What have the FT’s four top stories got in common? The answer is of course they all involve blockages between major super powers ; – India, UK, US, Canada and Europe are all busy trying to understand future trading and immigration issues with each other.

In reality, human labour is simply another commodity to throw into debates about trade. National insurance will be cheaper for Indian workers arriving on visas in the UK, UK will be sending and receiving labour to Europe, the US foreign policy as it touches Canada and China in these articles is about nationalism rather than globalism and what comes out of America’s perception of itself. In truth Britain is moving in precisely the opposite direction. I live in the City of London, I really do not sense my being British such is the extraordinary diversity of nationality around me.

Here I think is a great difference between financial services and the manufacturing of physical products. I may be dealing with any country at any time and may be used to the calculations of exchange rates as part of my fiscal language but this is not what most of the people in this country experience. Farage has worked that out, Trump has worked it out and there are strong nationalist forces at work in many European countries. It is wrong for us to consider ourselves right for having the money under our control. It is not our money, it is the money of our nation and we cannot globalise that money to a degree that we are doing right now. Sooner or later people will start asking what Britain is about.

There is an extraordinary change happening in our society as ordinary people show how fed up they are with being taken for granted and vote en masse for change. We have not seen this anger in pensions because people don’t understand them but they do understand what being poor in retirement looks like. That is why the great howl of indignation has gone up by ordinary people who feel they will be increasing winter fuel payments.

If I was Farage, I would start asking some very real questions (to those who know very little) about what pensions actually are. We seem happy enough with our state pension and used to understand we got a bit more from earnings (SERPS or S2P) and there were private pensions that people went after by joining firms like Royal Mail that did them or the public system which did them. But millions of people did not substantially work for bosses who paid income after they retired and the promise was that a new tax “auto-enrolment” which you could opt out of – would mean you did get a pension from your boss.

Of course you don’t get the pension from the boss but that’s the way that it’s hard coded into people’s head and the truth is that 13 years in from the start of auto-enrolment, people are finding they don’t get a pension but a pot and that the pot may look healthy enough if it was winnings from a TV quiz but does not last very long as a replacement income. Infact it’s not a replacement issue at all.

The top stories are about how to protect nation’s people from the terrors of tariffs and yet we have failed to consider these momentous matters in one of our most financial sectors, our pension provision.

Pensions are very much like my life in the City, they are global and we do not consider they have anything to do with the kind of issues outlined by the FT in the four stories they highlight this morning.

But if we look at what matters to ordinary people this morning and we find there is a different issue – affordability – and especially affordability of winter payment allowance for those who have no security of income from work.