The press and the BBC have, for once, been fairly critical of Gordon Brown and his pre-budget report. But not critical enough.
For the past year or more, the financial pages of all newspapers have been looking forward to the new pensions regime previously announced by Mr Brown. Standard Life said this morning that it, alone, had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds preparing for what Mr Brown had announced he would introduce - namely allowing pension funds to buy residential homes and other things such as fine wines. What Standard Life did, many other pension providers will also have done. So they have spent millions of pounds belonging to their shareholders - largely pension funds investing money for the retirements of many of us. Now Mr Brown gets up and says, "Ooops, sorry! I made a mistake. What I announced before is too open to abuse. I am now de-announcing it."
Except of course, he did not apologise. He has wasted money that was going to pay the pensions of millions of people. Pensions will, albeit fractionally, be lower as a result. But he did not apologise. The man has bungled. He has been incompetent. It has cost other people money. The press should have said all this bluntly.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Pensions
Comments (4)
TrackBack (9)
Comments
It won't just be the pension funds either. I suspect a number of investors will, like me, have taken expensive advice / already converted their personal pensions to SIPPs at considerable cost
to take advantage of the residential property provision.
If one were cynical you might think that GB's change of heart was more to do with the difficulty of taxing these sort of pension assets.
As they are fond of saying at Samizdata, "the State is not your friend".
Posted by: Paul Robinson at December 6, 2005 11:10 AM
Agreed – I’d say nowhere near as critical as they should be. Watching Newsnight last night, I was fuming when the presenter said “Gordon Brown may have been unlucky with his growth forecasts, but how well did he do with his borrowing?”. ‘Unlucky’? What on earth does he expect to happen when he is spending at European levels, shoving money into unreformed public services, strangling business with red tape, and encouraging people to be ‘ill’ because it no longer pays to work at the bottom of the labour market? Luck didn’t play a part.
A quick look at the Guardian columnists last night (William Keegan and Jonathan Freedland) confirmed my fears; they seem to be entirely unaware of the reasons for economic slowdown, and repeat the myth that Brown has managed the economy well. They even accept unquestioningly the explanation he offered for the slowdown; high oil prices. Strange when the UK only just became a net importer of oil, and other countries that have to import far more are booming.
On Radio 4 this morning, Gordon Brown described the ‘internal shock’ that is the housing market slowdown. Firstly, how a slight levelling of prices can be described as a 'shock' is beyond me. Secondly, I was taught that the housing market reflects other underlying trends in the economy: consumers are always going to be less willing to move house when their job is less secure and they have less disposable income.
Posted by: Alec Hodgson at December 6, 2005 11:11 AM
The difference between Gordo and Captain Bob ?
Maxwell was at least honest about being a crook !
The waste of money in public services is comical.
Anyone who works in any of the big 'state industries' will tell you that there are vast amounts of money wasted on pointless bureaucratic junk, which has a *detrimental* effect on the quality of the product, because the aim is always to hit the government targets, not to actually do the job properly.
Everyone knows at heart that the way to move the country on is to have a bonfire of the quangocracies, but no-one is willing to do it. Here's hoping for Cameron.
Cuts are always passed on to the bottom rung. This means that Doctors,Nurses,Policemen, Teachers, Social Workers are cut back, never the bureaucrats, they just pass the cuts on.
Posted by: Paul at December 6, 2005 05:59 PM
Warning: file(http://63.247.138.2/~bartholo/randomquotes.dump) [function.file]: failed to open stream: No route to host in /home/bartholo/public_html/archives/2005/12/gordon_brown_ha.php on line 320
Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in /home/bartholo/public_html/archives/2005/12/gordon_brown_ha.php on line 320
My question for Brown supporters is the following:
What is the difference between Gordon Brown and Robert Maxwell?
Maxwell intended, at least in theory, to pay back the pension money he stole. Brown is proud of having no such intention.
At various times, pollsters ask people if they would be prepared to pay a little more tax if the NHS or Education improved. Well, they've had their pensions stolen, and both those services seem to have got worse. Surely pollsters should be pointing this out, and asking how many people think they got good value for money?
The great political debate at present seems to be when Brown becomes Prime Minister. I'm more curious as to how he has managed to avoid his head being stuck on a pike on London Bridge ...
Posted by: Robert Dammers at December 6, 2005 11:03 AM