Hark at Liberal Democrat Steve Webb. Where once he suggested you might take your pension pot and buy a Lamborghini, now he is having to do the rounds of the media saying “When it’s gone, it’s gone”, as my mum says. But the interesting bit is this quote:
The three government-backed “guidance” services that are supposed to aid those looking to cash in their pension pots cannot currently be promoted publicly for fear of breaking strict pre-election rules.
Liberal Democrat Steve Webb has had a year from the 2014 budget to get this working. Liberal Democrat Steve Webb has, however, run out of time before the pre-election purdah kicks in to get it working. Look at Liberal Democrat Steve Webb.
Unlike Liberal Democrat Steve Webb, I don’t believe anyone’s actually going to cash the whole lot and blow it on hookers and coke – I’m more worried about daft business ideas, buy-to-let mania, and dodgy investment schemes. But as far as I can see it, Steve Webb has given every scam artist in the kingdom five weeks’ head start on the honking big pile of money.
Liberal Democrat Steve Webb is an embarrassment, but the scary thing here is that this is exactly the sort of thing his officials should have caught. What with fixed-term parliaments, the date of the election was perfectly predictable years in advance. Either the civil service has lost its grip on the calendar, or they were overruled.
When we look back on the Coalition, I think we will see it either as the era of the pet project and the half-baked thinktank, now happily closed, or else the point when we began to realise that the institutions were doomed, that a bit of the commonwealth might come off in your hand, that Somerset just went soggy and the Cabinet Office thinks you should keep petrol in your kitchen.
It’s a choice between competence and chaos, as someone said.
PS: I’m not bound by any pre-election rules, so Pensions Wise is the service you’re looking for and that Liberal Democrat Steve Webb should have organised a mass publicity campaign about 6 months ago if he hadn’t left it in the pub.
It’s a difficult one though. Would we rather that some sanity is restored next month, or do we want Steve Webb to have to do some form of nasty compulsory slave labour when he joins the dole queue on 8th May?
As a constituent of Webb, he will probably just about survive because he has the reputation for being a good constituency MP. I’d say unfortunately, but if not it means another Tory deadhead instead.
But, piss-ups and breweries aside, I’m surprised that not much has been made of the breaking of the old bargain that pension tax relief was the quid pro quo for relieving the government of some future costs of old age. Now “pensions” are just another ISA – we give money to the relatively rich for, what exactly?
Shouldn’t we have different priorities?
It isn’t a pension if you can cash it in.
I wonder how much moaning there will be 20 years from now when those who cashed in their pensions cannot afford a home help.
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Thread derail – but this is the right community to ask, so I humbly beg forgiveness…
I do a bit of part time uni teaching – there’s a student getting interested in systems (a la Stafford Beer) What’s a good introductory book to recommend to them?
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I don’t know if you’ve read any of Dominic Cummings blog (or articles).
I got interested in him because he has some interesting sense that our education curriculum is behind the times. However, he is a doctrinaire right-winger in a lot of ways, so be aware.
His posts about his time as a SPAD and his thoughts on the civil service are revealing though. It feels very much as though one story of the Thatcher era to the present is one of politicians giving up on the civil service and through outsourcing and consultants just looking to route around it. Problem with that is that it hasn’t really fixed any of the extant problems with the service (and Cummings has some good points on some of those issues) _and_ in undermining the service through “routing around” things that did work have been broken too…
Yes, I have, because I find him interesting psychologically. He’s right wing, but trying a bit to be evidence based, yet has no background in real life stuff (you know, like a science degree and work) and I really sympathise with him seemingly trying to pull together lots of disparate ideas, people, evidence etc to make sense of this huge complex world we live in. The problem being that he has difficulty being discriminating about what ideas he pulls in, and is too much in love with himself to be honest about it all.
The other point about re-routing around the civil service is that the corporations who you get to do the work have the same personnel issues and bureacratic problems that the civil service has.
Generally agree with your assessment of DC, he’s particularly prone to bigging up weak scientific evidence when it supports his views…
Absolutely agree that re-routing doesn’t improve anything on the efficiency/effectiveness front, but I’m writing a book chapter where I feel I’ve gathered a reasonable timeline of politicians seeing (and using) outsourcing to drive through ideological changes…
Sounds interesting, let us know what the book is when appropriate.
I’m sure there are people who will disagree but I personally think that we can regard Beerist cybernetics / O.R. as being dead and therefore anything looking at them would have to be historical or antique. The thing that is closest to it is presumably ‘systems thinking’ or similar so how about http://www.amazon.co.uk/Systems-Thinking-Practice-Includes-Retrospective/dp/0471986062 (which I must admit I have read but barely remember).
For a book on cybernetics / O.R. as would be understood by Beer I would personally recommend ‘Operational Research in War and Peace’ http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/p247
There is of course Pickering’s book http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo8169881.html which has chapters on Beer, Ashby, Walter etc. – this is somewhat longer and heavier going than the OR in War and Peace and I didn’t really get on with it – it is a mixture of history and Pickering’s view of What It All Means which is a sort of ‘f’ing the ineffable’ I couldn’t get to grips with’.
If your student is interested in Cybersyn then Medina’s book http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries is excellent. Not only can she write well but, gasp, she has actually been to Chile to talk to people in a language that isn’t English – frequently in tech histories things outside the Anglophonie don’t figure. It also I think goes beyond what Beer would have liked to happen to what actually did happen.
I personally think Beer is an awful writer – there is a collection which is rather better than most http://www.amazon.co.uk/Many-Grapes-Went-Into-Wine/dp/0471942960 (second hand copies seem to be cheaper than they used to be – note that Amazon is misleading, the two named people are editors, it is Beer’s writing apart from maybe a short history -my copy has been lent to someone for years so I can’t check)
Thanks for this.
Lots to look into.
I think that there’s still quite a bit of Beer left in this: http://www.open.ac.uk/postgraduate/qualifications/e28
Fascinating.
Know anyone who has access to the syllabus/reading lists?
Yes, me, but since my employer’s business plan (and hence, my income) is predicated on people paying for this rather than giving it away for nothing, I’m not going to dig them out. Sorry about that. I can say that a mate of mine has just done the course and she is now my go-to consultant of choice.
Fair enough. Many universities are happy to share reading lists, so I thought it worth asking.
Sorry: whereas with them the reading list is often an add-on to the main information delivery thang – lectures and seminars – with us it tends to be closely integrated into the info delivery, which is written teaching material. Thus it’s hard to separate it from the family silver. We’ve got this on the near side of the paywall, which might be interesting. http://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/computing-and-ict/systems-computer/systems-thinking-and-practice/content-section-0
That’s great, thank you – gives said student a bit of intro and some references to explore – so then they can work out if they want to pursue it further.
(After all, I could have put a list together for them, but I’m just too busy at the moment… It’s coming up on exam time in the class I’m teaching this term…)
Extra question – do you know which course (it says it is no longer current) that is from and who taught it? I might have an interesting research collaboration opportunity for that person…
Ignore that question, digging further, it’s clear that if it suits anyone it would be Karen Shipp.