Remembering Douglas Mason

Tomorrow (30 September) would have been the 85th birthday of Douglas Mason, the prolific Adam Smith Institute author, who famously proposed to replace council ‘rates’ (a local property tax) with a per-capita charge for local services — a system that was immediately dubbed the ‘poll tax’.

Everyone accepted that the ‘rates’ had to go. The amounts were decided 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. Having reviewed them all, Mason suggested that charging for local services on the basis of household size would be the fairest option. Soon, his idea was adopted — but without many of the safeguards he proposed, making it unpopular and a focus for discontent.

Most of Mason’s other ideas for the Adam Smith Institute 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 less restrictive licencing laws, another policy that was subsequently adopted. In Sunday, Sunday he made the same case for scrapping the laws against 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) voiced objections.

Mason’s talent was to take an issue — almost anything that was held back or suppressed by regulation or taxation or state control — explain its history, review its problems, describe 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 politically 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 1989 he collapsed outside Parliament, where he worked, and was given a cancer diagnosis with ‘months, not years’ to live. But he survive another 15 years, continuing to write, lecture and travel until his death in 2004.

Eamonn Butler