Alfred Sherman

Sir Alfred Sherman (born November 10, 1919 in London ; † August 26, 2006 ibid) was a British journalist and political scientist who founded the think tank Center for Policy Studies (CPS) in 1974 with Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher and between 1974 and 1984 whose director was. Through his work on economic liberalism , he became a pioneer of the Thatcherism founded by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher .

Life

Studies, Spanish Civil War and World War II

Sherman, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia , grew up in the East End of London . After attending the Hackney Downs Boys' School operated by the Worshipful Company of Grocers , he began studying chemistry at Chelsea Polytechnic . His origins led him to join the British Communist Party as a member. In 1937 he was de-registered after he had fought on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was captured by Italy , allied with Francisco Franco .

In 1938 he returned to Great Britain and took part in combat missions in the Middle East as a member of the British Army during World War II . Because of his language skills, he found use in the administration of the liberated and previously hostile areas. He helped set up the police force in Libya and improved his knowledge of the Arabic language there .

Post-war journalist and local politician

After the end of the war, Sherman began studying at the London School of Economics (LSE). In 1948 he was expelled from the Communist Party as a dissenters after refusing to change his mind about Josip Broz Tito's course in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia . After completing his studies at the LSE in 1950, he worked for a short time as a teacher before he was posted to Israel as a journalist for the weekly newspaper The Observer . There he also worked for the daily newspapers The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz and began his work as an advisor on issues relating to the free market economy as an advisor to the General Zionists .

Upon his return to Great Britain, Sherman wrote editorials for the Jewish Chronicle in the early 1960s , before he began working for the Daily Telegraph as the first local political correspondent in 1965 . Through his journalistic work he came into contact with Keith Joseph, who represented the Conservative Party as a member of the House of Commons , and whom he supported in his early campaigns for economic liberalism as a critic and in the late 1960s as a speechwriter. Joseph took over the post of Secretary of State for Social Services in the government of Prime Minister Edward Heath between June 1970 and March 1974 , but remained closely connected to economic liberalism. Sherman played a key role in advising him, especially in the talks at the end of Heath's tenure in February and March 1974. He convinced Joseph to set up a think tank.

In addition to his journalistic activities, he was a member of the Council of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea from 1971 to 1978 .

Founder and Director of the Center for Policy Studies

Founded the CPS in 1974 and supported by Keith Joseph

In 1974, Sherman co-founded the Center for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank with Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher and remained its director until 1984.

After the founding of the CPS, he was the main writer of a series of speeches dealing with liberal-economic issues. As such, he played a key role in reintroducing economic liberalism to the center of political debate and helped make Keith Joseph a possible candidate for the presidency of the Conservative Party. On September 5, 1974, in Preston , Joseph delivered a keynote speech , written by Sherman, entitled Inflation is Caused by Governments . This speech received a lot of press coverage and was reprinted between two pages in The Sun and in full in The Times . The Times headed the speech The Sharp Shock of Truth , stating that the essence of the arguments was undoubtedly correct, and recognized the fruitful nature of the speech.

After Joseph thwarted his chances by an unfortunate addition to a speech written by Sherman on October 19, 1974 in Edgbaston , he found a suitable student in Margaret Thatcher and thus contributed to the successful election of Thatcher as chairman of the Conservative Party in 1975.

Election victory of the Conservative Party in 1979

He wrote speeches for both Thatcher and Joseph until the Conservative Tories won the general election on May 3, 1979 . At the same time he wrote editorials for The Daily Telegraph on local political issues from 1977 to 1986 .

Sherman's absolutist temperament did not make him a respected advisor to the government, though a single entry in Thatcher's 1993 memoir The Downing Street Years underestimated his influence. In fact, the return of economist Alan Waters from the United States in January 1981 led Thatcher to seek an independent economic advisor as Prime Minister . The reason for this was also Sherman's criticism, which Sherman expressed not only privately to the Prime Minister, but also in public, for example in the article Stop-Go Monetarism published in The Observer . In it he stated that without public sector reform, government policy would be nothing more than a warming up of old programs.

On the other hand, it was important to note that Sherman's proposal in November 1981 that the CPS commission an independent study of the high level of sterling at the expense of British industry, as a result of which the Swiss monetarist Jürg Niehans was invited to Great Britain. His conclusion that monetary policy was too tight seemed like a strong criticism of the government. The report played a defining role in the 1981 budget, laying the economic and political foundations for the success of Thatcher's reign.

Ultimately, however, the decision of the 1979 appointed chairman of the CPS, Hugh Thomas , in October 1983 that the CPS should submit to the government led to Sherman's loss of influence. Sherman saw the CPS as a political organization to give the ideas formulated by the Institute of Economic Affairs a political force and to translate them into correct government policy goals. The decision by Thomas ended this role, which Sherman protested to no avail.

Teaching at the LSE, Knight Bachelor and Sherman's loss of influence

Following the decision by Thomas Sherman took a PhD fellowship in 1983 (Visiting Fellow ) at the London School of Economics and worked there until the 1985th At the same time he was beaten to a Knight Bachelor degree in 1983 and has had the addition of "Sir" since then.

In 1984 he also had to give up his position as director of studies at the Center for Policy Studies and finally lost his position as an editorial writer for The Daily Telegraph in 1986 immediately after Max Hastings became editor of this daily newspaper. In the following years he had less and less influence on the Prime Minister and her ministers, especially after he tried unsuccessfully in 1987 to convince the leadership of the Conservative Party around Norman Tebbit to give a speech to the chairman of the French right-wing populist Front National Jean-Marie Le Pen to invite a party conference. The conservative press then attacked Sherman, such as the Sunday newspaper The Sunday Telegraph , which called him “egomaniacal, hateful, compulsive, prone to tantrums and behaving like a three-year-old” ('ego-maniacal, spiteful, obsessive, prone to temper tantrums which would disgrace a three-year-old ').

Later, between 1993 and 1994, he spoke out in favor of the policies of the Bosnian Serb leader and President of the Republika Srpska Radovan Karadžić , which meant that his advice was rarely sought because of his extremism . In 1995 he became chairman of the Arizona- based Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies.

Sherman was married twice. His first marriage to Zahava Levin in 1958 resulted in a son. After her death in 1993, he married Angela Martin for the second time in 2001.

Publications

• Capitalism and Liberty , 1989
• Paradoxes of Power: reflections on the Thatcher interlude , memoirs, edited by Mark Garnett , Exeter 2005

Web links

• Sir Alfred Sherman , in: The Daily Telegraph, August 28, 2006
• Sir Alfred Sherman. Adviser who preached Thatcherism before the term was invented , in: The Guardian, August 29, 2006
• Sir Alfred Sherman. Political adviser to Thatcher , in: The Independent, September 22, 2011