Sir Samuel Brittan, who died at the age of 86 on Monday, was the doyen of British economic journalists for over half a century. Yet he achieved this position because he was so much more than that. He was a passionate believer in freedom from any sort of tyranny, political or personal, a true intellectual and a man of conscience. These qualities radiated from everything he wrote. Not only the Financial Times but the wider world owes him an enormous debt for his contribution.
Brittan had deep convictions, which shone through in his writings. He was known for his belief in free markets. But this was more because of his conviction that they expressed and supported liberty than that they would make everybody rich. He was well aware, too, that a society with free markets, such as Victorian England, could be replete with squalid tyrannies. His liberalism was far broader than this. He believed in freedom in all domains — economic, social and political.
That belief made him ambivalent towards Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. “The greatest paradox of Thatcherism, and to some extent Reaganism,” he wrote, disapprovingly, “is the contrast between their economic individualism and their authoritarianism in other areas”. Brittan hated violence and coercion. Essentially a pacifist, he condemned what he saw as the immoral sales of arms.