Nigel Lawson
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| The Right Honourable Nigel Lawson Baron Lawson of Blaby, PC |
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| In office 11 June 1983 – 26 October 1989 |
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| Prime Minister | Margaret Thatcher |
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| Preceded by | Geoffrey Howe |
| Succeeded by | John Major |
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| In office 14 September 1981 – 11 June 1983 |
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| Preceded by | David Howell |
| Succeeded by | Peter Walker |
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| In office 4 May 1979 – 14 September 1981 |
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| Preceded by | Robert Sheldon |
| Succeeded by | Nicholas Ridley |
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| Born | March 11, 1932 North London, England |
| Political party | Conservative |
| Religion | Jewish |
Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, PC (born 11 March 1932), is a British politician, Chancellor of the Exchequer between June 1983 and October 1989. His tenure in that office was longer than that of any of his predecessors since David Lloyd George (1908 to 1915), though it was surpassed by Gordon Brown in September 2003. Lawson is the father of journalist and food writer Nigella Lawson, Dominic Lawson, the former editor of The Sunday Telegraph and Tom Lawson, housemaster of Chernocke House at Winchester College.
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[edit] Early life
He was born in Hampstead in 1932, the son of Ralph Lawson, a tea merchant, and Joan Elisabeth Davis, the daughter of a stockbroker. His grandfather Gustav, an immigrant from Mitau (now Jelgava in Latvia) changed his name from Leibson to Lawson after becoming a British Citizen in 1911[1]. After studying at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, and carrying out National Service in the Royal Navy - during which time he commanded a small torpedo boat - Lawson began his career as a financial journalist and progressed to the positions of city editor of The Sunday Telegraph in 1961 and editor of The Spectator (1966–1970) before becoming Member of Parliament for Blaby in Leicestershire in February 1974 (a position he held until retiring at the 1992 General Election). While in opposition, he co-ordinated tactics with 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 (typically in excess of 10% per annum during that parliament).
[edit] In government
On the election of Margaret Thatcher's government, Lawson was appointed to the position of Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Although this is the fourth-ranking political position in the British 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.
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 (then state-owned since nationalization by the post-war government of Clement Attlee) over the closure of pits whose operation accounted for the coal industry's business losses and consequent requirement for state subsidy.
Lawson was a key proponent of the Thatcher Government's privatization policy. During his tenure at the Department of Energy he set the course for the later privatizations of the gas and electricity industries and on his return to the Treasury he worked closely with the Department of Trade and Industry in privatizing British Airways, British Telecom, and British Gas.
After the government's re-election in 1983, Lawson was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in succession to Sir 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 (in which he resumed the reduction of the standard rate of personal Income Tax from the 30% rate to which it had been lowered in Sir Geoffrey Howe's 1979 budget), his stock rose as unemployment began to fall from the middle of 1986 (employment growth having resumed over three years earlier).
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 Sir Edward Heath (1970 to 1974). Critics of Lawson assert that a combination of the abandonment of monetarism, the adoption of a de facto exchange-rate target of 3 deutschmarks to the pound (ruling out interest-rate rises), and excessive fiscal laxity (in particular the 1988 budget) unleashed an inflationary spiral.
Lawson, in his own defence, attributes the boom largely to the effects of various measures of financial deregulation. Insofar as Lawson acknowledges policy errors, he attributes them to a failure to raise interest rates during 1986 and considers that had Margaret 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 macroeconomic turbulence. Lawson also ascribes the difficulty of conducting monetary policy to Goodhart's Law.
Lawson opposed the introduction of the Community Charge (the poll tax) 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 responsible department (Department of the Environment).
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 personal economic adviser. Lawson's conduct of policy had become a struggle to maintain credibility once the August 1988 trade deficit revealed the strength of the expansion of domestic demand. As orthodox monetarists, Lawson and Thatcher agreed to a steady rise in interest rates to restrain demand, but this had the effect of inflating the headline inflation figure.
[edit] Resignation
After a further year in office in these circumstances Lawson felt that public articulation of differences between an exchange-rate monetarist, as he had become, and the views of Walters (who continued to favour a floating exchange rate) were making his job impossible and he resigned. Lawson coined the phrase that he did so "to spend more time with his family". He was succeeded in the office of Chancellor by John Major.
[edit] Retirement
After retiring from front-bench politics, Lawson decided, on his doctor's advice, to tackle his weight problem. He lost five stone (70 pounds, 30 kg) in a matter of a few months, dramatically changing his appearance, and went on to publish the best-selling "The Nigel Lawson Diet Book". On 1 July 1992 he was created a life peer as Baron Lawson of Blaby, of Newnham in the County of Northamptonshire.
In 1996, Lawson appeared on the BBC topical quiz show Have I Got News For You and, as a former Chancellor (regarded as one of the "big four" Government positions) became something of a coup as the guest who had previously held the highest political office. He was, however, happy to go on the show and take a mild amount of ribbing from the regulars as he was plugging his diet book at the time.
Lawson has been married twice:
- Vanessa Salmon (whose family founded the Lyons Corner House chain) (1955–1980); (one son Dominic and three daughters Thomasina, Nigella and Horatia)
- Thérèse Maclear (1980 – to present); (one son Tom and one daughter Emily)
[edit] Corporate roles
- 2007: Chairman of Central European Trust (CET). Clients include: American Express, Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, BP Amoco, Bristol-Myers Squibb, British Telecom, CGNU, Cigna, Cisco Systems, Coca Cola, Compaq Computers, Dow Chemical, E.I. du Pont de Nemours, General Electric, Glaxo Smith Kline,k GTE, IBM, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Microsoft, Mitsui, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Royal Dutch Shell Group, Sara Lee, SBC Communications, Société Générale, Sun Microsystems, Texaco, Total Fina Elf, Unilever, Xerox, Yamanouchi. (CET Website)
- 2007: Chairman of Oxford Investment Partners (OXIP Website)
- 2002: Non Executive Director NM Rothschild (Reference)
[edit] Global warming debate
In 2004, along with six others, Lawson wrote a letter to The Times criticising the Kyoto Protocol and claiming that there were substantial scientific uncertainties surrounding climate change [1]; he also wrote on the same subject in the November 2005 issue of Prospect magazine. Shortly afterwards, the House of Lords Economics Committee of which Lawson was a member, undertook an inquiry into the topic, which produced a report consistent with the arguments of Lawson's letter[2].
Shortly after the release of this report, the British government launched the Stern Review, an inquiry undertaken by the UK Treasury and headed by Sir Nicholas Stern. The Stern Review argued that the potential costs of climate change far exceeded the costs of a programme to stabilise the climate.
Lawson's lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, published 1 November 2006 [3] criticised the Stern Review and proposed what it describes as a rational approach, advocating adaptation to changes in global climate, rather than attempting to mitigate or reverse it.
Lawson also contributed to the 2007 documentary film The Great Global Warming Swindle.
In 2008, Lawson published a book expanding on his 2006 lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, "An Appeal To Reason: A Cool Look At Global Warming"[4]. His claims that climate change will be beneficial were refuted by leading scientists [5].
Lawson's son Dominic Lawson is also a vocal climate change skeptic, taking a similar viewpoint as his father in his columns in the Independent on Sunday[6][7]. The brother of his daughter in law, Christopher Monckton is one of the world's most prominent campaigners against the scientific consensus on climate change.
[edit] Bibliography
- An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming
- Thatcherism in Practice: A Progress Report
- The Retreat of the State
- The View from No.11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical
- The Nigel Lawson Diet Book
- The Power Game: An Examination of Decision Making in Government
- Conservatism Today: Four Personal Points of View By Robert Blake, Peregrine Worsthorne, David Howell and Nigel Lawson
- State of the Market (Occasional Papers S.)
[edit] References
- ^ Nations Memory Bank (originally from The Daily Telegraph)
- ^ House of Lords, Select Committee on Economic Affairs (July 2005). [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12i.pdf The Economics of Climate Change]. Retrieved on 2007-03-14.
- ^ Lawson, Nigel (November 1, 2006). Lecture on the Economics and Politics of Climate Change - An Appeal to Reason. Centre for Policy Studies. Retrieved on 2007-03-14.
- ^ Lawson, Nigel (April 6, 2008). Lord Lawson claims climate change hysteria heralds a 'new age of unreason'. The Sunday Telegraph. Retrieved on 2008-04-19.
- ^ Clover, Charles (April 15, 2008). IPCC: Lawson wrong about climate change. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved on 2008-04-19.
- ^ Lawson, Dominic (September 22, 2006). Dominic Lawson: The debate on climate change is far too important to be shut down by the scientists. The Independent on Sunday. Retrieved on 2008-04-20.
- ^ Lawson, Dominic (November 23, 2007). Dominic Lawson: Fight climate change? Or stay competitive? I'm afraid these two aims are incompatible. The Independent on Sunday. Retrieved on 2008-04-20.
[edit] External links
| Media offices | ||
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| Preceded by Iain MacLeod |
Editor of The Spectator 1966 – 1970 |
Succeeded by George Gale |
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
| Preceded by (new constituency) |
Member of Parliament for Blaby 1974–1992 |
Succeeded by Andrew Robathan |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Robert Sheldon |
Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1979–1981 |
Succeeded by Nicholas Ridley |
| Preceded by David Howell |
Secretary of State for Energy 1981–1983 |
Succeeded by Peter Walker |
| Preceded by Sir Geoffrey Howe |
Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983–1989 |
Succeeded by John Major |
