The conclusion foregrounds the wider implications of the book’s empirical findings for scholars of international neoliberalism, political projects, and policy change, as well as those seeking to understand the long shadow cast by reforms to social security during the 1980s. It begins by making the case for ‘neoliberalism’ as a valid object of study, recognising that the term has its critics and limitations. It argues for several analytical strategies that, we believe, can yield a deeper, more complex understanding of neoliberalism and that begin to address the persistent separateness of economic, intellectual history, and governmentality literatures and the relative lack of detailed consideration of specific case studies of neoliberal governance and policymaking compared with intellectual histories. The conclusion then surveys the book’s key findings across the full life cycle of (attempted) policy change and highlights the implications of these for current understandings of the role neoliberal ideas played in late twentieth-century government and the different pathways along which they found political traction. The conclusion’s closing sections explore the ways in which our overarching empirical findings recast what we know about the Thatcher project and political change in the 1980s before considering how our case study of neoliberal policy change in pensions might lead scholars to think differently about international neoliberalism, its interactions with interest groups, its shifting policy forms, its differing roles in the policymaking process, and, ultimately, its policy legacy.

This chapter sets out the system proposed by the Thatcher government’s 1985 Green Paper on social security reform and argues that this would have constituted a revolutionary, system-wide replacement. Yet this revolution never happened. To explain why, the chapter reveals the counter-revolution that ensured the planned pensions revolution did not take place – or, rather, happened only in a very different way from that envisaged by its architects. Making clear both the breadth and depth of opposition, the chapter examines the sequence of events that forced Thatcher’s government to execute a humiliating U-turn. As it does so, the chapter unpicks the forces at work in constraining and shaping the government’s options for more limited evolutionary change, showing how it navigated its way to a very different neoliberal version of pensions reform. As Paul Pierson famously put it, the government moved from outright privatisation of pensions to a process of ‘implicit privatisation’. The chapter concludes, however, that the main cause of this shift was a chronic underestimation by the revolution’s architects of the scale of the institutional barriers to the radical changes they were seeking to achieve. In particular, the analysis shows that opposition from the very life assurance and insurance companies the government had assumed would welcome its personal pension proposals in the event proved fatal to its revolutionary intent and forced it to accept a neoliberal evolution instead.

This chapter sets out existing approaches to Thatcherism and neoliberalism and calls attention to problems arising from the disconnections between them. Although the term ‘neoliberalism’ can be used improperly, the chapter argues that a distinctive set of neoliberal ideas and arguments took shape in the middle of the twentieth century. These gained their coherence through a network of thinkers interacting as a ‘thought collective’ with a common aim to reformulate liberalism. The chapter highlights the constituent schools that developed within this network and draws out their approaches to the welfare state and pensions policy. The chapter concludes by evaluating the relationship between Thatcherism and neoliberalism. It argues that this relationship can be best characterised as contingent, multi-layered, plural, embedded, dynamic, unstable, manifest, and ironic. On this basis, the chapter also claims that the most fruitful way to understand Thatcherism and neoliberalism is not to fully reconcile the differing perspectives of contemporaries, political scientists, sociologists, and historians nor to leave these entirely disconnected but, instead, to write histories that foreground the interconnections and interdependences of the phenomena each describes.

In its second term, the Thatcher government hoped to solve the ‘early leaver problem’ in collective occupational pensions by effectively replacing this part of the United Kingdom’s ‘second tier’ of pension arrangements with individualised personal pensions. As policy developed, though, this idea was expanded to embrace total reform of the ‘second tier’ through the outright abolition of the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (SERPS). In doing so, the government intended a dramatic break with the consensus reached only during the late 1970s. This chapter explores the roots of the plan to abolish SERPS, in the process tracing its two principal motivations: the desire to contain unfunded state spending on pensioners, a fear deepened by a growing awareness that SERPS could be a ‘demographic time bomb’, timed to detonate in the early decades of the twenty-first century; and the hope that, through privatisation, its former members would be imbued with the ‘vigorous virtues’ of thrift and entrepreneurialism. The chapter examines how this proposal became government policy in the 1985 Green Paper on the reform of social security, even though it was opposed by the great majority of those giving evidence to Norman Fowler’s Inquiry into Provision for Retirement (IPR). In doing so, it highlights the pivotal role of the No. 10 Policy Unit and John Redwood in persuading Margaret Thatcher to back those pushing for radical neoliberal reform.

This chapter charts the political and economic environment of the 1970s, which shaped the uptake of neoliberal ideas in Britain and their folding into a political project on the Conservative right. The chapter starts by highlighting the growing compatibility between Conservative and neoliberal ideas, emphasising the range of individuals who acted as carriers or bridges between the two. The chapter then considers four environmental factors thath served to make these ideas salient. First, there is the impact of the economic crises of the 1970s and the way in which they called into question the prevailing economic policy model. Second, the chapter briefly elaborates the various attempts to address these multitudinous problems made by both Conservative and Labour governments during the decade. Third, it explores key changes in British capitalism and in the composition of the UK labour force, which served further to undermine existing assumptions about the operation of the economy. Fourth, the chapter widens the analysis to consider the ‘crisis of consensus’, examining the self-conscious break with the putative Keynesian and welfare state consensus to be found on both the Left and Right of British politics. Having set out this context, it considers how economic crisis served to advance the neoliberal critique of the state in Britain. The chapter concludes by connecting these developments with the Conservative party’s longer-term attitudes to the state and its pursuit of ‘statecraft’.

Although its manifesto had given no hint of radical change, within months of its election in 1983 Margaret Thatcher’s second government was embracing pension reforms of breathtaking ambition. Had they been implemented, the reforms proposed would have led to the effective destruction of the occupational pensions enjoyed by about half the workforce, and of the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) that ied the remainder. In place of these collective approaches, a new system of individualised, compulsory, and much more risky ‘personal portable pensions’ would be backed up by a minimalist basic state pension. This chapter focuses on the attempt to substitute personal private pensions as the second tier of the UK pension system and, in the process, sweep away the country’s system of employer-provided occupational pensions. The chapter explores the emergence of the personal pensions idea and explains how it came to be embraced at the heart of government. The analysis shows how this radical (neoliberal) proposal was championed by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) and others as the solution to long-running problems through the investigations of the ‘Fowler Inquiry’ in respect of pensions. The chapter reveals the lines of resistance that these architects of change encountered from various stakeholders before explaining how the eventual outcome of this neoliberal policy development was embodied in the 1985 Green Paper on social security reform.