Infamously, last Thursday, as my friend Tom was being lauded by the shadow SOS, I suggested to the not very crowded meeting in Edinburgh a repeat of David Cameron’s trick with Ros Altmann.
Ros had been made a baroness and installed into the House of Lords so she could be Pensions Minister for the Government.
I suggested that Helen Whately suggested Tom McPhail be promoted to be a peer and be an unelected pension spokesperson for the Conservative party.
I will not call the Conservatives the opposition as there are several of them but the Tories have found an opportunistic way to get popular with the ABI, Pensions UK , IFS , Steve Webb and especially Tom McPhail.
The Tories pretend trustee investment of pension funds is impeccable. For them and their high minded friends , mandation is giving the Government a right to pollute fiduciary air by letting rip a loud and smelly fart. That’s nonsense.
I am delighted to find that this nonsense from the great and good is not making it to the top of the Corporate Adviser’s pops. A rather more pragmatic approach to getting ordinary people up to 60% better pensions is #1.
The lower house may find the whole argument about mandation too boring for them and give the Lords its amendment but I think that unlikely and so does another former Pensions Minister who sounds a little more realistic than the rest of the opposition.
Either way will make very little difference to most of us that do not breathe the thin fiduciary air that we pretend’s for them.
Pensions for ordinary people are the payments they spend to go on holiday or buy their groceries. Ordinary people have no regard for the niceties of fiduciary duties. They want value from the portion of their pay they and their bosses put away for later.
