Pension provision, noted Robin Blackburn in his 2002 study of the topic, Banking on Death: Or, Investing in Life, ‘has a reputation for being arcane, worthy and boring. Pensions may be thought tedious because they are horribly complicated… These notions are not completely wrong but they get in the way of more important truths.’

Blackburn’s analysis is astute: pensions are important, but oftentimes remain overlooked. While there has been something of a renaissance—spurred in no small part by the activities of left Labour councils engaging in community wealth building strategies—in seeking to harness the power of local government pension schemes, reinvigorating the sometimes latent notion of ‘pension fund socialism’, the complexity of the topic and the lengthy time horizons involved mean pensions are a topic which have perhaps not received the attention they deserve.

Indeed, while his phrasing is perhaps incendiary, it is hard to disagree with the assessment made recently by David Webber—in 2018’s The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon—that ‘the failure of virtually the entire left-of-center political spectrum… to even understand how these pensions function – is a profound strategic, tactical, and moral blunder.’

A new addition to the literature—which can usefully be read as an attempt to remedy the challenge proposed by Webber and address the description proffered by Blackburn—is Pensions Imperilled, a study of pensions provision in the UK from Craig Berry, a reader in political economy at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Berry’s book is in some ways difficult to situate: whilst undoubtedly an academic text, from the acknowledgements onwards it is clear that this is no dusty and detached survey of suboptimal policy decisions. ‘Rubbish pensions,’ writes Berry in the opening pages, ‘are an affront to our essential humanity.’

Berry is an erudite guide through a deeply complex world of annuities, auto-enrolment, and assorted acronyms—the prose remains lucid even when the source material can become stodgy—but also a self-reflexive author invested not just academically but politically in the topic he surveys and the discipline he works in: ‘Too much of what now passes for political economy, in particular, focuses on describing economic problems without interrogating the power dynamics which enable these problems to exist.’

Indeed, one of the key points Berry advances, revisited throughout the text, is that the stock explanation for much recent pension reform—that an ageing population, somehow taking policymakers by surprise, renders previously normalised levels of provision unaffordable—is simply a fallacy. The scope, level, and generosity of pensions provision has previously risen during periods of increasing life expectancy.

As he puts it, ‘If there is an ageing-induced crisis, its genesis lies in how the UK pensions system interacts with the apparent fact of demographic change, rather than any inevitable consequences of demographic change. The population has been ageing at a steep rate for a very long time – indeed, for much longer than the UK has had large-scale private pensions provision.’

The problem facing pensions in the UK—the factor imperilling them, to use Berry’s favoured term—is therefore not demography but political economy. While there have been periods where more generous pensions—defined benefit schemes, most notably, where the level of pay-outs for retiring employees were guaranteed—were more widespread, ‘the endangering of even short-term profitability,’ argues Berry, ‘has rarely been tolerated.’

As such, while it would be erroneous to regard the post-war period as a utopian period for pensions in the UK—significant gaps in coverage remained—it is evident that the changes introduced by the Thatcher government represented a critical moment in moving away from an, at least nominally, collectivist model of pension provision. Under the auspices of neoliberal thinking, pushing a socio-economic narrative valorising flexibility and global competitiveness, pensions came to be increasingly ‘individualised’.

From incentivising defined contribution pensions to breaking the ‘earnings link’, significantly eroding the value of the British State Pension such that pensioner poverty increased during the 1990s, Thatcher undertook a series of reforms that refigured what pensions were within an increasingly hegemonic neoliberal political imaginary. Subsequent governments have broadly accepted these changes, intervening only to redress particularly egregious issues – under New Labour, for example, the notion of personal responsibility became more, rather than less, central in the way pensions were structured.

Financialisation interacts interestingly with these developments. Berry advances a more nuanced argument around its development than is sometimes found in contemporary analyses of developed—and particularly Anglo-Saxon—economies. ‘Financialisation,’ he argues, ‘has to be the opening question, not the final conclusion.’ Financiers and financial institutions have always had a significant role in pensions provision: for Berry, pensions provision is both cause and conduit of financialisation.

At its essence, then, the problem facing pensions is in part what Berry has referred to elsewhere as an ‘epidemic of misunderstanding’. There is an analogue with the ever-present clichés applied to macroeconomic management more generally—that the government ‘has maxed out its credit card’ or similar—which speaks to the value of Berry’s text as an intellectual and economic history stretching beyond the field of pensions.

In some ways, the tragedy of pension provision is found in the fact that pensions are, in most cases, not what they are regularly characterised as—individuals putting money aside purely for their own retirement—but recent transformations are making them resemble this ‘common-sense’ understanding with deleterious consequences. The state has not so much stepped back as abrogated itself of its unique role—what Berry describes as the ‘ultimate temporal anchor’—and instead established new markets for individualised provision.

‘The individual,’ writes Berry in his conclusion, ‘now serves as the core imaginary of UK pensions provision. Indeed, a (misguided) reliance on the individual’s enduring capacity and willingness to take personal responsibility for their own retirement income now arguably functions as a form of temporal anchoring.’

There is an important temporal aspect of pensions; a recognition that ‘futures fail’. Yet the response from policymakers has been to move the burden of responsibility in managing and mitigating these futures on to individuals—those least able to respond to this—whilst the state—the institution best-suited to managing this failure—has effectively limited its role to that of creating markets and underwriting profitability.

This is a sad state of affairs, but not a hopeless one. All history is ad-hoc and contingent; it is rather fitting that Berry borrows from Marx’s famous invocation that ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please… The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’

Berry’s book is to no small extent shaped by this analytical framework: it is an invaluable guide not just to understanding what is going on under the cover of pensions provision in the UK now, but to recognising how we got here, and—crucially—how we might begin to fix the imperilled and individualised state of pension provision in the UK.