I know what is trying to be said here, but the bit about pensions is rather wrong.

Will Hutton is quite right about our obsession with the legacy of Peter Mandelson . The redacted and non-redacted papers teach us nothing about how to live better, they are just a temptation to wallow in political gossip.

The problems with the misalignment of politics, pensions and technology is that they’re not joined up. We’re very good at technology and very good at saving for retirement, what we’re not good at is getting the money we save to keep our technology working for us in Britain, in particular as a way to pay better pensions.

Around the beginning of this century, we turned our back on investing our pensions and turned towards using debt to match our liabilities. We lost all interest in growth stocks of the type that flourished in America because of the American finance system.

Latterly, and this has only been when the pensions which we thought were bust turned out to be mis-valued (from the end of QA culminating in Oct 22), we realised we missed an opportunity. I won’t go into this because this blog is full of rage of the type I read in the second half of the post above.

We now have a new kind of fund taking on the job of pension funds in the 20th century. Nest and People’s Pension lead the way with WTW’s Lifespan and L&G’s master trust not far behind. There is much money tied up in smaller workplace pensions which will get to size and all these new megafunds are capable of turning UK technology into the kind of funds that can challenge for Britain and Europe the current technological hegemony we read about in our papers (see examples above).

These mega pension funds were hardly exposed to UK growth assets at all. Nest until recently had less than 4% of our money invested in Britain, now it is above 20% and will be 30% invested in UK growth by the start of the next decade. It is a fund which our Government has an interest in and it is influential.

It has decided to extend its investment to cover assets building up to retirement and increasingly assets backing pensions in payment. The new default fund that will be launched in 2027 will look very much like a pension fund as we knew them last century, a fund aligned to the needs of Britain , embracing the Mansion House Accord.

Similarly, we will see default funds emerging for those who take no decisions but depend on what trustees consider a regular income that lasts as long as the pensioner does. If these funds go the way of the new CDC funds being launched over the next 12 months, the income will aim to increase the income by inflation each year, aim to offer a pension to spouses if one survives the pensioner.

And this week we heard one of Britain’s largest pension fund investors, the American firm- BlackRock, estimating that a third of all the money sitting in pots and currently invested into pots, will switch to CDC pensions in the next few years. This will mean that the pension funds which did indeed sit by and not invest in UK growth will now be doing so as David Yelland calls for.

Ironically, this will be at the expense of ongoing investment into technology. This week , Vanguard, one of the world’s largest indexed funds, found that one of its funds now had over $1tr invested in it.

The next day we hear that Elon Musk’s Space-X has a business plan that values it at $1.78tr pounds at flotation. This is down to an estimate of its capacity to grow revenues within the next five years.

We should not be lambasting our pension funds but praising them. Until recently the vast majority of our funds were being shipped off to America to invest like the Vanguard S&P 500 – some in that fund. Now we are looking at listed and unlisted British stocks doing the same thing. I live two miles from Europe’s largest data center (in Slough), what is happening along the Thames is akin to Silicon Valley. There is growth in Manchester and Newcastle and many other parts of Britain and if we have the tenacity to complete the transformation of our pension funds – we will be as proud of Britain as Americans are of California.

I don’t write as an expert on technology, or an economist like Will Hutton but I sit at their feet and learn from them. I am about to become a pensioner from my savings and my rights to an income from the state pension but that does not mean I want to pull up the drawbridge on growth. For heaven’s sake, I’m only 64 and look forward to the second half of the century. That is why I will not permit my pension money to be invested anywhere where it doesn’t gain from growth, I believe that Britain will grow as America has. I am very pleased to have some of my money in Nest and want more of that money to buy me a CDC pension.