Nigel Lawson
Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, was a British politician, journalist and climate change denier. A member of the Conservative Party, he served as Member of Parliament for Blaby in Leicestershire from 1974 to 1992, and served in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet from 1981 to 1989. Prior to entering the Cabinet, he served as the Financial Secretary to the Treasury from May 1979 until his promotion to Secretary of State for Energy. He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in June 1983 and served until his resignation in October 1989. In both Cabinet posts, Lawson was a key proponent of Thatcher's policies of privatisation of several key industries.
Lawson was a backbencher from 1989 until he retired in 1992 and sat in the House of Lords from 1992 to his further retirement in 2022. He remained active in politics as the president of Conservatives for Britain, a campaign for Britain to leave the European Union, and was a prominent critic of the EU. He also founded the climate change denial lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation and appointed himself chairman, and was an active supporter of Vote Leave.
Lawson was the father of six children, including Nigella Lawson, a food writer and celebrity cook, Dominic Lawson, a journalist, and Tom Lawson, headmaster of Eastbourne College.
Early life and education
Nigel Lawson was born on 11 March 1932 to a non-Orthodox Jewish family living in Hampstead, London. His father, Ralph Lawson, was the owner of a tea-trading firm in the City of London, while his mother, Joan Elizabeth, was also from a prosperous family of stockbrokers. His paternal grandfather, Gustav Leibson, a merchant from Mitau, changed his name from Leibson to Lawson in 1925, having become a British subject in 1911.Lawson was a great-nephew of the pianist Myra Hess.
Lawson was educated at Westminster School in London, and won a mathematics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a first-class honours degree in philosophy, politics and economics.
Life and career
For two years from 1954, Lawson carried out his National Service as a Royal Navy officer, during which time he commanded the fast-patrol boat HMS Gay Charger.Having been turned down for a career at the Foreign Office, Lawson joined the Financial Times as a journalist in 1956, subsequently writing the Lex column. He progressed to become City editor of The Sunday Telegraph in 1961, where he introduced Jim Slater's Capitalist investing column.
Early political career
In 1963, Lawson was recruited by Conservative Central Office to assist with speech-writing for prime ministers Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home in the lead-up to the 1964 general election.After returning to journalism as editor of The Spectator from 1966 to 1970, Lawson was selected as the Conservative candidate for the Eton and Slough constituency in 1968. He contested the seat unsuccessfully at the 1970 general election, before becoming Member of Parliament for Blaby in Leicestershire in February 1974, holding the seat until he retired at the 1992 general election.
In 1977, while an opposition whip, Lawson co-ordinated tactics with rebellious government backbenchers Jeff Rooker and Audrey Wise to secure legislation providing for the automatic indexation of tax thresholds to prevent the tax burden being increased by inflation.
In government
Financial Secretary to the Treasury
On the election of Margaret Thatcher's government, Lawson was appointed to the post of Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Although this is the fourth-ranking political position in the UK Treasury, Lawson's energy in office was reflected in such measures as the ending of unofficial state controls on mortgage lending, the abolition of exchange controls in October 1979 and the publication of the Medium Term financial Strategy. This document set the course for both the monetary and fiscal sides of the new government's economic policy, though the extent to which the subsequent trajectory of policy and outcome matched that projected is still a matter for debate.Secretary of State for Energy
In the Cabinet reshuffle of September 1981, Lawson was promoted to the position of Secretary of State for Energy. In this role his most significant action was to prepare for what he saw as an inevitable full-scale strike in the coal industry over the closure of deep coal mines whose uneconomic operation accounted for the coal industry's business losses and consequent requirement for state subsidy. He was a key proponent of the Thatcher government's privatisation policy. During his tenure at the Department of Energy he set the course for the later privatisations of the gas and electricity industries and on his return to the Treasury he worked closely with the Department of Trade and Industry in privatising British Airways, British Telecom, and British Gas.Chancellor of the Exchequer
Following the Thatcher government's re-election in 1983, Lawson was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, succeeding Geoffrey Howe. The early years of Lawson's chancellorship were associated with tax reform. The 1984 budget reformed corporate taxes by a combination of reduced rates and reduced allowances. The 1985 budget continued the trend of shifting from direct to indirect taxes by reducing National Insurance contributions for the lower-paid while extending the base of value-added tax.During these two years, Lawson's public image remained low-key, but from the 1986 budget, his stock rose as unemployment began to fall from the middle of 1986. Lawson also changed the budget deficit from £10.5 billion in 1983 to a budget surplus of £3.9 billion in 1988 and £4.1 billion in 1989, the year of his resignation. During these years, however, the UK's current account deficit similarly rose from below 1 per cent of GDP in 1986 to almost 5 per cent in 1989, with Lawson asserting that an external deficit based on private-sector behaviour is no reason for concern. During his tenure, the rate of taxation also came down. The basic rate was reduced from 30 per cent in 1983 to 25 per cent by 1988. The top rate of tax also came down from 60 per cent to 40 per cent in 1988, and the four other higher rates were removed, leaving a system of personal taxation in which there was no rate anywhere in excess of 40 per cent.
In 1986 the City of London's financial markets were deregulated in the so-called "Big Bang". In an interview in 2010, Lawson said that an unintended consequence of the Big Bang and the associated end of the separation that had existed between merchant and retail banking was the 2008 financial crisis.
The trajectory taken by the UK economy from this point on is typically described as "The Lawson Boom" by analogy with the phrase "The Barber Boom" which describes an earlier period of rapid expansion under the tenure as chancellor of Anthony Barber in the Conservative government of Edward Heath. Critics of Lawson assert that a combination of the abandonment of monetarism, the adoption of a de facto exchange-rate target of 3 Deutsche Marks to the pound, and excessive fiscal laxity unleashed an inflationary spiral.
In his defence, Lawson attributed the boom largely to the effects of various measures of financial deregulation. Insofar as Lawson acknowledged policy errors, he attributed them to a failure to raise interest rates during 1986 and considered that had Thatcher not vetoed the UK joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in November 1985 it might have been possible to adjust to these beneficial changes in the arena of microeconomics with less macroeconomics turbulence. Lawson also ascribed the difficulty of conducting monetary policy to Goodhart's law.
Lawson's tax cuts, beginning in 1986, resulted in the "Lawson Boom" of the British economy, which halved unemployment from more than 3,000,000 by the end of 1989. However, this may have led to a rise in inflation from 3 per cent to more than 8 per cent during 1988, which resulted in interest rates doubling to 15 per cent in the space of 18 months, and remaining high despite the 1990–1992 recession which saw unemployment rise nearly as high as the level seen before the boom began.
Lawson reflected on the 1987 general election in his memoir and wrote that the 1987 manifesto was not thought through properly and if it had not been for the economic growth of the country at the time, then the manifesto would have been a disaster because "as it was, it was merely an embarrassment".
The March 1988 budget was remembered for taking almost two hours to deliver due to continuous interruptions and protest from opposition members. Scottish National Party MP Alex Salmond was suspended from the House, and several MPs voted against the amendment of the law bill.
Lawson opposed the introduction of the Community Charge as a replacement for the previous rating system for the local financing element of local government revenue. His dissent was confined to deliberations within the Cabinet, where he found few allies and where he was overruled by the Prime Minister and by the ministerial team of the department responsible.
The issue of exchange-rate mechanism membership continued to fester between Lawson and Thatcher and was exacerbated by the re-employment by Thatcher of Alan Walters as a personal economic adviser.
Resignation
After a further year in office in these circumstances, Lawson felt that public criticism from Walters was making his job impossible and he resigned. He was succeeded in the office of chancellor by John Major.Lawson's six-year tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer was longer than that of any of his predecessors since David Lloyd George, who served from 1908 to 1915. Both men's records were subsequently beaten by Labour's Gordon Brown, who was chancellor from 1997 to 2007.
Retirement
After retiring from front-bench politics, Lawson decided to tackle his weight problem. He was 5 feet 9 inches tall; he lost five stone from 17 stone, or 238 pounds to 12 stone, or 168 pounds – in a matter of a few months, dramatically changing his appearance, and went on to publish the best-selling.On 1 July 1992 Lawson was given a life peerage as Baron Lawson of Blaby, of Newnham in the County of Northamptonshire.
In 1996 Lawson appeared on the BBC satirical and topical quiz show Have I Got News for You, in which he secured his team a last-minute victory. He occasionally appeared as a guest on his daughter Nigella's cookery shows.
Lawson served on the advisory board of the Conservative magazine Standpoint.
In 2013, Lawson advocated Britain leaving the European Union. He argued that "economic gains would substantially outweigh the costs". In the 2016 EU referendum, he supported Leave and was appointed chairman of the Vote Leave campaign.