Robin Murray (economist)

Greenside Farm, Hallbankgate, a hill-farm in and around Coalfell, was in a mining area, and a family property of Lady Mary Murray (1865–1956), Stephen's mother and daughter of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle; she passed it on to Stephen and his sister Rosalind Toynbee, wife of Arnold J. Toynbee.

Robin was sent to a variety of primary schools in the immediate post-war years, and on the move to the farm in Cumbria to White House School in Brampton (now the William Howard School).

Margaret's mother, Richenda Gillett, was one of the first English women doctors, graduating from the University of London in 1895.

Robin's mother, Margaret Murray née Gillett (1907-1979) came from a long line of English Quakers.

His father was Stephen Hubert Murray (1908-1994) a barrister with chambers in King's Bench Walk in the Inner Temple and from 1951 a farmer in Hallbankgate, Cumbria.

Stephen was the youngest son of Gilbert Murray, and Lady Mary Murray of Oxford, a connubial conjunction of Irish Catholic stock (via Australia) and English Whig aristocracy.

Her father was Joseph Rowntree Gillett, a banker and social philanthropist who went to work full time in the Rhondda Valley to alleviate suffering in the coalfields during the 1920s and 1930s.

Margaret herself was one of Britain's first female-chartered architects, graduating from the University of London in 1930 and practicing until the early 1970s.

The third of four sons, Robin's older brothers were Gilbert (1931-1963) a physicist and alpinist who died in a rockfall on Fox Glacier, New Zealand; and Alexander (1934-) who is a medieval historian.

Both parents joined the Communist Party of Great Britain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, their reason being that the CPGB was the only political party that understood and was taking action against the rise of fascism in Europe.

They both left the Party at the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.

Thereafter they both became members of the Labour Party, Stephen particularly active in the League of Labour Lawyers and later the Haldane Society.

In early 1939 he was sent to Lithuania to represent Jewish citizens subjected to Nazi oppression.

Robin Murray (14 September 1940 – 29 May 2017) was an industrial and environmental economist.

As a social entrepreneur, he advocated and implemented new forms of production and organization, based on principles of ecological sustainability, social justice, and democracy.

He developed his thought through practical projects and experiments.

A common thread throughout his work was how collaboration, rather than competition, could be a driving force behind economic development and provide the foundation for non-exploitative and egalitarian societies.

Robin Murray influenced how people eat, shop, and work, how we create and handle waste.

He was an influential member of the democratic-socialist movement in Britain, playing a role in setting up organizations such as Twin and Twin Trading (an alternative trading and development organization from which emerged farmer-owned Fairtrade companies Cafédirect, Divine Chocolate and Liberation Nuts), the London Food Commission and The London Climate Change Agency.

Robin Murray was born inside a farmhouse in Patterdale on 14 September 1940 in what was then the County of Westmorland (now Cumbria).

His mother and two older brothers had been evacuated from their London home at the onset of the Second World War and the London Blitz.

It was at Bedales that Robin met his future wife Frances (née Herdman, 1941-) and together they became head boy and girl of the school (1957-8).

Hubert (1946-) is an architect living and working in Boston, Massachusetts.

Stephen was heavily involved in the events of 1948 leading to the split of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers from the Labour Party, over the question of communist membership.

The Murray family moved from Hampstead to Hallbankgate in Cumberland in 1951, Stephen Murray giving up his legal career to farm.

In 1952 his parents sent him to Bedales School, a coeducational boarding school in Hampshire, founded in 1893 on the Arts and Crafts principles of educating the head, the hand and the heart.

Gilbert and Alexander (Sandy) had both preceded him at the school during and immediately after the war.

Having completed his exams, in 1959 Murray spent several months in between leaving school and going up to university working for Danilo Dolci in Partinico, Sicily.

The moral compass he inherited from his family (on both sides), his experience of working with parents and brothers on their Cumbrian hill farm and the year spent with peasants and villagers on community projects in the face of vested interests were all formative influences in his subsequent intellectual and professional trajectory, harnessed in the interests of social progress.

Murray studied Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, (1959-1962), then at the College of Europe in Bruges where we received a Diploma in European Studies (1962-1963), finally at the London School of Economics where he earned his MSc in economics (1963-1966).

While studying at the LSE, Murray was an Adult Education Lecturer for the Oxford University Extra Mural Department, the Inner London Education Authority and the Workers Education Association.

On finishing his studies, Murray became a lecturer in economics at the London Business School between 1966 and 1970.

The original 1967 edition was edited by Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams.

He was part of the group that helped bring the May Day Manifesto into being, and then contributed with Michael Barrett Brown to the economics section of the 1968 Penguin edition which was edited by Raymond Williams.

During the 1970s Murray played a critical role in the Brighton Labour Process Group which provided a series of papers for the inaugural Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) in the 1970s.

He also played a role as a policymaker, first as Chief Economic Advisor to the Greater London Council in the early 1980s and later in the 1990s in shaping London's waste strategy.

While working on these practical initiatives he taught at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, and later at the London School of Economics and Schumacher College.

Over the years he published articles including those describing the concepts of post-Fordism, zero-waste and social innovation.

Thereafter he joined the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (IDS) as a Fellow in Economics where he stayed until 1993.

He was awarded posthumously the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in October 2017, for "pioneering work in social innovation".