Damian

My friend Damion Stancombe thinks about abstract concepts like “collectives”  philosophically. He started each of his three short videos this  week with some words

The first clearly referenced a great night at the Anfield of Liverpool FC and what it did for his sense of collectivism. Or is that “solidarity”? It’s going reasonably well for Liverpool, they’re fourth in the table as I write, they still have moaners for the glory days of Klopp to Shankly – that’s part of the fun.

The second of these videos is here

Clearly this was written in the wake of a recent Manchester Utd game (since then things have got worse with a 0-3 home defeat to Bournemouth. The Man Utd fans like my friend Hilary Salt still turn out – they take the ups and downs which is very much a part of collective solidarity, something that Damian observes the Dutch have and the British seem to be losing. I’m not sure about that.

Frankly no one likes losing, there have been periods early in this century when stock markets went down, when bonds went down in value when any mixed pension fund went down. There have been times when football teams go down, look at Tottenham and West Ham last season.

I wrote a comment to say that getting 60,000 in Anfield happened whether Liverpool were winning or losing, we’d like to think that Yeovil fans remain whether in Championship or National League South.

The third of the three is here.

The first clearly referenced  being in a joyous crowd at Liverpool FC and what it did for his sense of collectivism.  He felt this for a short time.

The second explored the fracturing of solidarity at Man Utd as they go through more than a decade of mis-management.

This third one suggests that we no longer have the will to act in unison – collectively – patiently.

What does this mean for pensions?

I am quite sure that despite the regulation on CDC , despite the three continuity options (taking the place of PPF) there will be doubts about CDC by those in it just as there are doubts about Man Utd, Yeovil and even Liverpool fans. But to say that we don’t remember and aspire to regaining the good times is wrong – even when we’re down.

There have been times when people have enjoyed times. People getting their state pension are getting something that 30 or 40 years ago they didn’t think would be there for them. Many people of my boomer generation are benefiting from DB pensions and many people still are – mainly public sector – but people just the same, many of them at the football grounds!

When Burnham said we had to go back to the 198os, he could have been talking pensions when the second pension was SERPS and often Final Salary, that worked Damian. It worked until both parties wrecked it with tax policy and then with a mark to market accounting method that blew away best estimates and replaced it with mark to market accounting.

What is coming back, inch by inch, is that sense of “can do” that happens when you stick together with solidarity between employees, between employers and have at first unions driving these values.  It will not be universal but it will be there for the bottom tiers of what you call Maslow’s triangle and I call an adequate wage in retirement!

You don’t have an Arab Spring unless governance has totally broken down and has to be changed by force. We will look back at what happened in the first quarter of the century was a bad time for pensions, we may want to go back like Burnham to the days of Barbara Castle and not the days of Norman Fowler, the days when pensions were collective.

That doesn’t mean that people can’t chose to go it alone, many did even at the height of collective DB and SERPS but we aspired to be in a pension and knew what that meant.

Not everyone wants to go to football; some go to music festivals some congregate to worship. Few of us choose to fragment from what we grew up with, our society in Britain is a strong one.