Last Sunday lunchtime I sat in front of a group of 100 delegates at a fringe meeting of a union conference. We talked about them wanting their pensions back, of how they and their children could get paid a wage in retirement based on them saving for one at work.

My friend Damian has worked around actuaries most of his life and writes this piece with the same indignation as the delegates have. It’s indignation that people are being given choices that are too hard because actuaries have left them to it.

Here Damian and I , though of an age and background , differ radically. I do not think it should be people’s responsibility to engage with a world of freedom. I can see that if we had the capacity of David Bowie to take control we’d do our own thing with complex financial products. But we’re not that eager to get engaged with the way we get paid in retirement. We’ve been told we’re in workplace pensions and that the deduction on our payslip will pay us something in excess of the state pension. We were also told that of Serps and then S2P – that went in 2016.

Serps was dismantled by politicians , in harness with insurance companies , who thought that personal pensions (or the money purchase equivalent in occupational schemes) would be better for us than SERPS (or S2P as it became known).

The inevitable conclusion to the movement to personal pensions was pension freedom and it eventually arrived midway through the last decade. But it was not a replacement for SERPS , or a Defined Benefit Occupational Pension Scheme. It’s no use complaining that people don’t know how to operate pensions in a world of pension freedoms. They were never told they would have that job, never educated , never even warned. It was just thrust upon them.

Now , when Government is pushing for CDC and defaults in our workplace DC pension schemes, there is at last a recognition that we have left people with no way to turn pot to pension that’s within their grasp. It is the nastiest hardest problem Damian, the one that we can’t solve.

We can post pictures that frighten us into paying attention , we can throw stuff about the Land of the Blind and of ” the one eyed man” being king. We can do that in the pension bubble. But if I’d laid into the 100 working men and women in the hall in Brighton about them not paying attention to their pension (or some such phrase) I’d rightly have got ripped to shreds.

Barbara Castle gave us a state second pension, Margaret Thatcher took it away. Occupational DB pension schemes were supported by working men and women, workplace DC pensions baffle them. There are a lot of people who want their own pot and responsibility for their finances in retirement.

There are more who want a pension paid to them without them having to do anything but choose to take cash, choose whether their money goes to their spouse if they die first.

We cannot all be David Bowies, Damian. We cannot all be leaders or even self-sufficient. Most of us need a lot of help from all the people you mention!