Politics and Economics
In opposition to Clement Attlee's Agriculture Act 1947, Smedley helped to found, and become Secretary of, the Farmers' and Smallholders' Association in 1947. Its first President was the Conservative MP Waldron Smithers.
In 1952 Smedley resigned from his job as a Chartered Accountant and campaigned for economic liberalism from his office in EC2. His main campaigning organisation was the Cheap Food League which was against all types of protection and subsidy in agriculture, especially marketing boards. In a protest against high taxation he founded the Council for the Reduction of Taxation in 1954. Then in 1955, whilst a member of the Society of Individualists, Smedley met Antony Fisher and together they founded the Institute of Economic Affairs. Smedley also took over the Free Trade League and the Cobden Club in 1958.
Smedley was also a Liberal politician, standing against Rab Butler in Saffron Walden in the general elections of 1950 and 1951. In all he contested eighteen Parliamentary elections. However, he left the Liberal Party in 1962 due to his opposition to their favourable attitude to British membership of the European Economic Community. He founded the Keep Britain Out campaign to oppose British membership of the EEC. In 1979 he founded the Free Trade Liberal Party.
Read more about this topic: Oliver Smedley
Famous quotes containing the words politics and/or economics:
“His talk was like a spring, which runs
With rapid change from rocks to roses:
It slipped from politics to puns,
It passed from Mahomet to Moses;
Beginning with the laws which keep
The planets in their radiant courses,
And ending with some precept deep
For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.”
—Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–1839)
“The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races.... The economics of this musical esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)