DOUGLAS MASON came to prominence during the Thatcher years. He contributed many of the ideas and initiatives which made the climate of the day conducive to deregulation and free-market ideas. Most famously he called for the domestic rates which formed part of local government finance to be replaced by a per-capita charge on local residents. When the Government of the day introduced a measure along these lines, he was dubbed, rightly or wrongly, the “father of the poll tax”.

Douglas Calder Mason was born in Dunfermline, Fife, in 1941, but was educated at Bradford Grammar School. He returned to Scotland to study at the University of St Andrews, and lived in Fife thereafter. He developed an enduring affection for St Andrews, and contributed to the university first as a student and then as a governor.

As a student, he gave the St Andrews University Conservative Association a national significance. Espousing a free-market libertarian philosophy at a time when the Conservative Party itself subscribed to the centrist postwar consensus personified by Edward Heath, Mason provided the organisational skills which made the association effective. It became the largest student Conservative association in the UK, although from one of the smallest universities. Its message gradually spread through the party’s national student wing, colouring the outlook of a generation of its rising stars.

Mason himself was elected, while still a student in 1965, to the university’s general council business committee. Much later, between 1993 and 2000, he would become its convenor. More remarkably, the student Conservative association that he had nurtured ran him for a seat on Fife County Council, to which he was elected in 1967. His local government career went on to include Kirkcaldy District Council, the Scottish Housing Advisory Committee, and Glenrothes Development Corporation.

After leaving St Andrews, Mason chose to live and work in Glenrothes, becoming first a Conservative constituency agent, then combining freelance writing with work as an antiquarian book dealer. He contested the Fife Central parliamentary seat unsuccessfully for the Conservatives in 1983. He worked as a parliamentary assistant and speechwriter to both Allan Stewart, MP, a trade and then Scottish minister, and Lord Forsyth, an employment minister who became Secretary of State for Scotland. It was mainly through the work of the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), however, that he made a significant contribution to his times.

The institute, founded by three friends of Mason’s from his St Andrews days, had established itself in the late 1970s as a platform for free-market ideas. Mason joined as a fellow in 1984 and amplified its voice through a series of publications. In Time to Call Time (1986), for example, he suggested that the liberalisation of licensing laws in Scotland had led to lower alcohol abuse and crime, where previous levels had exceeded those in England. His work may have helped to ease the passage of more liberal licensing laws in England.

Mason’s Licensed to Live (1988) documented the burden of regulation affecting attempted start-up and small businesses, and was circulated among the members of the Government’s new deregulation unit. In Ex Libris (1986) and Expounding the Arts (1987) he put a libertarian case against subsidies for the favoured arts and literature of the educated classes. Mason also put forward a vigorous argument for privatising the Post Office, the Forestry Commission and the universities. He lectured around the world on deregulation and market reform.

He advocated a poll tax to finance local government, first through newspaper articles, then in the ASI’s Omega Report on Local Government (1983), and finally in Revising the Rating System (1985). Mason himself was highly critical of the way in which his proposal was implemented without the ten-year transition that he had called for, or the freeze on local spending.

He was not alone. When the poll tax was applied in Scotland at the start of the 1989-90 financial year — a year ahead of England — opposition was almost instant. Non-payment and civil unrest first north and then south of the Border culminated in the infamous Trafalgar Square riots of March 31, 1990, in which about 200,000 protesters clashed with police.

When Margaret Thatcher left office on November 22 of that year, all of her putative successors declared their intention to abandon the tax. Mason, however, remained a supporter of the principle, though he was disinclined to side with its execution by the Government. He opposed the repeal of the tax by Michael Heseltine and predicted that its successor, the council tax, would accumulate more problems than it solved.

Mason’s enduring fondness for St Andrews showed itself again in a series of monographs he wrote on aspects of the history of the university. In 1995 he co-edited City in the Mist, a collection of prose and poetry written by St Andrews students.

Since boyhood Mason had two recreational delights. The first was traditional jazz, of which he had a huge knowledge and a vast collection of ancient records. The second was science fiction, of which he accumulated one of the largest private collections in Britain.

A brain tumour was first diagnosed in 1990, but Mason continued while he could with an active public life of lectures and writing. He was very much in the tradition of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment — that of the gentleman scholar, engaging, courteous and good company.

He is survived by his mother and a younger brother.

Douglas Mason, political theorist, was born on September 30, 1941. He died on December 13, 2004, aged 63.