An appreciation on the twentieth anniversary of his death

There are men whose failure is obvious, and men whose success is invisible. Chris R. Tame belonged decisively to the latter category. He did not win elections, did not command institutions, did not acquire honours, and did not leave behind a single canonical book that could be abused by academics or misquoted by journalists. Yet the fact that British libertarianism exists at all as a coherent intellectual inheritance rather than as a handful of American imports, diluted slogans, and personality cults is largely his work. That this inheritance remains marginal, unfashionable, and institutionally weak does not disprove his achievement. It confirms the accuracy of his diagnosis.

Tame understood, earlier than most and more clearly than nearly all, that the enemy of liberty in late twentieth-century Britain was no longer socialism in its classical sense, nor even the bureaucratic socialism of the post-war settlement, but a new governing stratum that neither nationalised nor redistributed in the old ways, and that derived its power not from ownership but from supervision. He did not merely oppose this class. He mapped it, named it, and adjusted strategy accordingly. That class, later described with increasing bluntness as the Enemy Class, is now so dominant, so normalised, and so confident of its moral right to rule that most people have forgotten it ever needed to justify itself. Tame never forgot.

A tradition already dead

When Tame came to libertarianism in the early 1970s, the British liberal tradition had already collapsed. it had not been defeated. It had not refuted. It had simply collapsed. The names remained—Locke, Smith, Mill—but the substance had been drained away, repackaged as economic technique at one end and lifestyle permissiveness at the other. Liberty as a coherent doctrine of limits on power, applied across social, political, and economic life, had ceased to exist as a living intellectual position. Tame’s first and greatest achievement was to recognise this fact without illusion, and then to act on it.

He did not attempt revival through mass politics, because he understood that mass politics rewards what flatters, not what explains. He did not attempt revival through Conservative patronage, because he understood that Conservatism in Britain existed to manage decline, not to reverse it. He did not attempt revival through academic respectability, because he understood that the universities had already been absorbed into the Enemy Class. What he attempted instead was slower, quieter, and more durable: the reconstruction of a movement as a sociological fact, carried by people capable of memory, continuity, and disciplined disagreement. This decision alone distinguishes him from almost everyone who followed.

The Alternative Bookshop: an intellectual customs post

The Alternative Bookshop in Covent Garden was not important because it sold books. It was important because it functioned as a customs post for ideas entering Britain from the wider libertarian world, and as a sorting office for ideas already circulating domestically. Under Tame’s management, it became a place where arguments were tested rather than repeated, where reading was expected rather than assumed, and where ideological sloppiness was not indulged merely because it was enthusiastic.

Those who passed through the shop in the early 1980s encountered a man who had read nearly everything that mattered, remembered it accurately, and could place it in context without theatrical display. He argued relentlessly, especially for market anarchism, not because he expected universal conversion but because he regarded intellectual discomfort as a necessary precondition for seriousness. Many left unconvinced. Very few left unchanged. This was not evangelism. It was formation .

The bookshop also embodied a strategic principle that Tame never abandoned: ideas require physical concentration as well as textual transmission. Movements that exist only as correspondence networks decay into solipsism. Movements that exist only online decay into narcissism. For a time, the Alternative Bookshop provided gravity.

The Libertarian Alliance: strategy without illusion

The formal creation of the Libertarian Alliance in 1979 was not the beginning of British libertarianism. It was the refusal to allow its extinction to become permanent. From the outset, Tame imposed constraints that puzzled outsiders and irritated would-be reformers. There would be no party. There would be no doctrinal line. There would be no courting of donors at the cost of intellectual honesty. There would be no reduction of liberty to economics, and no apology for defending social freedom alongside property rights.

This was not eclecticism. It was anti-sectarian discipline. Tame had observed the American libertarian movement closely enough to understand how easily ideological purity collapses into factional hysteria, and how quickly money reshapes doctrine. The Libertarian Alliance would be a forum, not a church. Disagreement would be contained, not resolved by expulsion. That it survived at all under these constraints is evidence of how carefully the constraints were chosen .

Most importantly, Tame rejected the optimistic reading of Thatcherism that seduced so many libertarians. Where others saw privatisation, he saw administrative re-engineering. Where others saw retreat of the state, he saw its rationalisation. Markets were being permitted, not freed, and always under conditions favourable to established power. “These new markets are never free,” he observed, “and they are always dominated by the ruling class” . This judgement has aged exceptionally well.

FOREST and the turn to lifestyle regulation

Tame’s period at FOREST remains widely misunderstood, including by those who should know better. To some libertarians, defending the right to smoke appeared frivolous, or at best peripheral. To Tame, it was central. He had already concluded that the future of authoritarianism lay not in the nationalisation of industry but in the regulation of conduct. Power was shifting from ownership to supervision, from production to behaviour, from law to expertise. Tobacco was simply the most visible testing ground.

As he later explained, the enemies of liberty were no longer union bosses or Trotskyite agitators, but a growing class of administrators, lawyers, educators, experts, and media figures whose livelihoods depended on intervention, and whose moral authority rested on their asserted right to manage the lives of others. This Enemy Class had always existed. What had changed was its scale, its coherence, and its ideological confidence .

At FOREST, Tame attempted something unusually ambitious. He provided the tobacco industry with enough short-term public relations to keep its managers placated, while directing the real effort toward a sustained intellectual assault on the Enemy Class itself. The pamphlets, monographs, and ghost-written works produced during this period used smoking as evidence, not as subject. Their target was lifestyle regulation as a mode of governance. This strategy was never fully realised. Internal corruption, elite panic, and the reassertion of donor control curtailed it. Yet the analysis developed during this period remains one of Tame’s most enduring contributions, precisely because it anticipated the direction of travel so accurately.

Corporate cowardice and the myth of resistance

One of the most revealing aspects of the FOREST episode is how decisively it discredited the libertarian fantasy that big business is a natural ally of liberty. Tame had no sentimental illusions on this point, but even he underestimated the extent to which corporate bureaucracies would prefer accommodation to confrontation, and regulation to uncertainty. The passage he wrote in the mid-1990s condemning corporate “pre-emptive cringing” now reads less like polemic and more like ethnography. Businesses did not resist the Enemy Class because resistance offered no advantage. They compromised, learned the language of compliance, and turned regulation into a barrier against competition. Advertising bans became cartel mechanisms. Health scares became pricing strategies. The new order was not fought. It was priced in . This outcome did not falsify Tame’s analysis of the Enemy Class. It falsified the expectation that capitalism, left to itself, would defend liberty. Tame adjusted accordingly.

The unfinished book and the accuracy of failure

The suppressed FOREST manuscript of the mid-1990s deserves attention not because it succeeded, but because it failed in a way that illuminates Tame’s method. The text predicted an advancing regime of health authoritarianism, driven by scare narratives and enforced by bureaucratic power. What followed was subtler. The scares multiplied. The authoritarianism expanded. Yet the predicted prohibitions did not arrive in their pure form. Mars Bars were not banned. Bacon remained on sale. Coffee was not taxed into oblivion. Instead, the Enemy Class behaved less like revolutionaries and more like parasites. Control mattered more than abstinence. Salaries mattered more than purity. The goal was not to abolish pleasure, but to supervise it indefinitely. Tame’s factual material, drawn from press hysteria of the early 1990s, remains depressingly current. His error lay not in diagnosis, but in underestimating the governing class’s capacity for managed indulgence . This is not a minor correction. It explains why the modern regime feels simultaneously oppressive and unserious, intrusive yet ineffective, hysterical yet stagnant. Tame grasped the structure. He misjudged the tempo.

The final years: withdrawal without retreat

After leaving FOREST, Tame did not retreat into bitterness, though he had ample cause. He withdrew from the illusion that proximity to money or power would ever serve libertarian ends. Living quietly on the Kent coast, he continued to work, to correspond, and to assemble what was intended to become the Bibliography of Freedom, an undertaking of almost pathological thoroughness.

Those who mistook this period for retirement misunderstood the man. Tame was not resting. He was conserving. Movements, he believed, must survive their defeats intact, even if that means shrinking to a handful of people and a filing cabinet. Survival without corruption was victory of a kind.

Diagnosed with aggressive bone cancer in 2005, he faced death with the same unsentimental clarity he had applied to politics. He remained interested in public affairs, concerned for his friends, and engaged with the world until the end. He died on 20 March 2006, attended, calm, and unillusioned .

What remains

Twenty years on, it is tempting to judge Chris Tame by what did not happen. Libertarianism did not triumph. The Enemy Class did not fracture. The state did not retreat. Britain did not recover its older liberties. All true. None decisive. What Tame achieved was the preservation of an intellectual lineage that would otherwise have vanished. He prevented British libertarianism from dissolving into American pastiche, conservative apologetics, or lifestyle libertinism. He insisted on historical memory, analytical seriousness, and strategic realism in an environment hostile to all three. He did not promise victory. He promised continuity. In an age defined by collapse disguised as progress, that was the only honest offer available.

Samuel Johnson’s death, Garrick said, left a chasm that nothing could fill. Two years after Tame’s death, the same words were used without exaggeration . Twenty years later, the chasm remains. So does the bridge he built across it. That bridge is narrow. It is unfashionable. It is not crowded. But it still stands.