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Sunlight On Pensions

Good to see Michael O'Higgins, the new Chair of the UK Pensions Regulator making a splash in his first interview. He's quoted in Tuesday's FT as saying providers should be obliged to compare their returns against their fees and other charges, including brokerage and dealing costs.

He admits transparency is key to building public trust in pensions, implying there isn't much.

Add that level of transparency to the focus on improving administration and record-keeping, and we should see some more pension scandals come to light in 2011.

What fun!

Next job: fill the black hole.

Cleese, Fry, Lumley & Izzard v Beckett, Blunkett & Prescott

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the battle for electoral reform is that the leading 'Yes' campaigners share great comic wit and timing, while the leading 'No' campaigners merely have surnames that end in 'tt'.

The result should be a triumph of pragmatism over the petty self-interest of has-been Labour politicians.

But the Double-T's will try to make it a vote on t' economy, t' spending cuts, t' cost and t' complexity or some other basis for moral panic.

Personally, I plan to have a lot of fun at their expense.

Big Society: The Trend Continues

I must say I'm enjoying all this "Big Society" malarkey. The debate about what in the hell it means, the irony of Liverpool City Council complaining it doesn't have to fund its involvement (which is the point, after all), the claims that volunteering is in decline, the claims that volunteering is doing just fine.

Wavy Dave must be pleased that it's all travelling in the right direction.

Because the big idea in the "Big Society", if there is one, is really for the Tories to make political capital out of a number of trends that have been building and converging throughout the past decade. They know that faith in our institutions has been in decline, that various facilitators are enabling us to personalise retailing, entertainment, travel, finance, politics and now public services. They know that everyone (except investment bank executives) is focused on sustainability and how to achieve more with less. They know these trends are not going to ebb away any time soon.

But who cares if the Tories try to claim the credit? That's politics. I'm all for having more Big Society debates. The more we focus on the problems of how to deliver public services more cost-effectively and efficiently, the better.

Office Of The Devil's Advocate

I fancy that the perceived utility of Devil's advocacy has largely suffered from a having bad name. Which is hardly fair, given both its effectiveness and its holy origins. Although the Catholic church saw the value in appointing a canon lawyer to argue against an allegedly saintly person's canonization, other institutions were too timid to follow suit. And when the Catholic church itself replaced the 400 year old role with a lighter weight "Promoter of Justice" in 1983 it 'opened the floodgates' to 500 new saints, when only 98 had been canonised in the preceding 83 years. The role of Devil's advocate might well have been overdone from time to time, but the watered-down replacement clearly didn't cut it as force for critical thought.

Of course, the advent of the lighter weight Promoter of Justice coincided with the secular trend of appointing 'independent' commissions, internal auditors and other functionaries to review, audit or otherwise evaluate our institutions. Yet, just as we have more saints, we also seem to have corruption and fraud on a grander scale than ever before, and the world teeters on the brink of financial meltdown [cue thunder].

The most recent example of such lightweight independent review is the IMF's Independent Evaluation Office assessment of the IMF's response to the financial crisis. The IEO has waited until 2011 to announce that the IMF was guilty of "groupthink" and a lack of critical thought between 2004 and 2008 and so failed to recognise and respond adequately to the sub-prime crisis. Which means the IEO hasn't been terribly effective either for most of the decade.

So it occurs to me that we need to reintroduce a force for unadulterated critical thought - for Devil's advocacy - in all our institutions. We could put a Devil's Advocate on each of our Boards, in Parliament, in the Cabinet and at the top of each of our regulatory authorities. Each DA's office would act as a lightning rod for critical thought about each institution. And as the DA's figured out how to destroy our institutions, we'd be able to respond to the threats and opportunities they'd identified (in the same way Jack Welch once challenged GE's business units to simultaneously destroy and adapt their own businesses).

Which is all fine in principle.

The Devil's in the detail.

Image from Ask Sister Mary Martha.