Sam Bowman's comments on Theresa May's conference address have been covered across the national media and 200+ regional titles.
The Sunday Times covered Sam's comments thrice, reporting:
Some of the Tories’ traditional free-market allies are alarmed. Sam Bowman of the Adam Smith Institute laid into the policy, which he said had fostered a toxic culture at Volkswagen that ultimately led to last year’s emissions scandal, and reduced the value of German companies by 26%. “Academic evidence suggests that board representation is just about the only bad way of giving workers more say in how their firms are run,” he said. “So why on earth is this the policy that the supposedly pragmatic May is proposing?”
Secondly that:
If the test of being in the centre ground is that you get attacked by both right and left, Theresa May achieved her aim at the Tory conference. The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the latter the spiritual home of the Tories under Margaret Thatcher, both spluttered after finding much to dislike in the prime minister’s speech.
The ASI called on her to “abandon her ideological attachment to interventionist economic policies, look at the evidence, and accept that it tells us that markets, not the state, are the solution to our problems”. The IEA agreed, saying: “This was an alarming attack on free markets and the prime minister’s pledge for more state intervention in business completely disregards the evidence that competition, deregulation and a light-touch approach breeds the best results.
And the third article noted:
Think tanks normally supportive of Tory policy, such as the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs, have railed against the promised revival of state intervention.
A Tory conference that should have been a celebration for Britain’s second female prime minister, with all her political opponents in various states of disarray, helped to send the pound tumbling. Markets interpreted the prime minister’s remarks and those of her colleagues as pointing firmly towards an unsuccessful Brexit that will leave the economy holed below the waterline.
City AM reported on their front page:
Prime minister Theresa May was lambasted by business groups and policy wonks yesterday for a speech that laid bare an interventionist economic policy and a heavy-handed approach to business reform.
Adam Smith Institute executive director Sam Bowman said: “We call on the Prime Minister to abandon her ideological attachment to interventionist economic policies, look at the evidence, and accept that it tells us that markets, not the state, are the solution to our problems.
And again in City AM later in the week.
The Guardian reported:
Theresa May’s speech, and her criticism of the Bank of England’s monetary policy, has gone down rather badly with that beacon of free market ideology, the Adam Smith Institute.
Director Sam Bowman sounds like a man whose eyebrows got a thorough workout during the PM’s speech, saying:
[There isn’t] any evidence that clamping down on EU immigration will help British workers, but we will have to borrow more if immigration falls because they pay in more than they cost. Or that quantitative easing has made us worse off – the evidence suggests that without it the post-crisis recession would have been deeper and longer.
Mrs May’s speech was the opposite of pragmatic. We call on the Prime Minister to abandon her ideological attachment to interventionist economic policies, look at the evidence, and accept that it tells us that markets, not the state, are the solution to our problems.
And quoted Sam again on the Guardian later that week.
Buzzfeed reported:
A similarly outraged response came from the free market Adam Smith Institute, which once influenced the policies of Margaret Thatcher: “We call on the prime minister to abandon her ideological attachment to interventionist economic policies, look at the evidence, and that it tells us that markets, not the state, are the solution to our problems.”
The New Statesman reported:
Classical liberals feel increasingly homeless. Adam Smith Institute director Sam Bowman ordered May to “abandon her ideological attachment to interventionist economic policies, look at the evidence and accept that it tells us that markets, not the state, are the solution to our problems.”
The Daily Express reported:
Her speech sparked fear in the Big Six energy suppliers - British Gas, EDF Energy, nPower, E.On UK, Scottish Power and SSE.
Sam Bowman, executive director of the free market libertarian think tank Adam Smith Institute, said: "If only Theresa May was serious about ditching ideology in favour of pragmatism and evidence – she’d have to abandon most of her main policy planks.