There is one paragraph in this article that sprung out at me because I am currently saving into a Nest pension and because I had not realised that less than 2p in every £1 I hold in a Nest pot invests in UK quoted equities.

Nest, which manages over £50bn, said about 1.75 per cent of its total assets were invested in UK equities at the end of March. Liz Fernando, chief investment officer at Nest, told the FT in an interview that she had been “actively encouraging” all of Nest’s partner managers to look for UK assets.

I think that if you asked a random sample of the 13m who invest in Nest where they thought their money went, they would not tell you they knew that more than 98p in the £1 was not invested in UK companies but in other things.

I spent yesterday speaking with a young editor at the Guardian who was trying to work out how a successful pension system that prior to the turn of the century was doing rather well turned into a pension system that has cost companies a fortune but stopped investing more than 2p in the £1 of our money in the businesses spending all the money.

The moments that changed British pensions from an economic miracle to items to de-risk were the points when we moved from “best endeavours” to “lock down” and that is about accounting and not about investment. We stopped wanting to invest in Britain and started reading about Swensen who was working at Yale and managing their money. He believed that private not public markets were a source of real returns and though hidden from public view, gave opportunities to the smart (Swensen). He believed that if you weren’t as smart as him, you should invest in indices of publicly quoted funds which was cheap and as effective as you could find. Either way , diversification was the one freebie, guaranteeing you lower risk without lower reward  than investing in a concentrated way.

The net result was that growth assets concentrated in the UK were reorganised into global equity funds or into alternatives that delivered opaque returns but never the bad news you could get from a publicly quoted stock (until much later).

Put Swenson together with lock-down pension economics and you end up with a pension scheme that does not invest in UK equities (or only 2p in the pound).

We have to work out in our collective head whether Britain’s economy would benefit from pension money being invested at more than 2p in £1 or not. If we don’t want to invest in the UK and want to diversify into other places to put our money then Britain will be owned by third parties. Most of the large companies we pride ourselves in are quoted abroad or privately owned by overseas investors.

We now see a whole host of fund managers, asset holders and consultants discussing whether Britain should be owned as it is or by our long term investors (particularly pensions). A group of investment gurus went to Government and told them the reality

Participants .. said companies were facing a “doom loop” caused by domestic pension funds being net sellers of UK equities for nine consecutive years.

2p in the pound investment in the UK was put to side and the experts made it clear what they thought the country (and pensions) needed.

Targets of 5 per cent, 8 per cent and 10 per cent were discussed as reasonable thresholds to consider, and there was broad agreement that defined contribution schemes should be prioritised over defined benefit schemes.

At this point we should not be arguing about the difference of a DC , a CDC or a DB pension, we should be thinking of pensions as long-term and capital as there to pay income not to be redeemed at retirement. This being the case it is hard to see why investment in the long term is anything but a bet on Britain, if we don’t want to take a long-term bet on our country, then let’s lock down pensions. If we want Britain to be Great Britain again, let’s start backing our companies as we once did.