THE former Tory Party chancellor Nigel Lawson, who died last week aged 91, had become better known in his later years as an indefatigable champion of the cause of climate change denial.

His efforts to minimise perceptions of the damage of greenhouse gas emissions, and forestall action on decarbonisation, played their own small part in condemning future generations to lives that will be harder and more squalid than they ever needed to be.

But it was as the primary architect of Britain’s free-market turn, and Margaret Thatcher’s sometime right-hand man, that Lawson can claim his true legacy.

Much of the commentary after his death has noted Lawson’s intellect and determination. A wistful tone has been unmistakable. Looking back, at a distance of almost four decades, the Conservatives of those years seem to tower over their descendants today.

Some of this is the distorting haze of time. Some is misplaced nostalgia. But the perspective captures something important: unlike today’s Tories, Lawson’s generation of Conservative politicians had been steeled in a real class fight, facing in Britain the most consistently combative working class in the Western world.

The last Conservative government, that of Edward Heath, had been elected in 1970 on a promise to tackle union power. But it was broken by union resistance within two years, its headline anti-union legislation rendered unusable by the movement in support of five London dockers, arrested under the new laws but freed under threat of an incipient general strike.

Its attempts to “restrain” wages were broken by the miners’ strike of 1972, which saw the first use of “flying pickets” to spread the strike and shutter workplaces. And it was finally defeated by a second miners’ strike that forced the implementation of the much-fabled three-day week to restrict electricity use in early 1974.

It was this white-hot class fight that forged Thatcher and Lawson’s generation of Conservatives. Her election as Conservative leader in 1975 saw the new style of Tory move to the front ranks of the party — ruthlessly determined to avenge the humiliation of the early 1970s.

Returning to government after the messy 1978-79 Winter of Discontent public-sector strikes, these new Tories had a clarity of purpose and planning that Heath lacked.

Lawson, a Financial Times journalist before being elected MP, was an early and committed supporter of neoliberal ideologues Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek.

He, like the Tories around at the time, took the ideas and notions of the free market academics, and translated them, with notable effectiveness, into a programme for government and a transformed country.

And it worked. The “salami slicing” of the union movement, recommended in a secret 1977 report by Nicholas Ridley, himself later to oversee the sale of council housing, was accomplished through a combination of generous payments to some unions and selected battles with others, as a means to weaken solidarity — culminating in the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which saw the coalfield solidarity of a decade earlier decisively weakened as pits in Nottinghamshire, notoriously, stayed open and working.

It was Lawson who, as energy secretary from 1981, had overseen the building up of strategic coal stockpiles for power stations, weakening the ability of the National Union of Mineworkers to restrict electricity output.

The parallel legal offensive severely restricted the freedom of trade unions to organise as their members wished and created the notorious bureaucratic hurdles that would-be strikers must today leap over. The union movement in Britain was enfeebled, and has never recovered: between 1948 and 1990, not a single year saw fewer than 1.2 million days on strike. After 1990, not a single year has had more than 1.2 million days on strike.

But this was only one half of the battle. The other was brought centre-stage following Thatcher’s resounding, post-Falklands election victory in 1983. This was the plan to reshape British capitalism itself — taking on not only the unions but cleansing stale British industry with the pure fire of the free market.

Jamming up interest rates, then under direct Treasury control, had seen the value of the pound soar — great for the City of London, but a disaster for Britain’s manufacturers, unable to export competitively. Manufacturing employment, previously declining, nosedived, and never recovered.

It was energy secretary Lawson who prepared the ground for the privatisation of oil, gas and electricity. It was chancellor Lawson, appointed after the 1983 general election, who oversaw the immense transfer of wealth upwards, cementing the incredible shift in Britain from one of the most equal Western economies, to, by the early 1990s, one of the most unequal.

It was Lawson’s programme, ruthlessly pursued, that broke the back of Britain’s postwar model and created a new, neoliberal settlement.

But Lawson’s programme would have been almost impossible without the immense bounty of the North Sea oil. Revenues from the North Sea bailed out the Thatcher government, in two directions: first, because as Britain’s manufacturing exports collapsed, oil exports compensated, stabilising the balance of payments; second, and crucially, revenues from the North Sea were so vast that even the limited taxes the British government applied generated significant sums, amounting to 10% of all government revenue by the mid 1980s.

North Sea oil and gas flows had become significant by the late 1970s. Proposals from then-energy secretary Tony Benn to create a Norway-style sovereign wealth fund from the revenues had already been dismissed by the Treasury, in a classic act of short-termism. (Norway’s fund, today, is the largest single concentration of wealth on the planet, worth $1.3 trillion). And with the election of the Thatcher government in 1979, the UK Continental Shelf became the site of a vast experiment in free market economics. British Petroleum was privatised from 1979 to 1987. Safety standards were appalling, culminating in the devastating Piper Alpha disaster of 1988, whilst taxes were held to amongst the lowest of any major oilfield.

From 1971 to 2014, the British government took $410 billion in revenue — a significant boost. But Norway’s government took $1.2tn over the same period – three times as much. Even these comparatively limited revenues were squandered at Lawson’s direction as chancellor, to fund exceptional tax cuts for the wealthiest. In Budgets from 1986 to 1988, Lawson slashed the top rate of income tax from 60p to 40p, and reduced taxes on inheritance, sweetening these handouts to the wealthy with reductions in the basic rate of income tax that year and following.

Meanwhile, the “Big Bang” in the City of London saw a radical deregulation of tight rules, intended, in part, to restrain excessive risk-taking by the financiers, but which the City and the Tories argued stifled “innovation” — clearing the path to the financial crisis of 2008, as Lawson later admitted.

The first great property bubble of neoliberalism began to take shape, as rapid tax cuts for the rich and easier borrowing encouraged a flood of money into property, notably across the south-east.

Lawson’s rhetoric at the time was to create “popular capitalism… in which more and more men and women have a direct personal stake in British business and industry.” In the place of trade union rights, workers could own individual shares.

Privatisations after 1983 became great free market jamborees, heavily promoted on TV as an unmissable get-rich-quick opportunity. Take-up of initial share offerings in British Gas, British Telecom and other once-public companies were huge; but if the intention was ever to create “popular capitalism,” privatisation was an immense failure, with most initial buyers rapidly selling their grossly (and deliberately) underpriced privatised stocks.

In 1975, 38 per cent of shares on the London stock exchange were owned by individuals. By 1989, when Lawson resigned, after falling out with Thatcher over Europe, it had shrunk to 21 per cent, and today stands at just 12 per cent. Pension funds today, meanwhile, often trumpeted as providing an essential stake for workers in capitalism, have just 6 per cent of their value in British shares.

The Britain we live in today is the Britain Lawson, arguably more than any single individual other than Thatcher, worked to create. Its inequality, its failing public services, its shrunken industries and its property bubbles all trace their roots back to his fateful years in office. We will not build a decent, fairer country until that legacy is dismantled.

Follow James Meadway on Twitter @meadwaj.