Neal Lawson

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Neal Lawson is a political commentator in the United Kingdom.

He was born and brought up in 1960s/70s South East London. He got into politics through his father who was a printer in Fleet Street and joined the Labour Party at 16. After graduating from Nottingham Polytechnic, he worked for the Transport and General Workers Union in Bristol in the mid-late 1980s, later working with Gordon Brown helping to write speeches.^[1]

Lawson writes regularly for The Guardian and the New Statesman about equality, democracy and the future of the left. He sometimes appears on TV and radio as a political commentator. He is chair of the fast-growing pressure group Compass, whose goal is a more equal and democratic world, as well as a trustee of the liberal think-tank CentreForum. He is author of the pamphlet Dare More Democracy, which was based on interviews with swing voters in London and Birmingham.

Lawson is also the managing editor of the quarterly progressive policy journal Renewal. 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 was formerly an adviser to Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer and before that a researcher for the Transport and General Workers' Union. He co-edited The Progressive Century (Palgrave, 2001).

At the end of 2004 he gave up his job as a founding director of public affairs company LLM Communications, cashing in his substantial shares in the company, to focus full time on writing and activism.