Thatcher's Policy Unit and the "Neoliberal Vision"
Thatcher's Policy Unit and the "Neoliberal Vision"
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撒切尔的政策单位和“新自由主义愿景”
DOI：
10.1017/jbr.2022.111
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发表时间：
2022
影响因子：
1
通讯作者：
Davies A
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Davies A
利用最近发表的论文，我们分析了 20 世纪 80 年代英国尝试的新自由主义政策革命——试图将国家养老金限制在最低的统一费率福利，并用个人养老金进行补充。在此过程中，政府将废除与收入相关的国家养老金和雇主集体提供的职业养老金计划，这些计划覆盖了约一半的劳动力，并拥有伦敦证券交易所上市股票的约四分之一。不同寻常的是，我们的重点并不是部长们，因为我们取消了一场试图将英国每个工人重塑为投资者资本家的革命。相反，我们关注的是一个部级以下的政治权力中心——第十政策组，以及右翼智库政策研究中心对其的影响。在此过程中，我们确认了后者作为 20 世纪 80 年代政策变革设计师新自由主义思想来源的重要性，并揭示了政策单位作为英国新自由主义革命动力来源的中心地位。然而，我们也强调部长们的相对实用主义，因为他们放弃了政策部门的革命尝试，而是选择实施一套更具渐进性的改革。
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.