Labour is still in thrall to the low tax regime championed by my friend Nigel Lawson

theguardian.com:

T o listen to the plaudits from the Conservative press after the death of Nigel Lawson at 91 last week one could be forgiven for wondering how many of the eulogists were aware that the great man’s chancellorship – from 1983 to 1989 – had ended in tears.

Believe it or not, despite many differences on economic policy, which I voiced in my columns, Lord Lawson and I were good friends.

His was certainly a historic chancellorship and he left his mark on the Conservative party and the country. But in 1989 he was widely criticised for steering the economy into a phase of boom and bust. This led to a loss of control over inflation and the second worst recession since the second world war.

There was also the little matter of his damaging fallout with Margaret Thatcher over the disruption caused by her chief economic adviser, Alan Walters. Lawson resented the way Walters was encouraging Thatcher to resist his advocacy of Britain’s membership of the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM). Lawson was an enthusiast, constantly searching for the economic philosopher’s stone. His championship of the pound’s entry into the ERM followed his recognition of the failure of such putative panaceas as control of the money supply to cure Britain’s endemic inflation problem.

He was impressed by Germany’s counterinflationary record and thought that membership of the ERM – which was dominated by the deutschmark – would tie the pound into a low-inflation mechanism. As a prelude, early in 1987 he instructed the Bank of England to intervene in the foreign exchange market to keep the pound’s value close to that of the German currency. This became known as “shadowing the D-mark”.

When Thatcher found out, she was furious and never really forgave him. Oddly