies.
On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund issued a stinging rebuke of the government’s tax cuts and called on the prime minister to reconsider them to prevent increasing inequality.
The United Nations fund, which monitors the international monetary system to identify risks and recommend economic policies, said the budget could undermine efforts to tackle already rampant inflation.
With turmoil continuing since Friday, the Bank of England was forced to step in to calm the markets. The same day, the bank announced it would buy £65bn of government bonds over the next fortnight as fears grew that pension funds could be affected.
The former Bank of England governor Mark Carney later accused the government of “undercutting” financial institutions and said its tax-cutting measures were “working at some cross-purposes” with the bank.
Speculation that the central bank will now increase interest rates to nearly 6% has prompted nearly 300 mortgage deals to be pulled by lenders. Millions of existing mortgage holders could now also face huge hikes to their monthly repayments.
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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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http://desmogblog.cmail2.com/t/t-l-jddyltk-jdldtjdit-g/
http://www.desmog.uk/2014/11/07/25-years-thatcher-s-death-spiral-lawson-would-undermine-legacy
25 years ago today Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her premiership when she took to the podium at the UN general assembly on the global environment held on 8 November 1989.
However, her continued fall from grace would undermine what could have been one of her greatest contributions as a world leader, but instead exposed a government broken after the resignation of her chancellor Nigel Lawson.
...
http://www.desmog.uk/2014/11/05/lawson-s-break-thatcher
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RIP:
Margaret Thatcher's Climate Change Of Heart
The Huffington Post | By Lucia Graves Posted: 04/09/2013 11:15 am EDT | Updated: 04/09/2013 5:42 pm EDT
In 1990, Margaret Thatcher emerged as one of the first world leaders to champion climate science, issuing a call to action to fight manmade global warming at the Second World Climate Conference hosted at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.
She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the conservatives' case for environmental stewardship in the face of climate change. "I see the adoption of these policies as a sort of premium on insurance against fire, flood or other disaster," she said. "It may be cheaper or more cost-effective to take action now than to wait and find we have to pay much more later."
She would later recant many of her positions, however, adopting an increasingly skeptical stance. Although some maintain that she was consistent in her advocacy for the environment, more than 10 years later, she publicly criticized the push to protect it.
Her speech in Geneva acknowledged the uncertainty of the science behind climate change, before vigorously affirming that "the need for more research should not be an excuse for delaying much needed action now ... there is already a clear case for precautionary action at an international level."
A year before, in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York she urged the global community to take action.
"The evidence is there. The damage is being done. What do we, the international community, do about it? … It is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay. We have to look forward not backward, and we shall only succeed in dealing with the problems through a vast international, co-operative effort."
She called for the United Nations to ratify a treaty by 1992. The New York Times covered it at the time with the headline: "Thatcher Urges Pact On Climate." Excerpts from some of her climate-change speeches are here.
But in 2003, she backtracked on her climate advocacy, calling climate activism a "marvelous excuse for supra-national socialism," and denouncing Al Gore's calls for international cooperation around climate change "apocalyptic hyperbole."
In her 2003 book *Statecraft* she wrote of "a new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-center governing classes," praised former President George W. Bush for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol and bemoaned the “costly and economically damaging” schemes to limit carbon emissions.
While it would appear Thatcher, who died on Monday at age 87, did a complete 180 on the issue, Iain Murray with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., has argued that she remained an environmentalist.
"Thatcher's environmentalism is founded on Edmund Burke's conservative view of our inheritance as being worth defending," he wrote. "Yet that view is tempered by her classical liberal belief that human wealth and progress are crucial. That is why Lady Thatcher can be described as a true free market environmentalist."
Will Oremus, writing for Slate, notes she never abandoned her faith in the scientific method, nor her belief that true conservatism entailed caring for the Earth so that future generations may thrive.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/22/thatcher-climate-sceptic-monckton
Thatcher becomes latest recruit in Monckton's climate sceptic campaign
Monckton's use of Britain's former PM illustrates that climate denialism is about politics, not science
Margaret Thatcher once stunned the UN in 1989 with a call to action on global warming. But she later cooled her position on man-made climate change.
Climate change sceptics last week co-opted Margaret Thatcher into their lobbying campaigns, illustrating once more the strong ideological streak that drives their efforts.
Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley has posted, on the blog operated by former TV weatherman and prominent "sceptic" Anthony Watts, a personal account of his influence on Lady Thatcher's views about climate change during the 1980s. Thatcher shocked the UN in 1989 with a call to action on man-made global warming, but has since made sceptical public statements about anthropogenic climate change.
As we have come to expect, Viscount Monckton's recollection of events makes for interesting reading.
He begins with the claim that: "I gave her advice on science as well as other policy from 1982-1986, two years before the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] was founded", pointing out that the prime minister's policy unit at that time had just six members and that he was "the only one who knew any science". Monckton then goes on to suggest that "it was I who – on the prime minister's behalf – kept a weather eye on the official science advisers to the government, from the chief scientific adviser downward".
This revelation might be news to Lady Thatcher. On page 640 of her 1993 autobiography Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years, the former prime minister describes how she grappled with the issue of climate change, referring only to "George Guise, who advised me on science in the policy unit". Indeed, given Monckton's purportedly crucial role, it seems to be heartless ingratitude from the Iron Lady that she does not find room to mention him anywhere in the 914-page volume on her years as prime minister.
Viscount Monckton also modestly notes that he was responsible for bringing in "the first computer they had ever seen in Downing Street", on which he "did the first elementary radiative-transfer calculations that indicated climate scientists were right to say some 'global warming' would arise as CO2 concentration continued to climb".
It is perhaps surprising that this novel and important innovation by Viscount Monckton was not recognised by the current minister for science and universities, David Willetts, who was also a member of the prime minister's policy unit between 1984 and 1986. In 1986, "Two Brains" wrote a prize-winning essay on the role of the unit, but mysteriously omitted to mention Monckton's historic contribution.
Viscount Monckton also includes an amusing anecdote:
"In 1988 it was my successor at No. 10, George Guise, who travelled one bitterly cold October weekend down to Chequers, the prime minister's country house, and sat in front of a roaring fire writing the speech that would announce a government subsidy to the Royal Society to establish what would become the Hadley Centre for Forecasting. George remembers how he and the prime minister chuckled at the irony of writing a speech about 'global warming' on an evening so cold that he could hardly hold his pen."
But although her autobiography notes that she did indeed spend two weekends with George Guise working on her first speech about climate change and the environment, this was actually delivered to the Royal Society on 27 September 1988. And it was not until a year later, in a speech to the United Nations in November 1989, that she announced the establishment of "a new centre for the prediction of climate change".
However, Christopher Monckton has not been the only "sceptic" to recently explore the origin of Lady Thatcher's views on climate change. In The Sunday Telegraph last weekend, Christopher Booker praised her as "one of the first and most prominent of 'climate sceptics'", pointing out that that her 2003 book Statecraft includes a section on climate change that "amounts to an almost complete recantation of her earlier views.
But Booker neglects to mention some curious aspects about the arousal of Lady Thatcher's "scepticism" over climate change. At the start of the book's passage on Hot air and global warming, she notes that there is "a vast amount of highly technical material on these matters" but points out that "thankfully, the issues have been clearly analysed and debated by scholars in the United States" before providing a long list of publications by "free market" lobby groups, such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
In her description of the science, the former prime minister draws heavily on a pamphlet called A plain English guide to climate change which was published in December 1997 by the Reason Foundation, another lobby group that the following year received $70,000 from Exxon to "assess public policy alternatives on issues with direct bearing on the company's business operations and interests".
The Reason Foundation's document includes the following statement:
"It is widely acknowledged that the potential temperature changes predicted by global warming theory do not pose a direct threat to human life. Human beings, and a myriad of other organisms, exist quite comfortably in areas with temperature ranges more extreme than those predicted by global warming models."
The former prime minister's book draws heavily on such leaflets produced by US lobby groups, instead of scientific papers, and she refers only briefly to the work of the IPCC, which she was instrumental in bringing about, dismissing its 2001 report as "alarmist".
But Lady Thatcher reveals her true concerns by claiming that "the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes", and warning that the international effort to tackle climate change "provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism."
It is this attempt by the former prime minister, who is now 84, to justify her "scepticism" on the grounds of political ideology that perhaps explains why Booker and Monckton feel comfortable using her now to boost their own efforts to influence the public debate on climate change.
• Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.