Patrick Basham

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Patrick Basham is the director of the London and Washington based think tank the Democracy Institute. Basham is also the founding director of the Social Affairs Center at Canada’s Fraser Institute, and senior fellow with the Cato Institute’s Center for Representative Government.

Basham worked with the the Fraser Institute in a campaign against public health regulation on tobacco. Basham has close links to the tobacco industry. Basham has co-authored a number of research papers with John Luik, who has been accused of working as a tobacco lobbyist; Luik also does work for the Democracy Institute.

Basham received a PhD from Cambridge University on the subject of 'British and American political marketing' and his most frequent publications focus on tobacco, alcohol and obesity.

Education

Patrick Basham was an undergraduate student in the mid 1980's. In his foreward to Christopher Snowdon's book The Spirit Level Delusion, Basham describes the experience:

'For me, personally, Wilkinson and Pickett’s thesis brings back vividly unpleasant memories of an undergraduate year in the mid-1980s that I spent, in part, being taught about socio-economic matters by my sociology tutor, a newly-minted Marxist feminist PhD. She had little tolerance for my ‘tax cutting equals economic growth equals more employment’ economic model, which she termed, ‘An ungodly synthesis of the worst of Reaganism and Thatcherism’ (which I thought oddly religious rhetoric for such a fanatical atheist). ‘On the contrary, Patrick,’ she would inform me, ‘you need to get over your fixation with economic growth. Rather than putting all our effort behind growing the economic pie, we should instead limit the pie to its current size, and then focus our energies on the issue of how we shall divide it up.’

There it was: Eighties-style socialist fundamentalism in a nutshell. Two sentences that encapsulated the British Labour Party’s economic thinking at the height of the Left’s control of the party and at the nadir of the party’s electoral relevance. Fortunately, I thought at the time, and for some time afterwards, such thinking has had its day. But I was wrong

Tobacco Work

Patrick Basham's name appears in a range of internal tobacco industry documents. In 1999 Patrick Basham argued that the Fraser Institute was interested in the issue of tobacco regulation to defend people's right to 'to trade longevity knowingly for pleasure'.

A letter from Sherry Stein of the Fraser Institute to British American Tobacco in July 2000, praises Basham's work in promoting research that argues against regulating the tobacco industry more stringently. The letter argues that:

Patrick Basham, who you met in London, has done several radio interviews and was delighted and surprised by the overwhelmingly positive response to this study. The focus seems to be that smokers were cutting back and quitting on their own accord and government regulations such as smoking bans in public places, prohibition on tobacco ads, higher tobacco taxes, and warnings on packages had little to do with dropping smoking rates in Canada.

In 1999 Basham commented on a press release regarding the publication of a book which attempted to play down the link between second-hand smoke and cancer. Basham argued that:

'Given the current move among Canadian municipalities, such as Victoria, to enact stringent anti-smoking bylaws, we need to look carefully at what science, not conjecture, is really telling us about the dangers of second-hand smoke'.

Patrick Basham met with Adrian Payne from British American Tobacco in 2000 and following the meeting the Fraser Institute wrote to the tobacco giant asking for $50,000 worth of funding for Basham's Social Affairs Centre. They also asked for an additional $50,000 to set up a 'Centre for Studies in Risk and Regulation', the centre was needed, they argued, because:

'Agitators for a "zero-risk" society have become increasingly successful in advancing their cause, often basing their case on exaggerated junk science scares'.

Affiliations

Fraser Institute | Cato Institute | Democracy Institute | Spiked | Social Affairs Unit | The Free Society

Publications

• Patrick Basham, 2010, From the Nanny State to the Bully State, Democracy Institute, 29-March-2010
• Patrick Basham, 2010, Under the Counter & Over the Border - How the Government Inflames the Illicit Cigarette Trade, Democracy Institute, 18-March-2010
• Patrick Basham, 2010, Tobacco Substitute, The Times, 4-March-2010
• Partrick Basham, 2010, Sri Lanka needs carrot, not stick, The Guardian, 14-Feb-2010
• Patrick Basham and John Luik, 2010, A bleary-eyed attitude to alcohol research, 3-February-2010
• Patrick Basham, 2010, President Obama’s Fork in the Road, 25-Jan-2010
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2010, The myth of an ‘obesity tsunami’, 22-Jan-2010
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2010, In Defense of Santa, 21-Jan-2010
• Patrick Basham, 2009, Butt Out! How Philip Morris Burned Ted Kennedy, the FDA & the Anti-Tobacco Movement, Democracy Institute
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2009, Are Public Smoking Bans Necessary?, 17-Dec-2009
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2009, Can the UK Avert a Smoking Irish Failure?, 29-October-2009
• Patrick Basham & John Luik 2009, The City That Never Smokes, 26-October-2009
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2009, Women keep drinking, 3-March-2009
• DI Report, 2009, Alcohol Advertising Bans – September 200909-Sep-2009
• Patrick Basham, 2009, The Senator and the Symbol, 28-Aug-2009
• Patrick Basham, 2009, Afghanistan's Democratic Debacle, 21-Aug-2009
• Patrick Basham, 2009, Displaying the truth about policymaking, 13-Aug-2009
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2009, A fat doctor in the White House?, 29-Jul-2009
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2009, on discrimination against fat African-American women, 29-Jul-2009
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2009, Banning alcohol ads won’t cure alcoholism, 21-Jul-2009 Tuesday 21 July 2009
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2009, Turning fat people into social outcasts, on turning fat people into social outcasts, 30-Jun-2009
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2009, Smoke gets in the government’s eyes, 23-Jun-2009
• Patrick Basham, 2009, The unholy alliance between Philip Morris & the FDA in the Winston-Salem Journal, 06-Jun-2009
• Patrick Basham and John Luik’s, 2009, KICKING THE SODA CAN: HARD TRUTHS ABOUT A SOFT DRINK TAX, 3-June-2009
• Patrick Basham, 2009, Keep FDA away from tobacco Orange County Register, 3-June-2009
• Patrick Basham & John Luik, 2009, A display of ignorance over youth smoking, 29 April 2009
• John Luik, Patrick Basham & Gio Gori, 2006, Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, Social Affairs Unit
• Patrick Basham 2003, Defining democracy down: Explaining the campaign to repeal term limits
• Patrick Basham, 2002, This is reform?: Predicting the impact of the new campaign financing regulations, Cato Institute
• Patrick Basham, 2002, Does clean money make for competitive elections?: The failure of Maine's experiment with taxpayer financing of campaigns (Policy analysis)
• Patrick Basham, 2001, Assessing the term limits experiment, California and beyond, The Cato Institute