Reg Calvert, Oliver Smedley, Hayek and the nature of liberty

When Oliver Smedley shot Reg Calvert, more was at stake than a row over a radio transmitter. According to a 2011 blog post by Adam Curtis – thanks to a reader for putting me on to it – theirs was a dispute about the very nature of liberty:

A historian called Adrian Johns has written a brilliant book about Pirate Radio in the 1960s, called Death of a Pirate. In it he argues that Reg Calvert and Oliver Smedley represent two completely different kinds of "privateer".

Reg Calvert was part of an old, unruly tradition of true independence and libertarian freedom. A real buccaneer who would ignore rules and the structure of class and power in Britain while merrily going his own way.

Smedley on the other hand was a "privateer" only to the extent that he wanted to bring the private sector back to power in Britain. Other than that he wanted the traditional power structure to remain the same. And to do this he (and his Think Tank) wanted to reinvent the free market as a managed system - managed by them, and any true "privateer" - like Reg - who challenged that power was doomed.

Johns writes about the killing of Calvert.

"At that instant late in Midsummer Night 1966 when Smedley took his fatal decision, two kinds of piracy came into collision. Reg Calvert represented one kind - a kind whose history can be traced back centuries. He was an ingenious and imaginative entrepreneur, opportunistic and ambitious. He spoke in grandiose terms, but his operations were undercapitalized, seat-of-the-pants adventures that might bloom or collapse - as so many radical ventures initially are. The outsider, resistant to all rules.

Calvert represented the kind of pirate that the Institute of Economic Affairs hailed as holding the key to social and cultural progress. But in reality Smedley stood for a different kind of pirate altogether. He was the rational capitalist, well versed in both the maxims of accountancy and the abstract principles of liberal ideology. Privately educated, metropolitan and professional, Smedley saw himself as an agent in the political and cultural affairs of the nation.

It was this that Calvert threatened in 1966 - and what made Calvert so appealing was therefore precisely what also made him so dangerous. And as in military and political life, so in financial and entrepreneurial: Smedley's instinct was to stand fast. Hold his ground."

And the same was true of the ideas of Friedrich Hayek. He wasn't really trying to bring back an old, unpredictable, turbulent laissez-faire system - he wanted to create a new, technocratic system of managed competition that didn't in anyway threaten the existing structure of power.

Before he gets to this argument, Curtis has plenty on Calvert and Smedley and their involvement with pirate radio.