National President: Professor David Marsland
In November 2006, ICUT was pleased to announce the appointment of a National President in Professor David Marsland, Emeritus Scholar of Sociology and Health Sciences, Brunel University (London) and Professorial Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Buckingham. Other accolades include: Fellow of the Royal Society of Health, Fellow of the Institute of Supervisory Management, Member of UNESCO Social Sciences Board, Advisor to the British Parliamentary Social Security Committee and Hon. General Secretary of the British Sociological Association. David was also the recipient of the 1991 Margaret Thatcher Award for his multiple writings on freedom and enterprise.
Professor Marsland is a distinguished writer, broadcaster and academic commentator, and well known to the political and sociology worlds where he has made many colourful contributions. His litany of publications challenged the previous leftist consensus characterising Sociology and Health Studies. The two most recent books, Seeds of Bankruptcy (1988, Claridge Press) and Welfare or Welfare State? (1996, Macmillans) each questioned dependence on state welfare, while also challenging the worth of public sector services and its dominant left wing elites. The Professor – originally a man of the left – over the last three decades has redrafted his agenda to prioritise personal initiative, reassertion of the work ethic, and the replacement of the dependency culture by an enterprise culture based on meritocracy, self-help and growth. It was inevitable that his core beliefs would earn the interest and approval of Margaret Thatcher during her 11.5 years of government, and he maintains this association until the present day.
Essentially, Professor Marsland holds a healthy distaste for public and private monopolies, which he feels run contrary to the interests of people and the nation at large. He advocates his views with a style that is independent, articulate, even iconoclastic, but always scholarly and respectful of other viewpoints. ICUT has been enhanced and propelled by our association with this most prodigious and independent-minded of British social thinkers, and we look forward to even better things to come. In our early days, Professor Marsland was virtually alone among British academics in welcoming our arrival and recognising our purpose. Now, with the organisation’s successes over recent years, he feels vindicated, and actively supports this new move into the corporate sphere where he believes the best is yet to come.