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Neal Lawson | |
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| Personal details | |
| Born | 1963 (age 61–62) London, England, UK |
| Political party | Labour |
| Education | Nottingham Trent University (BA) |
Neal Derek Lawson (born March 1963) is a British political commentator, consultant, lobbyist and organiser.
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Neal Lawson | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1963 (age 61–62) London, England, UK |
| Political party | Labour |
| Education | Nottingham Trent University (BA) |
Neal Derek Lawson (born March 1963) is a British political commentator, consultant, lobbyist and organiser.
Lawson was born in and brought up in Bexleyheath, South East London. He became interested in politics through his father, a printer in Fleet Street, and joined the Labour Party at 16. After attending Gravel Hill Primary School, BETHS Secondary School and Bexley College, he graduated from the Nottingham Polytechnic. He then worked for the Transport and General Workers Union in Bristol and, in the mid to late 1980s, wrote speeches for Gordon Brown. [1] He was an adviser to Brown as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1992 to 1994. [2] In 1992, he founded Renewal , [3] the policy journal of the Labour Coordinating Committee published since 1993. [4]
He then went to work for Lord Bell at Lowe Bell Political as a lobbyist and advised Tony Blair on strategy during the 1997 general election campaign at the Labour Party's new media headquarters in the Millbank Tower. [5] [6] In January 1997, he co-organised a dinner meeting between Labour and the Liberal Democrats at the Goring Hotel in London, where Tony Blair and the Liberal Democrats leader Paddy Ashdown struck a covert electoral deal. [2] [3]
Following the May 1997 election victory, he co-founded a lobbying and public relations company, LLM Communications, with Ben Lucas and Jonathan Mendelsohn, [5] and was appointed its director in August of the same year. [7] In July 1998, he was at the centre of the cash-for-ministerial-access scandal known as Lobbygate, after boasting to the undercover journalist Greg Palast of his relationship with Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. [8] [6] [9] [10] [11] He wrote listings for the Evening Standard in 1998. [3]
He set up Compass in 2003 together with Tom Bentley, Michael Jacobs and Matthew Taylor, and left LLM in 2004 with a large payout that allowed him to focus full-time on his new work. He has since served as Compass's executive director. [12] Compass describes itself as "a home for those who want to build and be a part of a Good Society; one where equality, sustainability and democracy are not mere aspirations, but a living reality." [13] It has campaigned on issues such as high pay (helping form the High Pay Centre), [14] and against loan sharking. [15] As of 2020, it ran a campaign for Universal Basic Income. [16] At the 2017 general election Compass helped form the Progressive Alliance [17] and continues to work across all progressive parties and movements. Compass adopted a theory of transition to a good society called 45° Change based on a report Lawson wrote in 2019. [18]
In the aftermath of the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal and during the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum, Lawson co-directed the Vote for a Change campaign on behalf of the Electoral Reform Society [19] [20] along with Jess Asato and Colin Hines. [21] He was a director of Kat Banyard's UK Feminista pressure group from 2010 to 2015. [22]
In January 2013, he published a joint article with a group of Policy Network, Fabian Society and Liberal Left leaders that called on Labour and the Liberal Democrats to open coalition talks for the following election. [23] [24]
In May 2017, he spoke at the "Building a Progressive Future" launch event for the Progressive Alliance in London. [3] [25]
In June 2023, Lawson received notice that he may face expulsion from the Labour Party – after 44 years of membership – because of a May 2021 retweet supporting tactical voting during the local elections in Oxford West and Abingdon as part of his long-standing advocacy for a united progressive front with the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats. [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] Lawson described the Labour Party as a "bully" and accused it of pursuing a "bureaucratic project" instead of a "deep intellectual cultural project". [31]
Lawson is a part-time consultant at progressive communicators Jericho Chambers, where he works on a global responsible tax project. [32] He is on the Board of the Citizens Basic Income Trust [33] and is a Commissioner on the Women's Budget Group Commission on a Gender Equal Economy. [34]
He writes for The Guardian , [35] the New Statesman [36] and OpenDemocracy [37] about equality, democracy and the future of the left, and appears on TV and radio as a political commentator. He is the author of All Consuming, a book published with Penguin in 2009, which analyses the social cost of consumerism. Lawson's writing was influenced by the Polish Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.
Lawson is the managing editor of the quarterly progressive policy journal Renewal . [38] Renewal was previously the journal of the Labour Coordinating Committee, which was wound up in 1998 and briefly replaced by the Labour Renewal Network. He co-edited The Progressive Century (Palgrave, 2001). [39]
Lawson has been described by Zygmunt Bauman as “one of the most insightful and inventive minds on the British political stage”, [40] in The Guardian as “the most optimistic commentator in western Europe” [41] and as "new Labour's Eeyore" in the Sunday Times. [10]
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