I’d never heard of “pork barrel politics” before I read Lib Dem Treasury spokesman Sarah Olney tell the Guardian

“It will take more than this desperate attempt at pork barrel politics to win over voters after years of failure on the NHS and cost of living.”

The issue in question is the dishing out of the pork barrel to parts of the country where the Conservatives need to do well. It’s an electoral bribe of the kind that the electoral reforms of the 19th century were supposed to have gotten rid of and opposition parties are accusing Rishi Sunak of just this.

Olney’s beef is over the Tory’s proposed to scrap the UK shared prosperity fund, which replaced EU structural funds, to help fund the national service scheme.It claimed that this would be the last “nail in the coffin” for levelling up. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found the Conservative proposals would leave the UK’s poorest regions millions of pounds worse off.

Apparently , a pork barrel was often dumped in a slave compound by a plantation owner so that strong slaves would get stronger and weak ones wouldn’t – reinforcing a Darwinian status quo. Sunak is accused of playing to his preferred audience and abandoning the wretched under-class who would never vote Conservative.

I wondered where the pork barrel is landing in our world of financial services and was pleased to hear the Labour leader wanted us to be wealthy

There has been a part of socialism that I never got on with, it’s the part that wants everyone to dumb down and it’s the fatal flaw of a communist vision. Actually we all want to be wealthy and what we should be aiming for is universal wealth and happiness.

You would of course need a very large pork barrel to achieve universal wealth and I don’t think that’s what anybody think there is in the Treasury.

We should be making money by being productive – getting things done. I am tempted to say “hand-up not hand-out” but that political cliche has been so over-used that even this blog blanches at it.

But it is clear that dishing out money through the pork barrel is a pretty poor way of creating sustainable growth. There needs to be both an incentive and a means for people to become wealthy. The incentive is a Government that does not get in the way and the means is a  re-allocation of capital that allows further wealth creation (see numerous blogs on here about the parable of the tithes).

Almost everything that I read in the pension press is about wealth preservation. Virtually nothing is about wealth creation. The key to wealth preservation is the tax system and de-risking, but wealth creation depends on the deployment of  wealth in areas where risks can be rewarded. Whether we are talking about the hoarding of our national store of pension capital in gilts or the management of personal wealth in tax-advantaged savings accounts, the emphasis is the same. We are looking to pull up the drawbridge.

What is needed is neither the pork barrel or the drawbridge but the reinvestment of accumulated capital in projects of worth that generate lasting value in terms of ESG and provide the jobs and retirement funds for those generations for whom “wealth” seems a long way away.