Thatcher's Policy Unit and the “Neoliberal Vision”


 Using recently released papers, we analyze an attempted neoliberal policy revolution in 1980s Britain—the attempt to restrict the state pension to a minimal flat-rate benefit and supplement it with personal pensions. In the process, the government would abolish both the state earnings-related pension and collective employer-provided occupational pension schemes that then covered about half the workforce and owned about a quarter of all shares listed on the London Stock Exchange. Unusually, our focus is not primarily on ministers, as we unpick an attempted revolution that would have refashioned every worker in Britain as an investor-capitalist. Rather we focus on a sub-ministerial center of political power, the No. 10 Policy Unit, and the influence on it of the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank. In doing so, we confirm the latter's importance as source of neoliberal ideas for the architects of policy change in the 1980s and reveal the centrality of the Policy Unit as a source of motive power for Britain's neoliberal revolution. We also, however, highlight the relative pragmatism of ministers as they backed away from the Policy Unit's attempted revolution, choosing instead to implement a more evolutionary set of reforms.