Tom Miers joins The Free Society
Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 10:16 I am delighted to welcome a new recruit to the Forest family.
Tom Miers is joining us to work as commissioning editor for The Free Society. He will speak at various events and act as spokesman for TFS on a range of issues, including tobacco.
Tom is an independent public policy consultant with experience of the City, politics, journalism and business. Last year his Policy Exchange report The Devolution Distraction: How Scotland's Constitutional Obsession Leads to Bad Government was reported by the BBC, Daily Telegraph and the Scotsman, among others.
Tom's latest book, co-written with Craig Smith, is Democracy and the Fall of the West.
Writing today for The Free Society, Tom asks: "Do we live in a free society? This question is becoming ever harder to answer." Defining the role of the state and the importance of individual liberty in a free society, he says:
For me, the keystone of our society is that individuals must be able to live their lives in a way that is immune from arbitrary intervention by the state. So long as we pursue our aims and seek happiness without harming others, we should be left in peace. Indeed, the role of the state is to protect that private sphere from outside intervention, not to join those seeking to break into it.
This – the liberty of the individual – is what sets Western society apart from the tyrannies of the past and the despots of the present. It is also the key to our success. From individual freedom stems secure property, market exchange, intellectual freedom, and hence material prosperity, artistic endeavour and the ability to order our lives in a way that best suits our characters, tastes and abilities.
These days there is an alarming trend for government to intervene in one important aspect of this – the decisions we make on our lifestyles. The Big State is becoming increasingly concerned that we don’t know what’s good for us, and is ever more willing to force us to follow its own version of the path to happiness.
The implications of this go way beyond whether people smoke or drink or eat too much. This is why The Free Society is such an important campaigning unit in the war of ideas. Over the next weeks and months we will explore not just the practical absurdities of government restrictions on lifestyle choices, but the wider consequences for society of such intervention.
Under Tom's management the website will be updated most days. We are also working on our 2011 series of events which will be announced shortly.
Reader Comments (6)
Good luck to Tom.
Presumably this is the same Tom Miers who said 'Devolution has to be judged a spectacular failure in Scotland'?
Clearly devolution has been a big success in Scotland and Tom Miers is deluded. You don't need his form of right-wing bigotry and ignorance. Drop him now.
That's an interesting comment, simon (nsc). Why do you think that Scottish devolution is a success and that Tom Miers' disagreement is evidence of bigotry and ignorance?
Happily for Tom, I share many of his concerns about devolution. In my view, both the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly are entirely unnecessary layers of government that cost billions of pounds yet offer few benefits to the taxpayer.
There is no doubt that without the "example" set by the devolved government in Scotland, neither England nor Wales would have introduced a comprehensive smoking ban in 2007. Some may consider that an example of "success", but I don't.
In the current political climate in Scotland it takes a brave man to speak out - just the sort of person, in fact, that we need in a free society.
Tom is off to a very good start. As someone who knows some teachers the crypto Marxists are a disgrace to free speech and social conditioning, for example Katharine Birbalsingh.
Readers may also be interested in this article by Professor Carl V. Phillips who is an ETS/SHS harm sceptic. He documents the systematic silencing of debate by the anti smokers and makes for grim reading. Here is an exert.
"Enstrom cites the reign of terror over biology under Stalin as one example of politics trumping science. Though the Soviet case is rather extreme (we North Americans who dare question the scientific orthodoxy only have our careers threatened; not our lives, at least so far), it is not the most extreme. Many cultures were hobbled for centuries because of religious adherence to pseudoscience, and damage to people's health was one of the many results."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2173898/
I should of clarified that Katharine Birbalsingh is the victim.