Hugh Pemberton
Biographic Data
| ID | 380656 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hugh Pemberton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hugh |
| FAMILY NAME | Pemberton |
| SIGNATURE | PEMBERTON H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8683-533X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 153 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
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 lis…
Bad Piano? Bad Music? A Response to Comments on Lowe and Pemberton, The Official History of the British Civil Service , Volume II: 1982–1997
The reforms made to the civil service during the premierships of Margaret Thatcher and John Major were unparalleled in scope in peacetime. Undertaken in the name of efficiency and better management, they served to Balkanise the service, shrink the number of civil servants, subordinate them to the will of ministers, and effectively privatise a swathe of public services. Their legacy, however, was a relatively weak centre struggling to cope with a …
Waspi 's Is (Mostly) a Campaign for Inequality
Women Against State Pension Inequality ( WASPI ) has mounted a vociferous campaign for full compensation to be given to ‘1950s women’ who, it argues, have suffered severe financial hardship as a result of the rise in their state pension age from age 60. That campaign has gained significant political traction, with much sympathy expressed for the plight of those affected and acceptance (most notably by the Scottish National Party and the Labour Pa…
Everyman a Capitalist' or 'Free to Choose'? Exploring the Tensions Within Thatcherite Individualism
It is widely recognized that 'the individual' was prioritized by the Thatcher governments. However, there has been little analysis by historians of exactly how the Thatcher government conceptualized 'the individual'. In this article, we attempt to remedy this deficiency by undertaking a case-study of a key Thatcherite social policy reform: the introduction of 'personal pensions'. This approach allows us to understand the position of 'the individu…
Friends and neighbours voting revisited: The geography of support for candidates to lead the UK's Labour party
Crisis? What Crisis? The Callaghan Government and the British ‘Winter of Discontent’
The industrial strife that beset Britain during the winter of 1978–1979 proved to be a pivotal moment both in post-war British political history and in the history of the country's trade unions. Th
Making Thatcher's Britain
Brothers all? The Operation of the Electoral College in the 2010 Labour Leadership Contest
This article analyses the wealth of data released by the Labour Party on its 2010 leadership election. We uncover the way in which the list of candidates was expanded via the initial nomination process in the parliamentary Labour Party and highlight the artificiality of some candidacies. We find little evidence in the voting data to support the belief that the Miliband brothers represented two sides of an ideological divide but highlight the prof…
Labour's lost grassroots: The rise and fall of party membership
The failure of 'nationalization by attraction: Britain's cross-class alliance against earnings-related pensions in the 1950s1
In 1957, the Labour Party published radical proposals for a state earnings-related pension scheme ('national superannuation') whose funds were to be invested in stock markets to generate high returns, and to help modernize and dynamize the British economy. This article explores a sophisticated campaign against the proposal by the insurance industry, and the resistance of the unions. In doing so, it considers the implications of this cross-class a…
What matters is what works’: Labour's journey from ‘national superannuation’ to ‘personal accounts’
Richard Crossman: A Reforming Radical of the Labour Party - By Victoria Honeyman Richard Crossman and the Welfare State: Pioneer of Welfare Provision and Labour Politics in Post-War Britain - By Steph…
Strange Days Indeed: British Politics in the 1970s
It is now 30 years since the end of the 1970s. How distant that decade already seems. To anyone under 30, it appears as remote as the 1930s. If, as L. P. Hartley had it, the past is a foreign count
Years of State Pension: Learning from the Past. By Tony Salter, Andrew Bryans, Colin Redman and Martin Hewitt
In 1908, after a long campaign by those determined to do something for the biggest group of paupers in British society, the aged poor, the then Liberal government piloted the eight page Old Age Pensions Act through Parliament. In January 1909, 490,000 poor Britons over the age of 70 years began to receive the country's first (non-contributory) pension of 5 shillings a week. In the ensuing century, how best to provide old age income replacement co…
The Winter of Discontent in British Politics
Hay's argument that the ‘winter of discontent’ was essentially a manufactured crisis was discussed at the British Academy on the thirtieth anniversary of the 22 January 1979 public sector ‘day of action’. In the edited transcript of that discussion which we publish here, three contemporary actors offer some support for, but also clear rejoinders to Hay. David Lea applauds the credit Hay gives to the efforts of the unions to make pay policy work i…
The Economist Historical Archive, 1843-2003
Journal Article ‘The Economist Historical Archive, 1843-2003’ Get access ‘The Economist Historical Archive, 1843–2003’ (Gale Cengage Learning, 2007. Price on application). Hugh Pemberton Hugh Pemberton University of Bristol Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXXIII, Issue 504, October 2008, Pages 1315–1318, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cen256 Published: 01 October 2008
Using history, making British policy: The Treasury and the Foreign Office, 1950-76 - By Peter J. Beck
Taxation and Labour's Modernisation Programme
Extensive reforms to the country's taxation system were an integral part of Labour's plans for the modernisation of Britain and, despite its very narrow parliamentary majority, the new government immediately embarked on the most complex tax reform since the 1909 budget. This article considers the nature of that reform, concentrating on the new capital gains tax and the corporation tax, its two main elements, and its place in the modernisation pro…
Age Discrimination: An Historical and Contemporary Analysis. By John Macnicol
By the end of 2006 a European directive passed in 2000, under which all EU countries undertook to prevent direct and indirect employment discrimination according to age, sexual orientation, religion and disability, will require Britain to outlaw age discrimination. In parallel with this, as a consequence of debates about a looming ‘crisis’ in British pensions, we are seeing, and will likely see considerably more, pressure for workers to continue …
Policy Learning and British Governance in the 1960s
Relative Decline and British Economic Policy in the 1960s
In explaining Britain's post-war relative economic decline, contemporary historians have concentrated upon ‘government failure’: not enough, too much, or too much of the wrong sort of government intervention. Implicitly, such explanations conceive the British state as both centralized and powerful. Recent developments in political science have questioned this traditional view. Using this insight to structure its historical analysis, this article …
Learning and Change in 20th‐Century British Economic Policy
Despite considerable interest in the means by which policy learning occurs, and in how it is that the framework of policy may be subject to radical change, the “black box” of economic policy making remains surprisingly murky. This article utilizes Peter Hall's concept of “social learning” to develop a more sophisticated model of policy learning; one in which paradigm failure does not necessarily lead to wholesale paradigm replacement, and in whic…
Learning, Governance and Economic Policy
This article examines the relationship between economic policy networks and policy learning during the 1960s, using recently released files to flesh out the operation of both networks and learning. It finds that policy failure in the 1950s brought into being a new policy network which was able to secure a radical shift in the economic policy of the core executive in the early 1960s. However, it then proved impossible to craft, implement and susta…
A Taxing Task: Combating Britain's Relative Decline in the 1960s
The 1960s was a particularly rich period in the history of UK tax reform The decade also saw an ambitious attempt by the UK government to reverse Britain's relative economic decline via the adoption of a ‘Keynesian-plus’ package of enhanced demand management, incomes policy, and indicative planning. This article argues that the two phenomena were closely related. It argues that the new Keynesian-plus policy framework transcended party ideology an…
Policy Networks and Policy Learning UK Economic Policy in the 1960s and 1970s
Policy networks are advanced as an alternative to the Westminster model of the UK polity but the theory lacks an internal dynamic and has typological problems. This article applies Peter Hall’s (1993) concept of ‘social learning’ to policy networks and maps the networks found in two case studies of British economic policy making: Hall’s own study of the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism in the 1970s and the author’s research on the advent of …
Learning and Change in 20th‐Century British Economic Policy
Despite considerable interest in the means by which policy learning occurs, and in how it is that the framework of policy may be subject to radical change, the “black box” of economic policy making remains surprisingly murky. This article utilizes Peter Hall's concept of “social learning” to develop a more sophisticated model of policy learning; one in which paradigm failure does not necessarily lead to wholesale paradigm replacement, and in whic…
Policy Networks and Policy Learning UK Economic Policy in the 1960s and 1970s
Policy networks are advanced as an alternative to the Westminster model of the UK polity but the theory lacks an internal dynamic and has typological problems. This article applies Peter Hall’s (1993) concept of ‘social learning’ to policy networks and maps the networks found in two case studies of British economic policy making: Hall’s own study of the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism in the 1970s and the author’s research on the advent of …
Friends and neighbours voting revisited: The geography of support for candidates to lead the UK's Labour party
Brothers all? The Operation of the Electoral College in the 2010 Labour Leadership Contest
This article analyses the wealth of data released by the Labour Party on its 2010 leadership election. We uncover the way in which the list of candidates was expanded via the initial nomination process in the parliamentary Labour Party and highlight the artificiality of some candidacies. We find little evidence in the voting data to support the belief that the Miliband brothers represented two sides of an ideological divide but highlight the prof…
Waspi 's Is (Mostly) a Campaign for Inequality
Women Against State Pension Inequality ( WASPI ) has mounted a vociferous campaign for full compensation to be given to ‘1950s women’ who, it argues, have suffered severe financial hardship as a result of the rise in their state pension age from age 60. That campaign has gained significant political traction, with much sympathy expressed for the plight of those affected and acceptance (most notably by the Scottish National Party and the Labour Pa…
Relative Decline and British Economic Policy in the 1960s
In explaining Britain's post-war relative economic decline, contemporary historians have concentrated upon ‘government failure’: not enough, too much, or too much of the wrong sort of government intervention. Implicitly, such explanations conceive the British state as both centralized and powerful. Recent developments in political science have questioned this traditional view. Using this insight to structure its historical analysis, this article …
Everyman a Capitalist' or 'Free to Choose'? Exploring the Tensions Within Thatcherite Individualism
It is widely recognized that 'the individual' was prioritized by the Thatcher governments. However, there has been little analysis by historians of exactly how the Thatcher government conceptualized 'the individual'. In this article, we attempt to remedy this deficiency by undertaking a case-study of a key Thatcherite social policy reform: the introduction of 'personal pensions'. This approach allows us to understand the position of 'the individu…
The Winter of Discontent in British Politics
Hay's argument that the ‘winter of discontent’ was essentially a manufactured crisis was discussed at the British Academy on the thirtieth anniversary of the 22 January 1979 public sector ‘day of action’. In the edited transcript of that discussion which we publish here, three contemporary actors offer some support for, but also clear rejoinders to Hay. David Lea applauds the credit Hay gives to the efforts of the unions to make pay policy work i…
Labour's lost grassroots: The rise and fall of party membership
What matters is what works’: Labour's journey from ‘national superannuation’ to ‘personal accounts’
Learning, Governance and Economic Policy
This article examines the relationship between economic policy networks and policy learning during the 1960s, using recently released files to flesh out the operation of both networks and learning. It finds that policy failure in the 1950s brought into being a new policy network which was able to secure a radical shift in the economic policy of the core executive in the early 1960s. However, it then proved impossible to craft, implement and susta…
Crisis? What Crisis? The Callaghan Government and the British ‘Winter of Discontent’
The industrial strife that beset Britain during the winter of 1978–1979 proved to be a pivotal moment both in post-war British political history and in the history of the country's trade unions. Th
The failure of 'nationalization by attraction: Britain's cross-class alliance against earnings-related pensions in the 1950s1
In 1957, the Labour Party published radical proposals for a state earnings-related pension scheme ('national superannuation') whose funds were to be invested in stock markets to generate high returns, and to help modernize and dynamize the British economy. This article explores a sophisticated campaign against the proposal by the insurance industry, and the resistance of the unions. In doing so, it considers the implications of this cross-class a…
Policy Learning and British Governance in the 1960s
A Taxing Task: Combating Britain's Relative Decline in the 1960s
The 1960s was a particularly rich period in the history of UK tax reform The decade also saw an ambitious attempt by the UK government to reverse Britain's relative economic decline via the adoption of a ‘Keynesian-plus’ package of enhanced demand management, incomes policy, and indicative planning. This article argues that the two phenomena were closely related. It argues that the new Keynesian-plus policy framework transcended party ideology an…
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 lis…
Making Thatcher's Britain
Strange Days Indeed: British Politics in the 1970s
It is now 30 years since the end of the 1970s. How distant that decade already seems. To anyone under 30, it appears as remote as the 1930s. If, as L. P. Hartley had it, the past is a foreign count
Policy Networks and Policy Learning UK Economic Policy in the 1960s and 1970s
Policy networks are advanced as an alternative to the Westminster model of the UK polity but the theory lacks an internal dynamic and has typological problems. This article applies Peter Hall’s (1993) concept of ‘social learning’ to policy networks and maps the networks found in two case studies of British economic policy making: Hall’s own study of the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism in the 1970s and the author’s research on the advent of …
A Taxing Task: Combating Britain's Relative Decline in the 1960s
The 1960s was a particularly rich period in the history of UK tax reform The decade also saw an ambitious attempt by the UK government to reverse Britain's relative economic decline via the adoption of a ‘Keynesian-plus’ package of enhanced demand management, incomes policy, and indicative planning. This article argues that the two phenomena were closely related. It argues that the new Keynesian-plus policy framework transcended party ideology an…
Learning, Governance and Economic Policy
This article examines the relationship between economic policy networks and policy learning during the 1960s, using recently released files to flesh out the operation of both networks and learning. It finds that policy failure in the 1950s brought into being a new policy network which was able to secure a radical shift in the economic policy of the core executive in the early 1960s. However, it then proved impossible to craft, implement and susta…
Relative Decline and British Economic Policy in the 1960s
In explaining Britain's post-war relative economic decline, contemporary historians have concentrated upon ‘government failure’: not enough, too much, or too much of the wrong sort of government intervention. Implicitly, such explanations conceive the British state as both centralized and powerful. Recent developments in political science have questioned this traditional view. Using this insight to structure its historical analysis, this article …
Learning and Change in 20th‐Century British Economic Policy
Despite considerable interest in the means by which policy learning occurs, and in how it is that the framework of policy may be subject to radical change, the “black box” of economic policy making remains surprisingly murky. This article utilizes Peter Hall's concept of “social learning” to develop a more sophisticated model of policy learning; one in which paradigm failure does not necessarily lead to wholesale paradigm replacement, and in whic…
Policy Learning and British Governance in the 1960s
Taxation and Labour's Modernisation Programme
Extensive reforms to the country's taxation system were an integral part of Labour's plans for the modernisation of Britain and, despite its very narrow parliamentary majority, the new government immediately embarked on the most complex tax reform since the 1909 budget. This article considers the nature of that reform, concentrating on the new capital gains tax and the corporation tax, its two main elements, and its place in the modernisation pro…
Age Discrimination: An Historical and Contemporary Analysis. By John Macnicol
By the end of 2006 a European directive passed in 2000, under which all EU countries undertook to prevent direct and indirect employment discrimination according to age, sexual orientation, religion and disability, will require Britain to outlaw age discrimination. In parallel with this, as a consequence of debates about a looming ‘crisis’ in British pensions, we are seeing, and will likely see considerably more, pressure for workers to continue …
Using history, making British policy: The Treasury and the Foreign Office, 1950-76 - By Peter J. Beck
The Economist Historical Archive, 1843-2003
Journal Article ‘The Economist Historical Archive, 1843-2003’ Get access ‘The Economist Historical Archive, 1843–2003’ (Gale Cengage Learning, 2007. Price on application). Hugh Pemberton Hugh Pemberton University of Bristol Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXXIII, Issue 504, October 2008, Pages 1315–1318, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cen256 Published: 01 October 2008
Strange Days Indeed: British Politics in the 1970s
It is now 30 years since the end of the 1970s. How distant that decade already seems. To anyone under 30, it appears as remote as the 1930s. If, as L. P. Hartley had it, the past is a foreign count
Years of State Pension: Learning from the Past. By Tony Salter, Andrew Bryans, Colin Redman and Martin Hewitt
In 1908, after a long campaign by those determined to do something for the biggest group of paupers in British society, the aged poor, the then Liberal government piloted the eight page Old Age Pensions Act through Parliament. In January 1909, 490,000 poor Britons over the age of 70 years began to receive the country's first (non-contributory) pension of 5 shillings a week. In the ensuing century, how best to provide old age income replacement co…
The Winter of Discontent in British Politics
Hay's argument that the ‘winter of discontent’ was essentially a manufactured crisis was discussed at the British Academy on the thirtieth anniversary of the 22 January 1979 public sector ‘day of action’. In the edited transcript of that discussion which we publish here, three contemporary actors offer some support for, but also clear rejoinders to Hay. David Lea applauds the credit Hay gives to the efforts of the unions to make pay policy work i…
What matters is what works’: Labour's journey from ‘national superannuation’ to ‘personal accounts’
Richard Crossman: A Reforming Radical of the Labour Party - By Victoria Honeyman Richard Crossman and the Welfare State: Pioneer of Welfare Provision and Labour Politics in Post-War Britain - By Steph…
Labour's lost grassroots: The rise and fall of party membership
The failure of 'nationalization by attraction: Britain's cross-class alliance against earnings-related pensions in the 1950s1
In 1957, the Labour Party published radical proposals for a state earnings-related pension scheme ('national superannuation') whose funds were to be invested in stock markets to generate high returns, and to help modernize and dynamize the British economy. This article explores a sophisticated campaign against the proposal by the insurance industry, and the resistance of the unions. In doing so, it considers the implications of this cross-class a…
Brothers all? The Operation of the Electoral College in the 2010 Labour Leadership Contest
This article analyses the wealth of data released by the Labour Party on its 2010 leadership election. We uncover the way in which the list of candidates was expanded via the initial nomination process in the parliamentary Labour Party and highlight the artificiality of some candidacies. We find little evidence in the voting data to support the belief that the Miliband brothers represented two sides of an ideological divide but highlight the prof…
Crisis? What Crisis? The Callaghan Government and the British ‘Winter of Discontent’
The industrial strife that beset Britain during the winter of 1978–1979 proved to be a pivotal moment both in post-war British political history and in the history of the country's trade unions. Th
Making Thatcher's Britain
Friends and neighbours voting revisited: The geography of support for candidates to lead the UK's Labour party
Waspi 's Is (Mostly) a Campaign for Inequality
Women Against State Pension Inequality ( WASPI ) has mounted a vociferous campaign for full compensation to be given to ‘1950s women’ who, it argues, have suffered severe financial hardship as a result of the rise in their state pension age from age 60. That campaign has gained significant political traction, with much sympathy expressed for the plight of those affected and acceptance (most notably by the Scottish National Party and the Labour Pa…
Everyman a Capitalist' or 'Free to Choose'? Exploring the Tensions Within Thatcherite Individualism
It is widely recognized that 'the individual' was prioritized by the Thatcher governments. However, there has been little analysis by historians of exactly how the Thatcher government conceptualized 'the individual'. In this article, we attempt to remedy this deficiency by undertaking a case-study of a key Thatcherite social policy reform: the introduction of 'personal pensions'. This approach allows us to understand the position of 'the individu…
Bad Piano? Bad Music? A Response to Comments on Lowe and Pemberton, The Official History of the British Civil Service , Volume II: 1982–1997
The reforms made to the civil service during the premierships of Margaret Thatcher and John Major were unparalleled in scope in peacetime. Undertaken in the name of efficiency and better management, they served to Balkanise the service, shrink the number of civil servants, subordinate them to the will of ministers, and effectively privatise a swathe of public services. Their legacy, however, was a relatively weak centre struggling to cope with a …
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 lis…
Political science (23 works) · Political and Economic history of UK and US (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (10 works) · Public Administration (8 works)