Chris R. Tame | |
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Born | Christopher Ronald Tame 20 December 1949 Enfield, England, United Kingdom |
Died | March 20, 2006 | (aged 56)
Occupation | Journalist, Writer |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | Hull University |
Christopher Ronald Tame (20 December 1949 – 20 March 2006) was a British libertarian political activist. He is best known as the founder and Director of the Libertarian Alliance, a free market and civil liberties think tank.
Tame was born on 20 December 1949 in Enfield, Middlesex. His father, Ronald Ernest Tame, was a printer who had spent the war in the Eighth Army as an escort to Montgomery and had been mentioned in dispatches. He later became a process engraver and shop steward, and he and Tame's mother Elsie Florence, a nurse, had met and married just after the end of the Second World War. Tame was an only child, who grew up in post-war Britain.
He was brought up in Godalming in Surrey, where his family had moved. He attended a local Church of England primary school, and then grammar school. In 1971, he graduated from Hull University with a degree in American Studies.
Tame joined the Conservative students' organisation at Hull, and became active in the organisation. Disillusioned by the interventionist and authoritarian mindset, he left and never went back. He had felt that the Conservative Party was dominated by a "corporate elite" wedded to a "corrupt state capitalism." He announced his departure from the rostrum at an annual Federation of Conservative Students conference in the early 1970s.
In 1967, Tame founded the Libertarian Alliance as an informal discussion group, drawing ideas from Ayn Rand, among others. The organisation was formalised in 1979, with a structure of Tame as its President, and the Alliance was based in the Alternative Bookshop which Tame had opened in Covent Garden in London a year earlier. The Bookshop was advertised in National Association for Freedom's journal, 'The Free Nation.'