Douglas Mason
Today (13 December) marks 20 years since the death of Douglas Mason, the prolific Adam Smith Institute author, who proposed to replace council ‘rates’ (a local property tax) with a per-capita charge for local services — which was immediately dubbed the ‘poll tax’.
Everyone accepted that the ‘rates’ had to go: they were fixed in arbitrary and unfair ways, and only a tiny minority paid them, giving the majority an incentive to press for higher council spending. Several inquiries had proposed other options, such as local sales or income taxes, but none found favour. Eventually Mason’s idea was adopted, but without many of the safeguards he proposed, which made it unpopular and a focus for discontent.
Most of Mason’s other ideas were much more successful. In A Home for Enterprise, he proposed that, given the illiberalism of the new China, the UK should give right of abode to Hong Kong residents. It was after his death, but eventually the Cameron government accepted this important humanitarian principle. In Time to Call Time, he reviewed the evidence for more liberal licencing laws, another policy that was subsequently adopted. In Sunday, Sunday he made the same case for Sunday trading. In Privatising the Posts, he advocated Royal Mail privatisation, which again occurred later. And his case for privatising the Forestry Commission, Wood for the Trees, was thwarted only when a group of celebrities (who plainly did not understand the policy) objected.
Mason’s talent was to take an issue, be it regulation or taxation and state control, explain its history, review its problems, explain how state and political involvement made things worse, show how non-government solutions would be better, then put forward a range of options, complete with practical ways of implementing them. Often he was well ahead of public opinion, but in many cases, as with licensing and Sunday trading, opinion eventually caught up with him.
Douglas Calder Mason was born in Dunfermline and went (like the ASI co-founders Madsen Pirie and Eamonn Butler) to the University of St Andrews. A science fiction addict, he amassed what was perhaps the UK’s largest collection of Sci-Fi anthologies such as Analog and Astounding, many going back to the first issue. He also loved and sold antiquarian books. In 1990 he collapsed outside Parliament, where he worked, and was given a cancer diagnosis with ‘months, not years’ to live. But he lived another 14 years, continuing to write, lecture and travel until his death in 2004.