Neal Lawson

Neal Lawson (born 1963) is a British political commentator.

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Lawson was born in and brought up in the 1960s and '70s in Kent. He became interested in politics through his father, who was a printer in Fleet Street, and joined the Labour Party at 16. After attending BETHS Secondary School and Bexley College, he graduated from Nottingham Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University), before working for the Transport and General Workers Union in Bristol and, in the mid-late 1980s, with Gordon Brown helping to write speeches.

Lawson writes for The Guardian and the New Statesman about equality, democracy and the future of the left, and appears on TV and radio as a political commentator. He is chair of the pressure group Compass, whose goal is a more equal and democratic world. Lawson is author of a number of publications, including Dare More Democracy, based on interviews with swing voters in London and Birmingham, The Advertising Effect - co-authored with Zoe Gannon - and the book All Consuming, which analyses the social cost of consumerism. Lawson's writing has been heavily influenced by the Polish Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.

Lawson is also 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, Lawson 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.