This is PLSA Investment Conference 2025. I have nothing against any of the three individuals and am actually very fond of Emma Douglas and Nausicaa Delfas. But I am not happy with the circumstances that brought these people together.
The circumstances are a talk, late at night, to a boozed up Conference audience less a boat load of delegates that had been bussed off for a private affair. What Nelson Fraser had to offer was a view of Britain that compared it favourably to other nations. Arguments were based on high immigration and a peaceful population.
This contrasted with the very different view of Britain painted by the pension minister the day before which was of Britain going bust if it did not grow, this morning Britain’s Domestic Product was announced was down in January. We are not in a good place.
What Fraser Nelson was doing talking to us I do not know but I did not clap at the end of his talk, nor did many at my table. We looked mystified that the subject was being discussed at 10 pm and that we could be congratulating each other on our good fortune. My experience of living in Britain is not good at present. It is not the experience of most people. This is what the Minister said
The country’s in a hole and people aren’t happy . This is not a fluffy 2004 and we are not getting another pension commission. pic.twitter.com/9SfKDwKoV9
— Henry Tapper (@henryhtapper) March 11, 2025
The fluffy 2004 was being recreated in a hall full of conference delegates who should have wondered off confused that a right-wing magazine’s editor, should be offering us such a radically different view.
The reality of 2025 is that Britain must change and our pension system must change with it. We need to adapt to deliver growth.
The bad reality that we are in and the choices that face us have been debated on this blog and were debated in Edinburgh,
At a section run by Justin Way of the PLSA, John Hamilton (Stagecoach) , Shalin Bhagwan (PPF) and Richard Williams (of USS) spelt out how we could move to a more productive society. All three schemes invests for the future, all have money in their surpluses to give more back to society and to members. They are restricted in investing in a way that could revive Britain but they are schemes that achieve more than most.
These fine schemes are a rarity these days as the draw-bridge is pulled up behind many of our great pension schemes so that the profits that could be invested in better societies and better members , is being used to line the pockets of insurers and overseas reinsurers.
It is important that our leaders, the CEO of the Pensions Regulator and the Chair of the PLSA are not getting caught up in the fluffy world of 2004 or the world created by the imagination of Fraser Nelson.
Maybe I am sounding like someone who doesn’t drink and should do. Maybe I should get excited by Nelson Fraser’s view of Britain as a nice place to be. But I’m not.
Instead, I am staying sober and siding with those who are fixing my eye on a world in 10 and 15 years which is called Great Britain not something else.
Read the book , go out and do it , don’t be a Spectator
Please read the wonderful comment by Derek Scott – available below.
As Fraser Nelson is a staunch “unionist”, and I’m not, I find it strange to be defending him today.
But he does get it, when writing for a different audience.
I suspect he may have misread the PLSA dinner audience, although maybe your table and a few others were in a minority?
I can recall the Flaming Ferraris at one Edinburgh Conference and on another occasion lambasted the NAPF Council for hailing a charity collection from Edinburgh delegates at one dinner of about £20,000,
when I was used to Scottish business people raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for charity at almost every dinner. (The last Edinburgh one I attended last year, and there were only four tables, raised £706,500.)
See Fraser’s December 2024 article for The (Glasgow) Herald below:
Like any city, Glasgow is a network of villages – and ones blessed with beautiful, almost fairytale names.
Castlemilk, Anniesland, Easterhouse, Drumchapel: when I worked in the postal sorting office in Govan, I’d think about the contrast between the romantic notions conjured up by the names on the letters I handled – and the reality on the ground.
The city’s west end is one of the world’s best places to live: architecture, parks, schools and a quality of life only millionaires could find in London. But in its east end, we find some of the worst poverty in Europe.
I’ve just finished making a documentary for Channel Four on sickness benefit and deprivation, looking to see where in the UK is worst affected. The first list of top 20 made came back as ‘England and Wales only,’ a phrase that drives any Scot mad. I asked for the full, national picture and when it came, the top 20 had been transformed. Most of names were Scottish. Easterhouse, Drumchapel, Glenwood, Dalmarnock.
The ‘Glasgow effect’ of ingrained poverty is now a familiar term, but we don’t seem much closer to understanding or solving it. When I was a reporter in the Scottish Parliament in its early years, drugs deaths in Glasgow were a national scandal: nine for very 100,000 people.
It seemed a very urban blight, explained by the legacy of post-industrialisation, addiction and worklessness. But none of that explains why every part of Scotland has since surged way past this point. It’s now 29 drugs deaths per 100,000 people in Ayrshire, 23 in the Forth Valley, Dumfries and Galloway. Glasgow still comes first at 33.
It’s now 22 years since Iain Duncan Smith, as Tory leader, visited Easterhouse and was appalled by the poverty, boarded-up tenements, discarded needles and signs of social decay. This ‘Easterhouse agenda’ led to the Centre for Social Justice (on whose advisory board I sit) and later, in welfare reforms cut worklessness to the lowest levels ever recorded.
But since Covid, things have rapidly worsened. At the last count, six million were on out-of-work benefits of some kind. Almost every country had lockdowns and furlough, but no other country has seen sickness benefits rise as fast as the UK (indeed, most countries have seen a fall). So it’s hard to blame long Covid, or that furlough made people lazy.
Looking around the world, this seems to be a very British problem. And Scotland’s most deprived neighbourhoods, yet again, seem to be at the sharp end of this problem. Look at a list of communities where sickness benefit is most prevalent and we see Easterhouse second out of 8,500 communities.
Almost a third of its working-age population is on sickness benefit. Then comes Drumchapel, Greenock, Ardrossan, Methil, Alloa: all about 30 per cent. The UK average is seven per cent.
The scandal is not perfectly-healthy people scamming the system. The scandal is that people who need real help aren’t getting it – and haven’t been for decades. In my documentary, I speak to whistleblowing ex-DWP assessors who say that the cursory phone interviews they conduct are nowhere near enough.
The process has an 80 per cent success rate, twice what it was in the early days. Not enough emphasis is placed on the need for medical evidence now; the system is so easily gamed that ‘sickfluencers’ have emerged on TikTok and similar platforms sharing tips on what buzzwords to say during the assessment.
Change has already come to Scotland, where disability benefits are devolved. But the new adult disability payment (ADP) is designed to make the application process easier still – fewer face-to-face interviews and lighter-touch eligibility reviews. And the cost? It was £2 billion last year and the Scottish Fiscal Commission expects it to be £4.5 billion by the next election.
That’s a rise faster than anything England is braced for. The new Scottish system makes it less stressful to claim. But what is being done to give people proper support to turn their lives around?
Two thirds of new sickness benefit claimants mention anxiety, depression or similar complaints. I spoke to GPs who say that, quite often, people like this are most in need of the distraction of work. The social isolation that can come with worklessness can make mental health problems harder to deal with.
The phrase ‘Glasgow effect’ is rightly controversial, suggesting a sense of helplessness – as if the poverty were as inevitable as the weather. It’s even worse seeing ‘Scotland effect’ start to fall into use, as if it’s obvious that parts of Fife and Clackmannanshire should go the same way.
What is clear is the old style of welfare is deepening the poverty it’s supposed to eradicate and trapping people it’s supposed to help. Glasgow, Scotland and Britain all deserve better.
Britain’s Benefits Scandal: Dispatches, presented by Fraser Nelson, aired on Channel 4 on Monday, December 2, 2024.
These Flaming Ferraris!
https://www.theguardian.com/business/1999/mar/06/1
Flaming Ferraris sacked
This article is more than 26 years old
By Dan Atkinson
Sat 6 Mar 1999 03.05 GMT
James Archer, whizz-kid son of Lord Archer, the millionaire novelist and prospective mayoral candidate, was sacked yesterday by Credit-Suisse First Boston, the investment bank, for his role in an alleged attempt to manipulate share prices. Two of Mr Archer’s colleagues were also dismissed.
The sackings effectively mark the downfall of the so-called Flaming Ferraris, the trading team touted only two months ago as the world’s most successful share-dealing desk. CSFB said: “We are… clear and consistent in demanding high ethical standards from our staff. There is no place in our organisation for those who do not meet such requirements.”
Two of the Ferraris – named after their favourite after-hours cocktail – remain at CSFB and are not implicated in the affair in any way. But with the dismissal of desk chief David Crisanti, his deputy Adrian Ezra and Mr Archer, the short-lived City legend is over.
Mr Ezra resigned on Thursday but CSFB is thought to have insisted that its standard 30-day notice period applies in his case. None of the three will be entitled to the 1998 bonuses paid to CSFB’s London staff this week.
All were suspended two and a half weeks ago after CSFB began an internal inquiry into allegations that Mr Archer had tried to manipulate the Swedish stock-market index by aggressively selling shares in the timber group Stora. That inquiry is now complete and is believed to have concluded that, whereas Mr Archer was solely responsible for the Stockholm trades, Messrs Crisanti and Ezra did not handle their subordinate correctly in the aftermath, once the trades came to light.
The affair is being investigated by the City’s chief regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and by CSFB’s ultimate supervisor, the Swiss Federal Banking Commission in Berne.
An inquiry by Sweden’s stock exchange is expected to be completed on Tuesday, and prosecutor Unje Rudberj is keeping a watching brief.
CSFB has acted solely on the results of its own inquiry.
Mr Archer, 24, left Oxford University only last summer and, along with his fellow Ferraris, hit the headlines last December when the team – which specialises in equity arbitrage, the exploitation of differences between different stock-market indices – was touted as having made money on all but 12 days in 1998, an extraordinary achievement given the economic turmoil of last year.
It was suggested that the Ferraris may have been about to share a £5 million bonus, but it was not clear whether this would have been split with the 11 other CSFB equity arbitrageurs around the world. As fascinating to the public as their success was, their off-duty high-life that included the eponymous cocktails the Ferraris would down at the Nam Long Vietnamese restaurant in London’s Old Brompton Road and the 10-seater limousine they hired to take them to their Christmas party at Nobu, the Japanese restaurant in Park Lane.
Mr Crisanti, 34, is a Princeton graduate in economics. Mr Ezra, a former Indian squash champion, is Harvard-educated and aged 26.
Mr Archer, schooled at Eton, studied chemistry at Oxford and was reported to be earning £250,000 a year. In common with his father, he was an outstanding athlete and later an enthusiastic fund-raiser for charity.
By way of a postscript, Henry, in 2001 an SFA disciplinary tribunal found that three of the five be struck off the SFA’s register following an attempt to manipulate the Swedish OMX index – the equivalent of Britain’s FTSE 100 – in December 1998.
Expelling the three friends from the register on which all City of London professionals must be listed, the regulator revealed that Mr Archer and Mr Ezra had been told to pay £50,000 to cover its costs, while Mr Crisanti must stump up £100,000.
In 2010, the Nasdaq OMX in Stockholm reviewed the ban on Mr Archer and stated that they would no longer object to his being given access to their markets, should the circumstances arise.
He re-registered in London in 2019 but according to the current FCA register he no longer needs to be registered.
I doubt that CSFB trading desk would have pitched up at an NAPF conference, and the conference didn’t move to Edinburgh until 2002, after the CSFB desk team had been disbanded.
My failing memory has probably conflated a picture of the Ferraris in one of the Scottish newspapers at the same time as when there would have been pickets at the NAPF dinner, as well as the daytime venue, but no press photographers at the dinner, so they used a library photo instead.
The point the newspaper(s) were making was about black tie dinners inside for some, while others were outside on the streets protesting.
I can remember HM Treasury’s Ruth Kelly being picketed at the 2003 Edinburgh conference, and I see you had climate protesters at this year’s conference.
These scenes never happened in Eastbourne, as I recall, but there was a constant reminder on the pavements surrounding the conference venue, of real pensioners outside walking.