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Dr '''Chris Ronald Tame''' (20 December 1949 – 20 March 2006) was a British libertarian activist. He was best known as the founder and Director of the [[Libertarian Alliance]].<ref name=glenda>[http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1746779,00.html Chris Tame], Marc Glendening, ''[[The Guardian]]'', 5 April 2006</ref>

==Biography==
===Early years===
Tame was born on 20 December 1949 in Enfield, Middlesex. His father, Ronald Ernest Tame, was a printer who had spent the war in the [[Eighth Army (United Kingdom)|Eighth Army]] as an escort to [[Bernard Montgomery|Montgomery]] and had been mentioned in dispatches.<ref name=telegraph>[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/07/db0702.xml Chris Tame], [[The Daily Telegraph]], 7 April 2006</ref> He later became a process engraver and shop steward, and he and Tame's mother Elsie Florence, a nurse,<ref name=glenda/> had met and married just after the end of the [[Second World War]]. Tame was an only child,<ref name=gabb>[http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc144.htm An obituary of Dr Chris Tame] Dr Sean Gabb, [[Libertarian Alliance]], 22 March 2006</ref> who grew up in post-war Britain.

He was brought up in Godalming in Surrey, where his family had moved. He attended a local [[Church of England]] primary school, and then grammar school. In 1971, he graduated from [[Hull University]] with a degree in American Studies.<ref name=indie>[http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article352948.ece Chris R. Tame, Founder of the Libertarian Alliance], Sean Gabb, ''[[The Independent]]'', 23 March 2006</ref>

===Setup of Libertarian Alliance===
Tame joined the Conservative students' organisation at Hull, and became active in the organisation. Disillusioned by the interventionist and authoritarian mindset, he left and never went back. He had felt that the [[Conservative Party (UK)|Conservative Party]] was dominated by a "corporate elite" wedded to a "corrupt state capitalism". He announced his departure from the rostrum at an annual [[Federation of Conservative Students]] conference in the early 1970s.<ref name=glenda/>

In 1967, Tame founded the [[Libertarian Alliance]] as an informal discussion group,<ref name=glenda/> drawing ideas from [[Ayn Rand]], among others. The organisation was formalised in 1979, with a structure of Tame as its President,<ref name=indie/> and the Alliance was based in the Alternative Bookshop which Tame had opened in Covent Garden in London a year earlier.<ref name=telegraph/>

After university, Tame settled in London, where he worked mainly for the [[Institute of Economic Affairs]] and the [[National Association for Freedom]] (now the [[Freedom Association]]).

In 1978, Tame set up the Alternative Bookshop and was its manager. The shop became a "mecca" of classic liberals, [[anarcho-capitalism|anarchists]], and free-marketers,<ref name=glenda/> and was reportedly once target of a [[Molotov cocktail]] and of the [[Socialist Workers Party (Britain)|Socialist Workers Party]].<ref name=glenda/> The bookshop closed its doors in 1985 due to an unaffordable rent increase.<ref name=glenda/>

====Political beliefs====
Tame did not believe in seeking political power nor propagandising the masses, but saw the importance of influencing the intellectual debate.<ref name=indie/> Under the umbrella of the Libertarian Alliance, he published prolifically. One such work published in 1979 bore the title "Taxation is Theft". In addition to writing, he enjoyed engaging in debate with visitors to his shop.

Tame was equally opposed to censorship. During the [[Margaret Thatcher|Thatcher]] years, he exposed the contradictions of Conservatives who claimed to support free market economics yet demanded that "obscene" publications be censored. At the Conservative Party conference in 1990, Tame disrupted a rally organised by censorship advocate [[Mary Whitehouse]] by masterminding an invasion by scantily clad models claiming to be "Conservatives against sex censorship."<ref name=glenda/>

====Influence on Tories====
In the early 1980s, Tame was recruited by [[Keith Joseph|Sir Keith Joseph]] at the [[Department of Trade and Industry|Department of Trade and Industry]] to prepare a reading list to wean civil servants off the interventionist mindset in favour of genuine free markets and privatisation.

Being a monetarist, Tame was influential in convincing [[Margaret Thatcher]], [[Geoffrey Howe]] and Joseph that inflation was due to problems of controlling the money supply, debunking the conventional Tory wisdom that it was due to greedy trade unions, speculators, oil sheikhs or other "phantoms."<ref name=scotsman>[http://www.libertarian.co.uk/aboutla/obitscotsman.htm Chris R. Tame, 1949-2006], Published by [[The Scotsman]], 27 March 2006 and reproduced by the Libertarian Alliance</ref>

===Journalism===
In the mid-1980s, Tame was a producer on [[Channel 4]]'s ''Diverse Reports'', a series which looked at topical issues with libertarian and socialist perspectives.<ref name=glenda/>

In 1983, while researching for an article on how easy it was to acquire guns, grenades and other military items with a credit card by mail order from the United States, Tame duly did so and carried his acquired collection of light armaments in his knapsack to work further in the library at the American Embassy in [[Grosvenor Square|Grosvenor Square, London]]. He was arrested, charged and subsequently acquitted.<ref name=scotsman/>

===Work with pro-smoking organisations===
He was a non-smoker and keep-fit enthusiast, but he philosophically regarded that smokers' bodies were their own and that a person's liberty must extend to the freedom to make foolish decisions in this regard. He defended the rights of tobacco smokers as Director of pressure group [[FOREST]] from 1988 to 1995. In 1992, he won libel damages after successfully suing [[LBC|LBC Radio]], which accused him of "introducing young children to cigarettes and assisting in killing 110,000 people a year."<ref name=telegraph/> In 1995, FOREST removed Tame as director, as its tobacco industry sponsors believed Tame's approach had become too confrontational and abstract.<ref name=glenda/>

===Later years===
In the later part of his life, Tame moved to Ramsgate, where he had been working on a seven-volume ''Bibliography of Freedom''.<ref name=indie/>

Tame was an avid collector of economic and philosophical books, and had amassed a collection of some 40,000 works, including a number of rare classical liberal documents, some of which were donated to the [[Foundation for Economic Education]] in New York.<ref name=telegraph/>

Tame died on 20 March 2006 from an aggressive bone cancer, diagnosed a year before. He was twice married.

==External links==
*[http://www.libertarian.co.uk The Libertarian Alliance]

==Notes==
<references/>

Chris Tame - Revision history

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