Thatcher’s Policy Unit and the ‘Neoliberal Vision’

Using recently released papers, we analyse 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 abolishing both the state earnings-related pension and collective employer-provided occupational pension schemes which then covered about half the workforce and owned about a quarter of all shares listed on London’s 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 centre of political power - the No. 10 Policy Unit – and on the influence on it of the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think-tank. In doing so, we confirm the importance of the CPS as source of neoliberal ideas for the architects of policy change in the 1980s and reveal the centrality of the PU 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 PU’s attempted revolution, choosing instead to implement a more evolutionary set of reforms.