Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, PC (born
March 11, 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.
Early Life
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 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).
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 (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.
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.
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 a best-selling
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:
Corporate Roles
- 2007: Chairman of Central European Trust (CET). Clients include: American Express, Bank of America Barclays, BNP Paribas,
BP Amoco, Bristol-Myers Sqibb, British Telecom, CGNU, Cygna, 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, Lockhed
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)
- 2002: Non Executive Director NM Rothschild (Reference)
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[1].
Shortly after the release of this report, the British government established the Stern
Review, an inquiry undertaken by the UK Treasury and headed by Sir Nicholas Stern. The Stern Review found that the potential costs of climate change far exceeded the costs
of a program to stabilise the climate.
Lawson's recent lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, published 1 November 2006
[2] criticises the Stern Review and proposes 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.
References
- ^ House of Lords, Select Committee on Economic Affairs (July 2005). [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12i.pdf The Economics ofClimate 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.
External links
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