In this newsletter:
1) Nigel Lawson and the birth of the GWPF
Net Zero Watch, 4 April 2023
4) WSJ: Nigel Lawson’s lesson for today’s pessimists
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 4 April 2023
5) Nigel Lawson, the sceptic hero of our times
The Conservative Woman, 4 April 2023
6) If only the Tories had followed Nigel Lawson's Thatcherite common sense
Daily Express, 4 April 2023
Net Zero Watch, 4 April 2023
2) Nigel Lawson's last essay: Net Zero is a disastrous solution to a nonexistent problem
The Spectator, 6 November 2021
The Spectator, 6 November 2021
3) Matt Ridley: My unexpected lunch with Nigel Lawson – and Prince Philip
The Spectator, 5 April 2023
The Spectator, 5 April 2023
4) WSJ: Nigel Lawson’s lesson for today’s pessimists
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 4 April 2023
5) Nigel Lawson, the sceptic hero of our times
The Conservative Woman, 4 April 2023
Daily Express, 4 April 2023
7) Nigel Lawson’s legacy is one of British transformation
The Spectator, 4 April 2023
The Spectator, 4 April 2023
8) Nigel Lawson: A brilliant chancellor who was in many ways the architect of Thatcherism
The Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2023
The Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2023
9) Peter Lilley: Nigel Lawson was, like me, a British Gaullist who understood Brexit was necessary
The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2023
10) Editorial: Conservatives must learn from Nigel Lawson
The Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2023
Full details:
1) Nigel Lawson and the birth of the GWPF
Net Zero Watch, 4 April 2023
By Andrew Montford
It was the late Professor David Henderson who sparked Nigel Lawson’s interest in the climate domain. Henderson had persuaded Lawson to take a look at what he called “The Appleby File”, a dossier of his correspondence with senior Whitehall officials on the subject of global warming. This paperwork, Lawson later explained, revealed in the mandarins “a combination of ignorance and obfuscation that was indeed worthy of Sir Humphrey”.
Intrigued by the wrongheadedness of it all, Lawson quickly stepped into action. In his role as chairman of the House of Lords Economic Affair Committee, he persuaded his colleagues to launch an inquiry into the economics of climate change. Almost unique among subsequent Parliamentary inquiries, the witnesses included a number of eminent scientists who were on the sceptical side of catastrophism, as well as the usual chorus of the climate alarmist faithful. Such scrutiny was never to be repeated.
Global warming became a new focus of Lawson’s life. Soon he was hard at work on a book on the subject. Remarkably, no UK publisher would touch a short tome on the most important subject of our time by one of the most important politicians of recent decades. Fortunately, Lawson was not easily put off, and eventually found an American publisher that would take on the project.
When it appeared in 2008, An Appeal to Reason quickly became a bestseller, and on the back of its success, friends and supporters persuaded Lawson that a thinktank focused on climate change was needed. This was the seed of the idea that became the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Over the next twelve months, plans were put in place. Lawson would become the Foundation’s founding chairman, while Henderson would lead the Academic Advisory Council. A director was quickly recruited in the shape of Dr Benny Peiser, and an office – little more than a cupboard – was leased in Carlton House Terrace, a few doors down from the Royal Society.
The plan was for the Foundation to be launched in November 2009, on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Conference. In the event, that occasion was overshadowed by the dramatic release of the Climategate emails. Lawson could scarcely have hoped for better publicity.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation was launched by Lord Lawson and Dr Benny Peiser on 23 November 2009 in the House of Lords – in the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit.
The Foundation quickly became the focus of climate activists’ demonology, with Lawson installed in their minds as the heresiarch. A thousand conspiracy-mongering Guardian articles followed, a myriad of insults coming in their wake.
Lawson always shrugged off such nonsense. Steeled in the political battles of the 1980s, he’d been on the receiving end of such attacks before, and he scarcely seemed to notice them. He certainly never let them affect his behaviour, and his rebuttals were always polite and factual. His old-school decency was always to the fore.
Lawson knew that in the climate catastrophist movement he was facing an opponent that was not in any way rational. Facts and data were not central to the case being made for decarbonisation; insults and conspiracies about ‘big oil’ were therefore to be expected. Recalling his review of David Henderson’s Appleby File, he noted that ‘at no time was there the slightest suggestion that there should be an economic analysis of the issue’. Ten years later, the Climate Change Committee produced a lengthy report to accompany the Net Zero announcement, explaining why a cost-benefit analysis of the target was entirely inappropriate.
What Lawson saw, from early on, was something that I think the rest of the world is only now beginning to grasp
"It is difficult to escape the conclusion that climate change orthodoxy has in effect become a substitute religion, attended by all the intolerant zealotry that has so often marred religion in the past, and in some places still does so today."
Here, as in so many areas, Nigel Lawson was far, far ahead of the rest of us.
Nigel Lawson, 1932-2023. RIP.
Daily Express, 4 April 2023
Boris Johnson called Nigel Lawson 'a giant' in his tribute to him. If only he and his current Tory colleagues had followed his Thatcherite common sense, they could have been giants too.
Net Zero Watch, 4 April 2023
By Andrew Montford
It was the late Professor David Henderson who sparked Nigel Lawson’s interest in the climate domain. Henderson had persuaded Lawson to take a look at what he called “The Appleby File”, a dossier of his correspondence with senior Whitehall officials on the subject of global warming. This paperwork, Lawson later explained, revealed in the mandarins “a combination of ignorance and obfuscation that was indeed worthy of Sir Humphrey”.
Intrigued by the wrongheadedness of it all, Lawson quickly stepped into action. In his role as chairman of the House of Lords Economic Affair Committee, he persuaded his colleagues to launch an inquiry into the economics of climate change. Almost unique among subsequent Parliamentary inquiries, the witnesses included a number of eminent scientists who were on the sceptical side of catastrophism, as well as the usual chorus of the climate alarmist faithful. Such scrutiny was never to be repeated.
Global warming became a new focus of Lawson’s life. Soon he was hard at work on a book on the subject. Remarkably, no UK publisher would touch a short tome on the most important subject of our time by one of the most important politicians of recent decades. Fortunately, Lawson was not easily put off, and eventually found an American publisher that would take on the project.
When it appeared in 2008, An Appeal to Reason quickly became a bestseller, and on the back of its success, friends and supporters persuaded Lawson that a thinktank focused on climate change was needed. This was the seed of the idea that became the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Over the next twelve months, plans were put in place. Lawson would become the Foundation’s founding chairman, while Henderson would lead the Academic Advisory Council. A director was quickly recruited in the shape of Dr Benny Peiser, and an office – little more than a cupboard – was leased in Carlton House Terrace, a few doors down from the Royal Society.
The plan was for the Foundation to be launched in November 2009, on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Conference. In the event, that occasion was overshadowed by the dramatic release of the Climategate emails. Lawson could scarcely have hoped for better publicity.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation was launched by Lord Lawson and Dr Benny Peiser on 23 November 2009 in the House of Lords – in the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit.
The Foundation quickly became the focus of climate activists’ demonology, with Lawson installed in their minds as the heresiarch. A thousand conspiracy-mongering Guardian articles followed, a myriad of insults coming in their wake.
Lawson always shrugged off such nonsense. Steeled in the political battles of the 1980s, he’d been on the receiving end of such attacks before, and he scarcely seemed to notice them. He certainly never let them affect his behaviour, and his rebuttals were always polite and factual. His old-school decency was always to the fore.
Lawson knew that in the climate catastrophist movement he was facing an opponent that was not in any way rational. Facts and data were not central to the case being made for decarbonisation; insults and conspiracies about ‘big oil’ were therefore to be expected. Recalling his review of David Henderson’s Appleby File, he noted that ‘at no time was there the slightest suggestion that there should be an economic analysis of the issue’. Ten years later, the Climate Change Committee produced a lengthy report to accompany the Net Zero announcement, explaining why a cost-benefit analysis of the target was entirely inappropriate.
What Lawson saw, from early on, was something that I think the rest of the world is only now beginning to grasp
"It is difficult to escape the conclusion that climate change orthodoxy has in effect become a substitute religion, attended by all the intolerant zealotry that has so often marred religion in the past, and in some places still does so today."
Here, as in so many areas, Nigel Lawson was far, far ahead of the rest of us.
Nigel Lawson, 1932-2023. RIP.
2) Nigel Lawson's last essay: Net Zero is a disastrous solution to a nonexistent problem
The Spectator, 6 November 2021
Whatever the cause of the climate change madness, the effect is clear. While global warming is not a problem, the policies intended to prevent it are a disaster.
The Spectator, 6 November 2021
Whatever the cause of the climate change madness, the effect is clear. While global warming is not a problem, the policies intended to prevent it are a disaster.
Human folly is all too common. But in a long life I have never come across anything remotely as bad as the current climate scare.
The government’s COP26 targets are ambitious (and eye-wateringly expensive). Amid the debate, one important question seems to be missing. Are we really facing an existential threat? Or might the climate change ‘crisis’ in fact be quasi-religious hysteria, based on ignorance?
It is true that, since the industrial revolution, when we began to use fossil fuels — first coal, then oil and gas — as our source of energy, this has led to a steady, albeit gradual, increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The know-nothings (notably but by no means exclusively the BBC) customarily refer to this as pollution. In reality, it is the very reverse: so far from carbon dioxide being pollution, it is the stuff of life. It is the food of plants, and without plants there would be little animal life and no human life.
The principal effect of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to stimulate plant growth, known as the fertilisation effect. Careful studies have shown that the planet is indeed becoming greener thanks to increased CO2. And yet we’re told that we need to prevent any further increase in CO2 in order to become ‘green’.
A secondary effect of increased CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is to warm the planet slightly. This is no bad thing: many more people die each year from cold-related illnesses than from heat-related ones. And the warming is very slight indeed. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an offshoot of the United Nations, the Earth is warming at a rate of at most one-sixth of a degree per decade, a barely perceptible amount.
And of course we don’t experience the mean global temperature anyway: we experience the temperature in our own neck of the woods, which varies enormously. Humankind is nothing if not adaptable. For example, the difference between the mean annual temperature in Finland, a cold place, and that in Singapore, a warm place, is some 22 degrees. And both these countries are pretty successful.
The climate hysteria is by no means a harmless folly. The reason the world uses fossil fuels is that they are far and away the cheapest source of large-scale reliable energy. Nuclear power is reliable, but not cheap. Renewables — wind and sun — are not particularly cheap and certainly not reliable (the wind doesn’t always blow, nor does the sun always shine).
The economic cost of abandoning fossil fuels — what is nowadays known as net zero — is massive: even the Treasury admits that it will cost the UK tens of billions of pounds a year. That is why China, by some distance the world’s largest emitter of CO2, while paying lip service to the net-zero target, continues to build new coal-fired power stations hand over fist (and not just in China: it is also building them throughout much of the developing world).
Decarbonisation, in short, would be an unparalleled economic calamity. So how is it that the UK and most of the western world have signed up to it? The answer can only be conjectural. I suggested at the start that the current climate scare is a quasi-religious hysteria. Mankind seems to have a psychological need for a belief system. Traditionally in the West, this has been Christianity; but with the waning place of Christianity in the modern world, climate catastrophism has emerged to take its place.
And needless to say, it is particularly convenient for our political leaders, who will be gone before the full extent of the economic damage caused by the measures they advocate becomes apparent. Meanwhile, whatever errors they may commit in this non-deferential age, they can pass themselves off as saviours of the planet.
But whatever the cause of the climate change madness, the effect is clear. While global warming is not a problem, the policies intended to prevent it are a disaster.
The government’s COP26 targets are ambitious (and eye-wateringly expensive). Amid the debate, one important question seems to be missing. Are we really facing an existential threat? Or might the climate change ‘crisis’ in fact be quasi-religious hysteria, based on ignorance?
It is true that, since the industrial revolution, when we began to use fossil fuels — first coal, then oil and gas — as our source of energy, this has led to a steady, albeit gradual, increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The know-nothings (notably but by no means exclusively the BBC) customarily refer to this as pollution. In reality, it is the very reverse: so far from carbon dioxide being pollution, it is the stuff of life. It is the food of plants, and without plants there would be little animal life and no human life.
The principal effect of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to stimulate plant growth, known as the fertilisation effect. Careful studies have shown that the planet is indeed becoming greener thanks to increased CO2. And yet we’re told that we need to prevent any further increase in CO2 in order to become ‘green’.
A secondary effect of increased CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is to warm the planet slightly. This is no bad thing: many more people die each year from cold-related illnesses than from heat-related ones. And the warming is very slight indeed. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an offshoot of the United Nations, the Earth is warming at a rate of at most one-sixth of a degree per decade, a barely perceptible amount.
And of course we don’t experience the mean global temperature anyway: we experience the temperature in our own neck of the woods, which varies enormously. Humankind is nothing if not adaptable. For example, the difference between the mean annual temperature in Finland, a cold place, and that in Singapore, a warm place, is some 22 degrees. And both these countries are pretty successful.
The climate hysteria is by no means a harmless folly. The reason the world uses fossil fuels is that they are far and away the cheapest source of large-scale reliable energy. Nuclear power is reliable, but not cheap. Renewables — wind and sun — are not particularly cheap and certainly not reliable (the wind doesn’t always blow, nor does the sun always shine).
The economic cost of abandoning fossil fuels — what is nowadays known as net zero — is massive: even the Treasury admits that it will cost the UK tens of billions of pounds a year. That is why China, by some distance the world’s largest emitter of CO2, while paying lip service to the net-zero target, continues to build new coal-fired power stations hand over fist (and not just in China: it is also building them throughout much of the developing world).
Decarbonisation, in short, would be an unparalleled economic calamity. So how is it that the UK and most of the western world have signed up to it? The answer can only be conjectural. I suggested at the start that the current climate scare is a quasi-religious hysteria. Mankind seems to have a psychological need for a belief system. Traditionally in the West, this has been Christianity; but with the waning place of Christianity in the modern world, climate catastrophism has emerged to take its place.
And needless to say, it is particularly convenient for our political leaders, who will be gone before the full extent of the economic damage caused by the measures they advocate becomes apparent. Meanwhile, whatever errors they may commit in this non-deferential age, they can pass themselves off as saviours of the planet.
But whatever the cause of the climate change madness, the effect is clear. While global warming is not a problem, the policies intended to prevent it are a disaster.
3) Matt Ridley: My unexpected lunch with Nigel Lawson – and Prince Philip
The Spectator, 5 April 2023
So it was that on 14 March 2017 we four sat down to a lively lunch in which we discussed environmentalism from several angles. The Duke drank beer, Lord Lawson wine.
The Spectator, 5 April 2023
So it was that on 14 March 2017 we four sat down to a lively lunch in which we discussed environmentalism from several angles. The Duke drank beer, Lord Lawson wine.
When I joined the House of Lords in 2013 I soon realised that, despite its poor reputation, the place contained plenty of wise, quick-witted and courageous minds. None more so than Nigel Lawson who died this week. An intellectual titan who had once almost become a philosophy professor, he was not content to rest on his considerable laurels as a politician and seemed unafraid to challenge any conventional wisdom to check if it deserved that status.
But it was a lunch in 2017 with Lord Lawson and two ninety-somethings who are also now dead that remains probably the most sparkling memory of my nine years as a member of the Lords. It came about thus.
In 2016, Lord Lawson asked me to give the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s annual lecture. In it I argued, among other things, that, on the whole, the good effects of carbon-dioxide-induced global greening were being understated and the bad effects of carbon-dioxide-induced global warming were being overstated. Nigel chaired a lively discussion afterwards with characteristic verve.
Shortly afterwards he told me he had sent a copy of my lecture to the Duke of Edinburgh and was surprised to have had almost by return of post a lengthy response, in which Prince Philip agreed with some of the points I had made but expressed pessimism about population growth. Nigel, never one for beating about the bush, had drafted a response, which he showed me, and which said – I exaggerate but not by much – ‘Matt’s right and you’re wrong’.
I suggested a rewrite with a good deal of oily stuff about how honoured we both were that HRH had taken the trouble to read the lecture, etc, etc. Nigel reluctantly agreed though I could tell such flattery did not come naturally to him. And why not, I suggested, invite the Duke to lunch to discuss the matter? He was highly unlikely to accept.
A few days later Prince Philip replied, suggesting a date for this lunch. We then had the problem of where to hold it. We could hardly bring him into the peers’ dining room or the terrace canteen. We approached Black Rod and the Lord Speaker, who agreed to make a room available upstairs and send food up. To make four I suggested we invite James Lovelock, the inventor and author of the Gaia hypothesis, a chum of Lawson’s.
So it was that on 14 March 2017 we four sat down to a lively lunch in which we discussed environmentalism from several angles. The Duke drank beer, Lord Lawson wine.
Prince Philip, the pioneering conservationist, was 95; Jim Lovelock, the pioneering inventor, was 97; and Nigel Lawson, the pioneering economist, was 86. I was a non-pioneering stripling of 58. I wish I could recall more of what was said but I know that wind farms came in for a good deal of stick and nuclear power plenty of carrot. And I remember a few rounds of no-holds-barred discussion about population, climate and whether modern environmentalism was exaggerating problems and ignoring solutions to the extent that it might in itself be a threat to the planet.
I then made the mistake of saying, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you three are a very good advertisement for old age’. At which they all rounded on me and told me I did not know what I was talking about, and it was horrid being old, or words to that effect.
I miss all three of them.
But it was a lunch in 2017 with Lord Lawson and two ninety-somethings who are also now dead that remains probably the most sparkling memory of my nine years as a member of the Lords. It came about thus.
In 2016, Lord Lawson asked me to give the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s annual lecture. In it I argued, among other things, that, on the whole, the good effects of carbon-dioxide-induced global greening were being understated and the bad effects of carbon-dioxide-induced global warming were being overstated. Nigel chaired a lively discussion afterwards with characteristic verve.
Shortly afterwards he told me he had sent a copy of my lecture to the Duke of Edinburgh and was surprised to have had almost by return of post a lengthy response, in which Prince Philip agreed with some of the points I had made but expressed pessimism about population growth. Nigel, never one for beating about the bush, had drafted a response, which he showed me, and which said – I exaggerate but not by much – ‘Matt’s right and you’re wrong’.
I suggested a rewrite with a good deal of oily stuff about how honoured we both were that HRH had taken the trouble to read the lecture, etc, etc. Nigel reluctantly agreed though I could tell such flattery did not come naturally to him. And why not, I suggested, invite the Duke to lunch to discuss the matter? He was highly unlikely to accept.
A few days later Prince Philip replied, suggesting a date for this lunch. We then had the problem of where to hold it. We could hardly bring him into the peers’ dining room or the terrace canteen. We approached Black Rod and the Lord Speaker, who agreed to make a room available upstairs and send food up. To make four I suggested we invite James Lovelock, the inventor and author of the Gaia hypothesis, a chum of Lawson’s.
So it was that on 14 March 2017 we four sat down to a lively lunch in which we discussed environmentalism from several angles. The Duke drank beer, Lord Lawson wine.
Prince Philip, the pioneering conservationist, was 95; Jim Lovelock, the pioneering inventor, was 97; and Nigel Lawson, the pioneering economist, was 86. I was a non-pioneering stripling of 58. I wish I could recall more of what was said but I know that wind farms came in for a good deal of stick and nuclear power plenty of carrot. And I remember a few rounds of no-holds-barred discussion about population, climate and whether modern environmentalism was exaggerating problems and ignoring solutions to the extent that it might in itself be a threat to the planet.
I then made the mistake of saying, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you three are a very good advertisement for old age’. At which they all rounded on me and told me I did not know what I was talking about, and it was horrid being old, or words to that effect.
I miss all three of them.
4) WSJ: Nigel Lawson’s lesson for today’s pessimists
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 4 April 2023
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 4 April 2023
As Margaret Thatcher’s wing man, he helped revive Britain’s economy.
Nigel Lawson, applauded by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at the end of his speech during the Conservative Party's annual conference on October 13, 1988. PHOTO: PA/ZUMA PRESS
It’s easy to despair at the inflation and economic malaise afflicting the West these days, but our problems are solvable, as they were a half century ago. One of those crucial problem solvers was British politician Nigel Lawson, who died this week at age 91.
Born in North London in 1932, Lawson began his career as a financial journalist before entering politics in the 1970s. That decade was even more miserable in the United Kingdom than it was in the U.S. By the time Margaret Thatcher led the Tories into office in May 1979, inflation was raging and the country had been wracked by strikes in its “winter of discontent” in 1978-1979. Lawson entered Thatcher’s administration in a junior role and was appointed Energy Secretary in 1981.
He made his historic mark as Chancellor of the Exchequer starting in 1983. He’s best known for his tax reforms, which reduced the top personal income-tax rate to 40% from 60% and brought the top corporate rate to 35% from a 1970s high of 52%. He also was a steward of the Thatcher administration’s privatizations of large state-owned firms and the “Big Bang” financial reforms that would transform London into a global financial center.
The central insight was that by freeing entrepreneurship from regulatory shackles and then allowing entrepreneurs to keep more of the fruits of their labors, governments could boost prosperity. It worked, and the mid-1980s became a boom era for Britain.
Critics blamed Lawson’s tax policies for stoking another bout of inflation in the late 1980s. Conservatives, including Thatcher, criticized him for supporting a policy of stabilizing the pound’s exchange rate with other European currencies. That disagreement led him to leave her cabinet in 1989, and the exchange-rate strategy fell apart when Britain belatedly joined a formal exchange bloc with Europe in 1990 only to tumble out two years later.
Those errors weren’t Lawson’s. Despite the enormous progress of the Thatcher years, Britain in the late 1980s was (and still is) a more heavily regulated, higher-tax economy than the U.S. The real lesson is that the more entrenched socialism becomes, the more painful it is to dislodge. Britain continues to pay the price for its many post-World War II mistakes with lower investment, lower productivity growth and chronically higher inflation than elsewhere. Lawson tried his best to fix it.
In his later years, Lawson made another contribution by injecting much-needed common sense into debates over climate policy by appealing to facts and reason. His message throughout his career was that conservatives should focus on prosperity and resist the distraction of trendy theories. It’s a good lesson for today’s conservative pessimists.
5) Kathy Gyngell: Nigel Lawson, the sceptic hero of our times
The Conservative Woman, 4 April 2023
It is a mark of this extraordinary man that he walked tall and never let the Maoist treatment of him deter him from his mission to bring real science back to the debate.
Nigel Lawson, applauded by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at the end of his speech during the Conservative Party's annual conference on October 13, 1988. PHOTO: PA/ZUMA PRESS
It’s easy to despair at the inflation and economic malaise afflicting the West these days, but our problems are solvable, as they were a half century ago. One of those crucial problem solvers was British politician Nigel Lawson, who died this week at age 91.
Born in North London in 1932, Lawson began his career as a financial journalist before entering politics in the 1970s. That decade was even more miserable in the United Kingdom than it was in the U.S. By the time Margaret Thatcher led the Tories into office in May 1979, inflation was raging and the country had been wracked by strikes in its “winter of discontent” in 1978-1979. Lawson entered Thatcher’s administration in a junior role and was appointed Energy Secretary in 1981.
He made his historic mark as Chancellor of the Exchequer starting in 1983. He’s best known for his tax reforms, which reduced the top personal income-tax rate to 40% from 60% and brought the top corporate rate to 35% from a 1970s high of 52%. He also was a steward of the Thatcher administration’s privatizations of large state-owned firms and the “Big Bang” financial reforms that would transform London into a global financial center.
The central insight was that by freeing entrepreneurship from regulatory shackles and then allowing entrepreneurs to keep more of the fruits of their labors, governments could boost prosperity. It worked, and the mid-1980s became a boom era for Britain.
Critics blamed Lawson’s tax policies for stoking another bout of inflation in the late 1980s. Conservatives, including Thatcher, criticized him for supporting a policy of stabilizing the pound’s exchange rate with other European currencies. That disagreement led him to leave her cabinet in 1989, and the exchange-rate strategy fell apart when Britain belatedly joined a formal exchange bloc with Europe in 1990 only to tumble out two years later.
Those errors weren’t Lawson’s. Despite the enormous progress of the Thatcher years, Britain in the late 1980s was (and still is) a more heavily regulated, higher-tax economy than the U.S. The real lesson is that the more entrenched socialism becomes, the more painful it is to dislodge. Britain continues to pay the price for its many post-World War II mistakes with lower investment, lower productivity growth and chronically higher inflation than elsewhere. Lawson tried his best to fix it.
In his later years, Lawson made another contribution by injecting much-needed common sense into debates over climate policy by appealing to facts and reason. His message throughout his career was that conservatives should focus on prosperity and resist the distraction of trendy theories. It’s a good lesson for today’s conservative pessimists.
5) Kathy Gyngell: Nigel Lawson, the sceptic hero of our times
The Conservative Woman, 4 April 2023
It is a mark of this extraordinary man that he walked tall and never let the Maoist treatment of him deter him from his mission to bring real science back to the debate.
THE news of Lord Lawson’s death last night filled me with deep sadness. He was one of the most distinguished politicians of an era with which, with his death, we lose the final connection. This makes his passing one of true historical note – the last of the principled Conservatives, a remarkable politician driven by an intelligence and commitment to the truth that continued beyond his time in office into this century and his enormously significant and courageous challenge to modern climate ideology.
Without him, arguably, there would have been no public questioning of the new religion masked as science. His determination to set up the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2009 was an appeal to reason, contrary to the naysayers of the London School of Economics and the rest of the establishment left.
Lord Lawson was a threat to the establishment. He broke ranks and his appeal to scientists, engineers and economists brought a formidable array of brains and manpower into the group he set up under the direction of Dr Benny Peiser. I was honoured to be invited to be a Trustee a few years ago.
The extent of the threat that Lawson personally was to the extraordinarily influential billionaire-funded climate movement that since the 1990s has captured most governments, institutions and corporations (including the Bank of England, and notably Ofcom) can be measured by the avidity of his public demonising and the pillorying of him as a ‘climate denier’. Not only was he banned from the BBC (bringing back memories of Lord Reith’s lengthy ban on Churchill) but so was anyone else with the temerity to question the new orthodoxy. The science was settled, the BBC decided in 2018.
Lord Lawson withstood constant abuse from the BBC that we began reporting in 2014. It culminated in Ofcom’s first impartiality ruling against the BBC. Why? Because the BBC hadn’t come down hard enough on Lord Lawson’s questioning of the received, unscientific wisdom. The BBC’s vilification of him goes back years, as David Keighley reported here, and on this site here and here and here again in 2018.
He was, as David pointed out, at the fulcrum of the BBC’s biased approach. They wanted Lawson’s head on a platter. By damning the BBC for even giving airtime to Lord Lawson, Ofcom delivered it to them.
It is a mark of this extraordinary man that he walked tall and never let the Maoist treatment of him deter him from his mission to bring real science back to the debate. It was not a way to court popularity with the establishment, the reverse in fact. In his latter years his deeply morally grounded position set him apart.
He was a man prepared to defy the groupthink regardless of the cost to him. His so-called Conservative successors should look at his career and hang their heads in shame. His is the legacy to be proud of: he never forgot the value of freedom of speech and independence of thought and he showed us as individuals what we must be prepared to do to defend it.
There will, I hope, be many more admiring words written about him. He will deserve them all.
6) Tim Newark: If only the Tories had followed Nigel Lawson's Thatcherite common senseWithout him, arguably, there would have been no public questioning of the new religion masked as science. His determination to set up the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2009 was an appeal to reason, contrary to the naysayers of the London School of Economics and the rest of the establishment left.
Lord Lawson was a threat to the establishment. He broke ranks and his appeal to scientists, engineers and economists brought a formidable array of brains and manpower into the group he set up under the direction of Dr Benny Peiser. I was honoured to be invited to be a Trustee a few years ago.
The extent of the threat that Lawson personally was to the extraordinarily influential billionaire-funded climate movement that since the 1990s has captured most governments, institutions and corporations (including the Bank of England, and notably Ofcom) can be measured by the avidity of his public demonising and the pillorying of him as a ‘climate denier’. Not only was he banned from the BBC (bringing back memories of Lord Reith’s lengthy ban on Churchill) but so was anyone else with the temerity to question the new orthodoxy. The science was settled, the BBC decided in 2018.
Lord Lawson withstood constant abuse from the BBC that we began reporting in 2014. It culminated in Ofcom’s first impartiality ruling against the BBC. Why? Because the BBC hadn’t come down hard enough on Lord Lawson’s questioning of the received, unscientific wisdom. The BBC’s vilification of him goes back years, as David Keighley reported here, and on this site here and here and here again in 2018.
He was, as David pointed out, at the fulcrum of the BBC’s biased approach. They wanted Lawson’s head on a platter. By damning the BBC for even giving airtime to Lord Lawson, Ofcom delivered it to them.
It is a mark of this extraordinary man that he walked tall and never let the Maoist treatment of him deter him from his mission to bring real science back to the debate. It was not a way to court popularity with the establishment, the reverse in fact. In his latter years his deeply morally grounded position set him apart.
He was a man prepared to defy the groupthink regardless of the cost to him. His so-called Conservative successors should look at his career and hang their heads in shame. His is the legacy to be proud of: he never forgot the value of freedom of speech and independence of thought and he showed us as individuals what we must be prepared to do to defend it.
There will, I hope, be many more admiring words written about him. He will deserve them all.
Daily Express, 4 April 2023
Boris Johnson called Nigel Lawson 'a giant' in his tribute to him. If only he and his current Tory colleagues had followed his Thatcherite common sense, they could have been giants too.
Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, who died this week at the age of 91, presided over a period in Britain’s history that gave us greater freedom and prosperity as a result of reducing the role the Government has in our lives. He made popular capitalism a reality and continued his campaigning for a prosperous UK well into his 80s.
At the height of the 1980s, Lord Lawson was entrusted with delivering Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s vision of Britain as a dynamic modern economy that rewarded hard work and rolled back the socialist state.
Becoming Chancellor in 1983, he cut the top rate of income tax from 60 percent to 40 percent and the basic rate from 30 percent to 25 percent.
He launched popular capitalism by offering shares to everyone by privatising gas, telecoms and other state-owned utilities. I still remember the “Tell Sid” adverts encouraging people to buy gas shares.
He powered up the financial services sector with his Big Bang of deregulation, making the City of London an internationally attractive business capital that could compete with New York.
His brand of go-go capitalism revived the reputation of Britain following its socialist slump in the 1970s and generated post-war record economic growth of 5 percent in the late 1980s, which halved unemployment from 3 million to 1.6 million, the lowest for a decade. It became known as the “Lawson Boom.”
Comedian Harry Enfield caricatured the subsequent rise in working-class prosperity, helped enormously by the Right to Buy council housing revolution, with his “Loadsamoney” decorator brandishing fistfuls of cash.
Emerging out of the declinism of the 1970s, the revival of London with its gleaming skyscrapers and glamorous restaurants was a wonder to behold. Britain could hold its head up again.
However, all was not well within the dynamic team at the top of the Tory party. Lawson disagreed with Thatcher’s antipathy towards the EU and wanted to shadow the Deutschmark by keeping interest rates low, but this triggered a bout of inflation that brought the economy down to earth in the 1991 recession.
Before becoming Chancellor, Lawson was appointed Secretary of State for Energy and it was his responsibility to prepare for the coal miners’ strike by stockpiling necessary energy. The bitter conflict was a key element in Thatcher’s taming of the radical trade unionism that had blighted the previous decade.
The downside of this brutal battle was the deindustrialisation of Britain in a dash towards the service economy, with hundreds of jobless, dislocated working-class communities in the north of the country suffering the most.
A heritage of antipathy that was only reversed by Boris Johnson’s 2019 election win with his optimistic pledge of Get Brexit Done and levelling up. Failure to deliver on this front will see many Red Wall Tory working-class voters returning to Labour.
Lawson once defined Thatcherism as a “mixture of free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, Victorian values (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism.”
Many top Tories pay lip service to this successful political recipe but do little to use their current majority to pursue it. Lawson helped enact much of this programme and the brilliance of the 1980s British economic revival will remain his greatest legacy.
It is a measure of how much Lawson cared about the fate of the UK that, even well into his 80s, he was chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank dedicated to challenging the extreme aspects of climate change activism.
“Net zero is a disastrous solution to a non-existent problem,” he wrote in 2021. “The reason the world uses fossil fuels is that they are far and away the cheapest source of large-scale reliable energy… The economic cost of abandoning fossil fuels – what is nowadays known as net zero – is massive: even the Treasury admits that it will cost the UK tens of billions of pounds a year.”
It is a clear warning from a man who once saved Britain from economic ruin and wanted to protect it from another folly that will only make the poor poorer and do little to make us a prosperous and free country.
“He was a giant,” says Boris Johnson in his tribute to him. If only he and his current Tory colleagues had followed his Thatcherite common sense, they could have been giants too.
At the height of the 1980s, Lord Lawson was entrusted with delivering Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s vision of Britain as a dynamic modern economy that rewarded hard work and rolled back the socialist state.
Becoming Chancellor in 1983, he cut the top rate of income tax from 60 percent to 40 percent and the basic rate from 30 percent to 25 percent.
He launched popular capitalism by offering shares to everyone by privatising gas, telecoms and other state-owned utilities. I still remember the “Tell Sid” adverts encouraging people to buy gas shares.
He powered up the financial services sector with his Big Bang of deregulation, making the City of London an internationally attractive business capital that could compete with New York.
His brand of go-go capitalism revived the reputation of Britain following its socialist slump in the 1970s and generated post-war record economic growth of 5 percent in the late 1980s, which halved unemployment from 3 million to 1.6 million, the lowest for a decade. It became known as the “Lawson Boom.”
Comedian Harry Enfield caricatured the subsequent rise in working-class prosperity, helped enormously by the Right to Buy council housing revolution, with his “Loadsamoney” decorator brandishing fistfuls of cash.
Emerging out of the declinism of the 1970s, the revival of London with its gleaming skyscrapers and glamorous restaurants was a wonder to behold. Britain could hold its head up again.
However, all was not well within the dynamic team at the top of the Tory party. Lawson disagreed with Thatcher’s antipathy towards the EU and wanted to shadow the Deutschmark by keeping interest rates low, but this triggered a bout of inflation that brought the economy down to earth in the 1991 recession.
Before becoming Chancellor, Lawson was appointed Secretary of State for Energy and it was his responsibility to prepare for the coal miners’ strike by stockpiling necessary energy. The bitter conflict was a key element in Thatcher’s taming of the radical trade unionism that had blighted the previous decade.
The downside of this brutal battle was the deindustrialisation of Britain in a dash towards the service economy, with hundreds of jobless, dislocated working-class communities in the north of the country suffering the most.
A heritage of antipathy that was only reversed by Boris Johnson’s 2019 election win with his optimistic pledge of Get Brexit Done and levelling up. Failure to deliver on this front will see many Red Wall Tory working-class voters returning to Labour.
Lawson once defined Thatcherism as a “mixture of free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, Victorian values (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism.”
Many top Tories pay lip service to this successful political recipe but do little to use their current majority to pursue it. Lawson helped enact much of this programme and the brilliance of the 1980s British economic revival will remain his greatest legacy.
It is a measure of how much Lawson cared about the fate of the UK that, even well into his 80s, he was chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank dedicated to challenging the extreme aspects of climate change activism.
“Net zero is a disastrous solution to a non-existent problem,” he wrote in 2021. “The reason the world uses fossil fuels is that they are far and away the cheapest source of large-scale reliable energy… The economic cost of abandoning fossil fuels – what is nowadays known as net zero – is massive: even the Treasury admits that it will cost the UK tens of billions of pounds a year.”
It is a clear warning from a man who once saved Britain from economic ruin and wanted to protect it from another folly that will only make the poor poorer and do little to make us a prosperous and free country.
“He was a giant,” says Boris Johnson in his tribute to him. If only he and his current Tory colleagues had followed his Thatcherite common sense, they could have been giants too.
7) Ross Clark: Nigel Lawson’s legacy is one of British transformation
The Spectator, 4 April 2023
The sadness is that by the time of Lord Lawson’s death, much of reform he initiated had been reversed, much to the detriment of economic growth and Britain’s standing in the world.
The path from the editor’s chair at The Spectator to 11 Downing Street was not untrodden when Mrs Thatcher asked Nigel Lawson to replace Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor of the Exchequer after the 1983 general election. Iain Macleod had made the same journey in 1970. But whereas Macleod died 13 days into the job, Lawson went on to become Britain’s most significant post-war chancellor, and the architect of high Thatcherism.
You have to be at least 50 now to remember the stupor in which the British economy lay when Lawson took office. The statist economy of the 1970s, with its wretched labour disputes and under-performing nationalised industries had still not been fully dismantled. It is a tribute to Lawson that, when he left office in 1989 after six and a half years running the economy, Britain had been reborn as an enterprise economy.
We could do dearly now with the spirit of enterprise which Lawson unleashed upon an initially reluctant Britain
Unemployment had plunged by a million, and the economy was growing by five per cent a year – a rate we now associate more with developing economies such as China. Moreover, growth hadn’t been bought with high levels of public spending, as many economists seem now to think is essential: the government was running a surplus of £4.1 billion.
None of this happened by accident. It happened because Lawson effected a large shift towards private capital and private enterprise. Britons were incentivised once again to start businesses, to take financial risks and, for the first time in many cases, to invest directly in the stock market.
It was Lawson who put the Laffer Curve into action in Britain. Under him, tax ceased to be confiscatory. He reduced the basic rate of income tax from 30 per cent to 25 per cent and the upper rate from 60 per cent to 40 per cent, and he also abolished surcharges which, in Labour’s time, had created an effective marginal tax rate of 98 per cent for some.
The Thatcher privatisations were criticised by many for selling off the family silver too cheaply, but that misses the point. What was being sold was, indeed, public property, but the public was being invited to invest in it at what, in most cases (though not all), turned out to be attractive prices.
In the one case where the investment initially went badly wrong – BP, whose floatation coincided with the 1987 stock market crash – Lawson devised a scheme to buy back shares from disgruntled private shareholders, limiting their loss. Owning shares became, for the first time, a mass-participation sport. Today’s Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) can be traced to the Personal Equity Plans (PEPs) that Lawson introduced. The only regret is that too many people offloaded their shares for a quick profit rather than holding them as long-term investments.
Yet Lawson’s ‘popular capitalism’ – as it was called at the time – was not supported by public debt, Liz Truss take note. Under Lawson’s command, sound public finances came first, and only when the government finances were in balance were taxes cut.
Lawson’s time was not without errors, however. By 1988, the economy was overheating thanks to a boom in private credit, and inflation was up to 8 per cent. His biggest mistakes were to cut interest rates in 1988 when he should have raised them and to announce a change in the rules over the tax treatment of mortgage repayments several months before they took effect.
The result was a mad rush to beat the deadline, pouring fuel on the fire of an already booming property market, and precipitating its eventual collapse. The housing crash, which left millions in ‘negative equity’, owing more on their mortgage than their home was worth – undermined the faith of many homeowners in capitalism; although far greater profits for property investors lay in the future.
Lawson not only had the right financial instincts, he could be astute politically, too, sometimes more so than his boss. It was thanks to him, in his role as energy secretary prior to becoming chancellor, that power stations were stocked with coal well ahead of the government’s clash with Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers. The country managed to get through an 11 month strike without the lights going out, as they had done in the 1970s.
The former chancellor also opposed the poll tax, which was eventually to bring down Mrs Thatcher. His support for Britain joining the Exchange Rate mechanism, which pegged sterling to a narrow range of the Deutschmark, was less successful. A sceptical Thatcher gave into the demands to join – but Britain’s membership kept interest rates artificially high, prolonging the early 1990s recession.
The crisis of Black Wednesday tarnished the reputation of the Thatcher government, and Lawson’s role within it, allowing Gordon Brown to paint the Conservatives as the party of boom and bust. But we could do dearly now with the spirit of enterprise which Lawson unleashed upon an initially reluctant Britain – and which transformed Britain from basket case to a magnet for investment. The sadness is that by the time of Lord Lawson’s death, much of reform he initiated had been reversed, much to the detriment of economic growth and Britain’s standing in the world.
The Spectator, 4 April 2023
The sadness is that by the time of Lord Lawson’s death, much of reform he initiated had been reversed, much to the detriment of economic growth and Britain’s standing in the world.
The path from the editor’s chair at The Spectator to 11 Downing Street was not untrodden when Mrs Thatcher asked Nigel Lawson to replace Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor of the Exchequer after the 1983 general election. Iain Macleod had made the same journey in 1970. But whereas Macleod died 13 days into the job, Lawson went on to become Britain’s most significant post-war chancellor, and the architect of high Thatcherism.
You have to be at least 50 now to remember the stupor in which the British economy lay when Lawson took office. The statist economy of the 1970s, with its wretched labour disputes and under-performing nationalised industries had still not been fully dismantled. It is a tribute to Lawson that, when he left office in 1989 after six and a half years running the economy, Britain had been reborn as an enterprise economy.
We could do dearly now with the spirit of enterprise which Lawson unleashed upon an initially reluctant Britain
Unemployment had plunged by a million, and the economy was growing by five per cent a year – a rate we now associate more with developing economies such as China. Moreover, growth hadn’t been bought with high levels of public spending, as many economists seem now to think is essential: the government was running a surplus of £4.1 billion.
None of this happened by accident. It happened because Lawson effected a large shift towards private capital and private enterprise. Britons were incentivised once again to start businesses, to take financial risks and, for the first time in many cases, to invest directly in the stock market.
It was Lawson who put the Laffer Curve into action in Britain. Under him, tax ceased to be confiscatory. He reduced the basic rate of income tax from 30 per cent to 25 per cent and the upper rate from 60 per cent to 40 per cent, and he also abolished surcharges which, in Labour’s time, had created an effective marginal tax rate of 98 per cent for some.
The Thatcher privatisations were criticised by many for selling off the family silver too cheaply, but that misses the point. What was being sold was, indeed, public property, but the public was being invited to invest in it at what, in most cases (though not all), turned out to be attractive prices.
In the one case where the investment initially went badly wrong – BP, whose floatation coincided with the 1987 stock market crash – Lawson devised a scheme to buy back shares from disgruntled private shareholders, limiting their loss. Owning shares became, for the first time, a mass-participation sport. Today’s Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) can be traced to the Personal Equity Plans (PEPs) that Lawson introduced. The only regret is that too many people offloaded their shares for a quick profit rather than holding them as long-term investments.
Yet Lawson’s ‘popular capitalism’ – as it was called at the time – was not supported by public debt, Liz Truss take note. Under Lawson’s command, sound public finances came first, and only when the government finances were in balance were taxes cut.
Lawson’s time was not without errors, however. By 1988, the economy was overheating thanks to a boom in private credit, and inflation was up to 8 per cent. His biggest mistakes were to cut interest rates in 1988 when he should have raised them and to announce a change in the rules over the tax treatment of mortgage repayments several months before they took effect.
The result was a mad rush to beat the deadline, pouring fuel on the fire of an already booming property market, and precipitating its eventual collapse. The housing crash, which left millions in ‘negative equity’, owing more on their mortgage than their home was worth – undermined the faith of many homeowners in capitalism; although far greater profits for property investors lay in the future.
Lawson not only had the right financial instincts, he could be astute politically, too, sometimes more so than his boss. It was thanks to him, in his role as energy secretary prior to becoming chancellor, that power stations were stocked with coal well ahead of the government’s clash with Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers. The country managed to get through an 11 month strike without the lights going out, as they had done in the 1970s.
The former chancellor also opposed the poll tax, which was eventually to bring down Mrs Thatcher. His support for Britain joining the Exchange Rate mechanism, which pegged sterling to a narrow range of the Deutschmark, was less successful. A sceptical Thatcher gave into the demands to join – but Britain’s membership kept interest rates artificially high, prolonging the early 1990s recession.
The crisis of Black Wednesday tarnished the reputation of the Thatcher government, and Lawson’s role within it, allowing Gordon Brown to paint the Conservatives as the party of boom and bust. But we could do dearly now with the spirit of enterprise which Lawson unleashed upon an initially reluctant Britain – and which transformed Britain from basket case to a magnet for investment. The sadness is that by the time of Lord Lawson’s death, much of reform he initiated had been reversed, much to the detriment of economic growth and Britain’s standing in the world.
8) Nigel Lawson: A brilliant chancellor who was in many ways the architect of Thatcherism
The Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2023
By Charles Moore
He showed a mastery of his brief better than anyone since Gladstone, while his leadership example impressed those who followed him
The Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2023
By Charles Moore
He showed a mastery of his brief better than anyone since Gladstone, while his leadership example impressed those who followed him
Nigel Lawson was “unassailable”. That is what Mrs Thatcher kept saying on television just after he had resigned from her Cabinet in 1989. She was trying to express how much he had meant to her government and to conceal how deeply they had come to disagree.
Lawson was in many ways the economic architect of Thatcherism and his own economic thinking was more sophisticated than Mrs Thatcher’s. It was he, when a relatively junior minister, who had formulated the Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) which guided her battle against inflation.
It was he, as her Chancellor of the Exchequer from her landslide second general election victory in 1983, who reaped the fruits of the first-term prudence and toughness. The economy recovered and Lawson’s tax reforms created greater freedom for business. The budget deficit of 3.7 per cent of GDP in 1983 had become a substantial budget surplus by the time he resigned six years later. His expansionism helped secure the Conservatives’ third consecutive election victory in 1987.
His 1988 Budget the following year, which cut the basic rate of income tax to 25 per cent and reduced the top rate from 60 per cent to 40 per cent, seemed at the time to have settled the argument against socialism, although it later turned out to have been a bit too much of a good thing, stoking the return of inflation and the “Lawson boom”. It was also Lawson, more than anyone else, who presided over privatisation, making it Britain’s most powerful global policy export.
Those who did not understand the man saw him as too much the economic technician, but in fact he was highly political, calculating, usually rightly, how to relate economic policy to the electoral cycle. After the economic failures of the 1970s, Lawson’s confidence was infectious with the electorate.
Although quite ideologically driven, he was also practical. He saw the severe flaws in the plans for the poll tax and was the only Cabinet minister brave enough to tell Mrs Thatcher what they were. For many years, the mutual respect between Lawson and Mrs Thatcher was genuine, and the unity between No 11 and No 11 Downing Street did indeed seem unassailable.
But their differences grew. By the mid-1980s, Lawson came to doubt his own mechanisms for controlling the money supply. A bit of an alchemist, he sought a magic formula, and thought one could be found in joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (the ERM). Mrs Thatcher always vehemently, though semi-privately, opposed Britain’s ERM entry. So Lawson tried to get round her by “shadowing the Deutschmark” without telling her. When she found out, she was furious and felt deceived.
Lawson himself was quite eurosceptic and did not want the pound to be subsumed into the single currency (the euro, as it eventually became) of which the ERM was the intended forerunner, but Mrs Thatcher was intensely suspicious of the direction of travel. With Geoffrey Howe, her euro-enthusiastic foreign secretary, whom Mrs Thatcher had come to dislike, Lawson formed a close bond over the ERM. In the summer of 1989, the two men tried to bounce her into ERM membership - the “Madrid ambush”. She faced them down and never forgave either.
Lawson resigned in October, complaining of interference from her economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters. She had demoted Howe a few weeks earlier. All this sowed the seeds of her fall the following year.
Mrs Thatcher’s eventual assessment of Lawson was that, although he was brilliant, he was also “a gambler”, and this frightened her.
Lawson was indeed a brilliant man, with a mastery of his subject greater than any chancellor since Gladstone. He seemed – and sometimes was – arrogant, but he had charm and humour too. He possessed the inquiring and independent mind of a true intellectual, with courage to match. In his post-office years, he devoted great energy to the unpopular but important task of questioning orthodoxies about climate change. His memoirs are the fullest account of the issues confronting government in that dramatic era. In office, he had grown too fat. Out of it, he slimmed with amazing success and wrote a bestseller about it.
Nigel Lawson’s economic innovation and leadership example impressed those who followed after him, including Rishi Sunak, who keeps a framed photograph of him in his office.
Lawson was in many ways the economic architect of Thatcherism and his own economic thinking was more sophisticated than Mrs Thatcher’s. It was he, when a relatively junior minister, who had formulated the Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) which guided her battle against inflation.
It was he, as her Chancellor of the Exchequer from her landslide second general election victory in 1983, who reaped the fruits of the first-term prudence and toughness. The economy recovered and Lawson’s tax reforms created greater freedom for business. The budget deficit of 3.7 per cent of GDP in 1983 had become a substantial budget surplus by the time he resigned six years later. His expansionism helped secure the Conservatives’ third consecutive election victory in 1987.
His 1988 Budget the following year, which cut the basic rate of income tax to 25 per cent and reduced the top rate from 60 per cent to 40 per cent, seemed at the time to have settled the argument against socialism, although it later turned out to have been a bit too much of a good thing, stoking the return of inflation and the “Lawson boom”. It was also Lawson, more than anyone else, who presided over privatisation, making it Britain’s most powerful global policy export.
Those who did not understand the man saw him as too much the economic technician, but in fact he was highly political, calculating, usually rightly, how to relate economic policy to the electoral cycle. After the economic failures of the 1970s, Lawson’s confidence was infectious with the electorate.
Although quite ideologically driven, he was also practical. He saw the severe flaws in the plans for the poll tax and was the only Cabinet minister brave enough to tell Mrs Thatcher what they were. For many years, the mutual respect between Lawson and Mrs Thatcher was genuine, and the unity between No 11 and No 11 Downing Street did indeed seem unassailable.
But their differences grew. By the mid-1980s, Lawson came to doubt his own mechanisms for controlling the money supply. A bit of an alchemist, he sought a magic formula, and thought one could be found in joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (the ERM). Mrs Thatcher always vehemently, though semi-privately, opposed Britain’s ERM entry. So Lawson tried to get round her by “shadowing the Deutschmark” without telling her. When she found out, she was furious and felt deceived.
Lawson himself was quite eurosceptic and did not want the pound to be subsumed into the single currency (the euro, as it eventually became) of which the ERM was the intended forerunner, but Mrs Thatcher was intensely suspicious of the direction of travel. With Geoffrey Howe, her euro-enthusiastic foreign secretary, whom Mrs Thatcher had come to dislike, Lawson formed a close bond over the ERM. In the summer of 1989, the two men tried to bounce her into ERM membership - the “Madrid ambush”. She faced them down and never forgave either.
Lawson resigned in October, complaining of interference from her economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters. She had demoted Howe a few weeks earlier. All this sowed the seeds of her fall the following year.
Mrs Thatcher’s eventual assessment of Lawson was that, although he was brilliant, he was also “a gambler”, and this frightened her.
Lawson was indeed a brilliant man, with a mastery of his subject greater than any chancellor since Gladstone. He seemed – and sometimes was – arrogant, but he had charm and humour too. He possessed the inquiring and independent mind of a true intellectual, with courage to match. In his post-office years, he devoted great energy to the unpopular but important task of questioning orthodoxies about climate change. His memoirs are the fullest account of the issues confronting government in that dramatic era. In office, he had grown too fat. Out of it, he slimmed with amazing success and wrote a bestseller about it.
Nigel Lawson’s economic innovation and leadership example impressed those who followed after him, including Rishi Sunak, who keeps a framed photograph of him in his office.
9) Peter Lilley: Nigel Lawson was, like me, a British Gaullist who understood Brexit was necessary
The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2023
They were the power couple who changed the fortunes of this country and were admired across the world: Nigel Lawson who died this week and Margaret Thatcher who died 10 years ago this month.
The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2023
They were the power couple who changed the fortunes of this country and were admired across the world: Nigel Lawson who died this week and Margaret Thatcher who died 10 years ago this month.
Nigel provided the intellectual heft and economic expertise to what became known as Thatcherism. Margaret – while sharing his economic principles – gave not just her name but the leadership and moral purpose. Why did they fall out?
When an overtly well-matched couple splits up it often mystifies as well as pains friends devoted to both. That was certainly how I felt when Nigel resigned as Margaret’s Chancellor. Having been researcher and speechwriter for both before entering parliament, then becoming Nigel’s PPS and later Economic Secretary to the Treasury, I had assumed that they were inseparable.
What made the rupture particularly incomprehensible was that it was about a European issue – whether to enter the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). People assumed that meant Nigel was then a Europhile. As a result, they were astonished when he not only endorsed Brexit but chaired the Leave campaign.
In fact, he was always (like me) a ‘British Gaullist’: a useful label for someone who loves European culture (Nigel lived in France until recently) and wants the maximum trade and cooperation with our European neighbours, but believes that sovereignty – the power to make our own laws – is paramount. I recently found an article I cut out from the Financial Times in 1966 titled “At Last a Europe worth joining” by a journalist called Nigel Lawson. It welcomed President de Gaulle’s success in winning the Luxembourg Compromise giving member states a veto - meaning Europe could develop as co-operating independent nations rather than a supranational authority.
To Lawson, ERM membership was a discipline to control inflation. He had found money supply targets too wayward. He also believed that within the ERM it would be easier to fend off plans for a Single Currency. By contrast, Thatcher worried that it would take Britain nearer that objective to which she was equally opposed. She was also persuaded by Alan Walters that the ERM would create perverse incentives exacerbating the inflation/deflation cycle.
So, the Lawson and Thatcher row was not about different enthusiasm for European integration – both were against (unlike Geoffrey Howe). It was about tactics of thwarting the planned Single Currency and whether fixed exchange rates help control inflation. Unusually, though Lawson might have been correct about tactics, Thatcher was proved right on the economics.
Unfortunately, Lawson upset Thatcher by not telling her he was shadowing the Deutsche Mark to prepare for joining the ERM. It may seem incredible that she did not know. But he never mentioned it at our Treasury ministerial meetings. I learned about it from the newspapers – even though my ministerial responsibilities included ‘international economic relations’! I then asked officials whether we could leave the ERM, if we joined. The Chancellor told me this was above my paygrade and only he, the permanent secretary and chief economist dealt with such matters.
Thatcher in turn upset Lawson by making Walters her economic adviser – which would not have been a problem had Walters kept his views for her ears only. But his outspokenness made the rift with Lawson public. The Chancellor decided either he or Walters must go. In fact, both went – followed inexorably (but not intended by Nigel) by Geoffrey Howe and the Lady herself.
Given he opposed the euro on grounds of sovereignty, it should have been no surprise that Lawson supported Brexit. He also attributed much of Thatcherism’s success to pruning and simplifying regulations. Without Brexit we could not do the same for the huge body of EU regulation. He saw that as Brexit’s main economic benefit – far more valuable than negotiating trade deals.
The other fashionable, but intellectually shallow, doctrine he opposed was climate alarmism. As the energy secretary who prepared for the miners’ strike, he knew secure, low-cost energy is vital. His best-selling book, “An Appeal to Reason: a Cool Look at Global Warming” foresaw that costs of preventing modest climate change could far exceed the benefits. Latterly, he took no comfort in seeing those costs coming home to roost, and the growing acceptance that once again his penetrating intellect is proving correct.
10) Editorial: Conservatives must learn from Nigel Lawson
The Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2023
A self‑described Tory radical, he proved that enterprising policies, when introduced unapologetically, can stand the test of time
Nigel Lawson was one of the towering politicians of a golden generation of Conservatives who would form the backbone of Margaret Thatcher’s transformative period in office throughout the 1980s. His death, almost exactly 10 years after that of the former prime minister, serves to remind the party today of the power of ideas, political vision and economic dynamism.
In the Energy Department in Mrs Thatcher’s first government, Lawson impressed to such an extent that she made him chancellor at the start of her second term in 1983. He was avowedly pro-growth and sought to boost the economy by “changing the structure of taxation”. He argued that high tax rates destroy enterprise, encourage avoidance and drive talented entrepreneurs overseas.
The 1988 budget was most emblematic of his time in charge of the Treasury. Lawson scrapped all tax rates above 40p, while reducing the basic rate of income tax from 27 per cent to 25 per cent. Moreover, the broader tax system was simplified. This signalled that Britain, after decades of economic decline, was once again becoming a dynamic market economy. Government no longer treated wealth creation as if it were an immoral activity. People of all ages and backgrounds have benefited from that momentous change.
But in the intervening years, taxes have become increasingly complex once more, as Lawson’s successors have sought to maximise revenues by stealth. In 1988 only five per cent of taxpayers paid the 40p rate – today the figure is 15 per cent. It was supposed to be a tax on the wealthy but now it hits the aspirant middle classes.
Mrs Thatcher once called Lawson “unassailable” but they fell out over the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and her retention of economic adviser Alan Walters. Lawson wanted what he perceived as the discipline of the ERM for Britain. Yet he later came out in support of leaving the European Union in 2013, and even became chairman of Vote Leave. This is testament to the fact that one need not be an ideological eurosceptic in order to see the benefits of Brexit.
Conservatism today can learn a great deal from the life and works of Nigel Lawson. A self‑described Tory radical, he proved that enterprising policies, when introduced unapologetically, can stand the test of time. It is those very policies that our economy needs most today.
11) More obituaries
Nigel Lawson, who shook up British economy in Thatcher era, dies at 91
The Washington Post, 4 April 2023
Nigel Lawson, Economic Force Under Thatcher, Dies at 91
The New York Times, 4 April 2023
Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor Nigel Lawson dies, aged 91
The Australian, 4 April 2023
Nigel Lawson
BBC News, 4 April 2023
When an overtly well-matched couple splits up it often mystifies as well as pains friends devoted to both. That was certainly how I felt when Nigel resigned as Margaret’s Chancellor. Having been researcher and speechwriter for both before entering parliament, then becoming Nigel’s PPS and later Economic Secretary to the Treasury, I had assumed that they were inseparable.
What made the rupture particularly incomprehensible was that it was about a European issue – whether to enter the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). People assumed that meant Nigel was then a Europhile. As a result, they were astonished when he not only endorsed Brexit but chaired the Leave campaign.
In fact, he was always (like me) a ‘British Gaullist’: a useful label for someone who loves European culture (Nigel lived in France until recently) and wants the maximum trade and cooperation with our European neighbours, but believes that sovereignty – the power to make our own laws – is paramount. I recently found an article I cut out from the Financial Times in 1966 titled “At Last a Europe worth joining” by a journalist called Nigel Lawson. It welcomed President de Gaulle’s success in winning the Luxembourg Compromise giving member states a veto - meaning Europe could develop as co-operating independent nations rather than a supranational authority.
To Lawson, ERM membership was a discipline to control inflation. He had found money supply targets too wayward. He also believed that within the ERM it would be easier to fend off plans for a Single Currency. By contrast, Thatcher worried that it would take Britain nearer that objective to which she was equally opposed. She was also persuaded by Alan Walters that the ERM would create perverse incentives exacerbating the inflation/deflation cycle.
So, the Lawson and Thatcher row was not about different enthusiasm for European integration – both were against (unlike Geoffrey Howe). It was about tactics of thwarting the planned Single Currency and whether fixed exchange rates help control inflation. Unusually, though Lawson might have been correct about tactics, Thatcher was proved right on the economics.
Unfortunately, Lawson upset Thatcher by not telling her he was shadowing the Deutsche Mark to prepare for joining the ERM. It may seem incredible that she did not know. But he never mentioned it at our Treasury ministerial meetings. I learned about it from the newspapers – even though my ministerial responsibilities included ‘international economic relations’! I then asked officials whether we could leave the ERM, if we joined. The Chancellor told me this was above my paygrade and only he, the permanent secretary and chief economist dealt with such matters.
Thatcher in turn upset Lawson by making Walters her economic adviser – which would not have been a problem had Walters kept his views for her ears only. But his outspokenness made the rift with Lawson public. The Chancellor decided either he or Walters must go. In fact, both went – followed inexorably (but not intended by Nigel) by Geoffrey Howe and the Lady herself.
Given he opposed the euro on grounds of sovereignty, it should have been no surprise that Lawson supported Brexit. He also attributed much of Thatcherism’s success to pruning and simplifying regulations. Without Brexit we could not do the same for the huge body of EU regulation. He saw that as Brexit’s main economic benefit – far more valuable than negotiating trade deals.
The other fashionable, but intellectually shallow, doctrine he opposed was climate alarmism. As the energy secretary who prepared for the miners’ strike, he knew secure, low-cost energy is vital. His best-selling book, “An Appeal to Reason: a Cool Look at Global Warming” foresaw that costs of preventing modest climate change could far exceed the benefits. Latterly, he took no comfort in seeing those costs coming home to roost, and the growing acceptance that once again his penetrating intellect is proving correct.
10) Editorial: Conservatives must learn from Nigel Lawson
The Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2023
A self‑described Tory radical, he proved that enterprising policies, when introduced unapologetically, can stand the test of time
Nigel Lawson was one of the towering politicians of a golden generation of Conservatives who would form the backbone of Margaret Thatcher’s transformative period in office throughout the 1980s. His death, almost exactly 10 years after that of the former prime minister, serves to remind the party today of the power of ideas, political vision and economic dynamism.
In the Energy Department in Mrs Thatcher’s first government, Lawson impressed to such an extent that she made him chancellor at the start of her second term in 1983. He was avowedly pro-growth and sought to boost the economy by “changing the structure of taxation”. He argued that high tax rates destroy enterprise, encourage avoidance and drive talented entrepreneurs overseas.
The 1988 budget was most emblematic of his time in charge of the Treasury. Lawson scrapped all tax rates above 40p, while reducing the basic rate of income tax from 27 per cent to 25 per cent. Moreover, the broader tax system was simplified. This signalled that Britain, after decades of economic decline, was once again becoming a dynamic market economy. Government no longer treated wealth creation as if it were an immoral activity. People of all ages and backgrounds have benefited from that momentous change.
But in the intervening years, taxes have become increasingly complex once more, as Lawson’s successors have sought to maximise revenues by stealth. In 1988 only five per cent of taxpayers paid the 40p rate – today the figure is 15 per cent. It was supposed to be a tax on the wealthy but now it hits the aspirant middle classes.
Mrs Thatcher once called Lawson “unassailable” but they fell out over the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and her retention of economic adviser Alan Walters. Lawson wanted what he perceived as the discipline of the ERM for Britain. Yet he later came out in support of leaving the European Union in 2013, and even became chairman of Vote Leave. This is testament to the fact that one need not be an ideological eurosceptic in order to see the benefits of Brexit.
Conservatism today can learn a great deal from the life and works of Nigel Lawson. A self‑described Tory radical, he proved that enterprising policies, when introduced unapologetically, can stand the test of time. It is those very policies that our economy needs most today.
Nigel Lawson, who shook up British economy in Thatcher era, dies at 91
The Washington Post, 4 April 2023
Nigel Lawson, Economic Force Under Thatcher, Dies at 91
The New York Times, 4 April 2023
Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor Nigel Lawson dies, aged 91
The Australian, 4 April 2023
Nigel Lawson
BBC News, 4 April 2023
The London-based Net Zero Watch is a campaign group set up to highlight and discuss the serious implications of expensive and poorly considered climate change policies. The Net Zero Watch newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.netzerowatch.com.
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