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.