Neal Derek Lawson (born March 1963) is a British political commentator, consultant, lobbyist and organiser. He is the co-founder and chair of the Labour Party-affiliated centre-left pressure group Compass.

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 as a researcher for the Transport and General Workers' Union in Bristol and, in the mid to late 1980s, wrote speeches for Gordon Brown. He was an adviser to Brown as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1992 to 1994. In 1992, he founded Renewal, the policy journal of the Labour Coordinating Committee published since 1993.

He then went to work for Lord Bell at Lowe Bell Political as a lobbyist. In May 1996, he joined David Halpern in co-founding Nexus, described by Tony Blair as the first virtual think tank and affiliated to the Labour Party; its inaugural seminar was sponsored by Deloitte and Touche Consulting Group and addressed by Blair, while its March 1997 conference at the London School of Economics on "Passing the Torch", welcomed by Anthony Giddens, referenced New Labour's expected takeover from the New Right.

Lawson advised Blair on strategy during the 1997 general election campaign at the Labour Party's new media headquarters in the Millbank Tower. 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.

Following the May 1997 election victory, Lawson co-founded a lobbying and public relations company, LLM Communications, with Ben Lucas and Jonathan Mendelsohn, and was appointed its director in August of the same year. In March 1998, he positioned himself on the left of New Labour as a "new social democrat" in an opinion piece written jointly with Simon Buckby (the subsequent campaign director of Britain in Europe). In July 1998, Lawson and his LLM partners were at the centre of the cash-for-ministerial-access scandal known as Lobbygate, after he boasted to the undercover journalist Greg Palast of his relationship with Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. Lawson was personally involved in lobbying for the scandal-ridden GTech Corporation and for Anglian Water, which had breached environmental regulations. He wrote listings for the Evening Standard in 1998.

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. 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." It has campaigned on issues such as high pay (helping form the High Pay Centre), and against loan sharking. As of 2020, it ran a campaign for Universal Basic Income. At the 2017 general election Compass helped form the Progressive Alliance 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.

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 along with Jess Asato and Colin Hines. He was a director of Kat Banyard's UK Feminista pressure group from 2010 to 2015.

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.