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Nigel Lawson

(b. London, 11 Mar. 1932) British; Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983 – 89; Baron (life peer) 1992 Educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a first in PPE, Lawson had a distinguished career as a journalist before entering parliament. After ten years as a financial journalist and a year spent as a speech writer to Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home (1963 – 4), he was appointed editor of the Spectator in 1966, a post he held for four years. In 1970 he stood unsuccessfully as Conservative candidate for Eton and Slough. He entered parliament in February 1974, shortly before his 42nd birthday, as MP for the safe seat of Blaby in Leicestershire. Within two years he had been appointed an Opposition whip and in 1977 was made a spokesman on Treasury affairs. A neo-liberal, he was appointed Financial Secretary to the Treasury when the party was returned to office in 1979. In 1981 he entered the Cabinet as Energy Secretary and in 1983 he began a six-year stint as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He set about simplifying the tax system and reducing the level of direct taxation, actions that made him popular with both the party and the Prime Minister. Though he shared Margaret Thatcher's economic philosophy, he opposed the introduction of the poll tax and, with the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, pushed the Prime Minister to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism. The Prime Minister's increasing reliance on the advice of her economic adviser Sir Alan Walters resulted in Lawson demanding Walters's departure. When this was refused, he resigned, creating a short period of intense political difficulty for the Prime Minister.

After leaving government, Lawson accepted a directorship of Barclays Bank and wrote a massive volume of memoirs, The View from Number 11 (1992), providing a fascinating insight into economic policy-making. Though widely recognized — including by Margaret Thatcher — as being intellectually brilliant, he also had a reputation for intellectual arrogance. He was not a clubbable politician and the consequences of his expansionary 1988 budget reduced his support on the back benches. He left the House of Commons in 1992, taking a life peerage as Lord Lawson of Blaby.

 
 
Quotes By: Nigel Lawson

Quotes:

"To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern."

 
Wikipedia: Nigel Lawson
The Rt Hon. Nigel Lawson

In office
11 June, 1983 – 26 October, 1989
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
Preceded by Geoffrey Howe
Succeeded by John Major

In office
14 September, 1981 – 11 June, 1983
Preceded by David Howell
Succeeded by Peter Walker

In office
4 May 1979 – 14 September 1981
Preceded by Robert Sheldon
Succeeded by Nicholas Ridley

Born March 11 1932 (1932--) (age 75)
Flag of England North London, England
Political party Conservative
Religion Jewish

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)
  • 2007: Chairman of Oxford Investment Partners (OXIP 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

  1. ^ 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.
  2. ^ 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.

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Media offices
Preceded by
Iain MacLeod
Editor of The Spectator
1966 – 1970
Succeeded by
George Gale
Parliament of the United Kingdom (1801–present)
Preceded by
(new constituency)
Member of Parliament for Blaby
19741992
Succeeded by
Andrew Robathan
Political offices
Preceded by
Robert Sheldon
Financial Secretary to the Treasury
1979–1983
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

 
 

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Political Biography. A Dictionary of Political Biography. Copyright © 1998, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
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