If you could get the pension issue right, Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander confided pre-prandially at the London embassy to Richard Crossman, craftsman of a British version of superannuation, it was an enormous electoral help. Getting it right was precisely the nub of the matter. Although sharing obvious similarities, Scandinavian and British supplementary pension schemes differed in their goals, the political functions they served and the social forces that shaped their formulation. The state's role in a realm formerly left to the individual was the issue decided by the dispute over superannuation. The benign liberalism of postwar pension reform, limiting statutory intervention to a minimum and leaving untamed inequalities beyond this scope, had won broad political backing by threatening few interests. Superannuation now called into question this placid consensus. Should stark inequalities be tolerated above the flat-rate minimum then drawn as the boundary for public control? Or ought the state to legislate to correct imbalances here as well? By threatening to socialize what had earlier been left free, superannuation reversed the innocuously liberal solution achieved after the war.

The superannuation issue whipped to a froth the normally pacific waters of Swedish politics during the late 1950s. The flat-rate universalist minimalism of postwar reform had satisfied the urban middle classes and rural inhabitants.