Figleaf Economics

12. November 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: COVID-19, Demographics, Economics, Legal, Media & Politics, Professions

In my last post I referred to Dan Wang’s excellent new book, Breakneck, which I have now read at (for me) breakneck speed, finishing it in a week. It has made me realise how very little I knew about China.

Wang makes the point that China today is reminiscent of the US of a century ago. However he also makes the point that parts of the US were terrible to live in then: from racist segregation and lack of representation, to massive industrial pollution and insensitive planning decisions. As he says of the US:

The public soured on the idea of broad deference to US technocrats and engineers: urban planners (who were uprooting whole neighborhoods), defense officials (who were prosecuting the war in Vietnam), and industry regulators (who were cozying up to companies).

China meanwhile has a Politburo stuffed with engineers and is capable of making snap decisions without much regard to what people want. There is a sense of precarity about life there, with people treated as aggregates rather than as individuals. The country can take off in different directions very quickly and often does – there is a telling passage about the totally different life experiences of someone born in 1959 compared to someone born in 1949 (the worst year to be born in China according to Wang) – and even the elites can be dealt with brutally if they fall out of line with the current direction of travel. But they have created some impressive infrastructure, something which has become problematic for the US. Only around 10% of its GDP goes towards social spending, compared to 20% in the US and 30% amongst some European states, so there is no effective safety net. Think of the US portrayed in (as Christmas is fast approaching) “It’s a Wonderful Life” – a life that is hard to the point of brutality with destitution only one mistake away. And there is a level of social control alien to the west, controlling where people can live and work and very repressive of ethnoreligious minorities. And yet there is a feeling of progress and forward momentum which appears to be popular with most people in China.

As Wang notes at the end of his introduction:

“Breakneck” is the story of the Chinese state that yanked its people into modernity – an action rightfully envied by much of the world – using means that ran roughshod over many – an approach rightfully disdained by much of the world. It is also a reminder that the United States once knew the virtues of speed and ambitious construction.

The chapter on the one child policy, which ran for 35 years, is particularly chilling (China announced its first population fall in 2023 and its population is projected to halve to 700 million by 2100), and now the pressure is on women to have more children again. There is also a chapter on how China dealt with Covid – Wang experienced this first hand from Shanghai for 3 years – which made me understand perhaps why we wasted so much money in the UK on Track and Trace. You would need to be an engineering state to see it through successfully, and China ended up taking it too far in the end.

The economics of China is really interesting. As Wang notes:

China’s overbuilding has produced deep social, financial and environmental costs. The United States has no need to emulate it uncritically. But the Chinese experience does offer political lessons for America. China has shown that financial constraints are less binding than they are cracked up to be. As John Maynard Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” For an infrastructure-starved place like the United States, construction can generate long-run gains from higher economic activity that eventually surpass the immediate construction costs. And the experience of building big in underserved places is a means of redistribution that makes locals happy while satisfying fiscal conservatives who are normally skeptical of welfare payments.

This goes just as much for the UK, where pretty much everywhere outside London is infrastructure-starved (and, as Nicholas Shaxson and John Christensen show here in their written evidence to a UK Parliamentary Committee, even where infrastructure is built outside London, the financing of it sucks money away from the area where the infrastructure is being built and towards finance centres, predominantly in London), but there is also strong resistance from all the main parties to significant redistribution via the benefit system. This results in inequalities which even the FT feels moved to comment on and a map of multiple deprivation in England which looks like this:

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way in the UK, there are prominent examples of countries operating in a different way, eg China. The bad news is that China is not doing it because of economics. They are doing it because the state was set up to build big from the beginning. It is in its nature. The lesson of China is that it will keep doing the same things whatever the situation (eg trying to fix the population fall caused by an engineering solution with another engineering solution). Sometimes the world economy will reward their approach and sometimes it will punish it, but that will not be the primary driver for how they behave. I think this may be true of the US, the EU states and the UK too.

Daniel Kahneman showed us in Thinking Fast and Slow, how most of our mental space is used to rationalise decisions we have already taken. One of the places where I part company with Wang is in his reverence for economists. He believes that the US should listen more to both engineers and economists to challenge the lawyerly society.

In the foreword for The Principles of Economics Course from 1990 by Phillip Saunders and William Walstad, Paul Samuelson, the first person from the US to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1970, wrote:

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.” It was a poet who said that, exercising occupational license. Some sage, it may have been I, declared in similar vein: “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economic textbooks.” The first lick is the privileged one, impinging on the beginner’s tabula rasa at its most impressionable state.

My view would be that the economists are already in charge.

As a result, my fear is that economics is now used for rationalising decisions we have already made in many countries now, including our own. We are going to do what we are going to do. The economics is just the fig leaf we use to rationalise what may otherwise appear unfair, cruel, divisive and hope-denying policies. The financial constraints are less than they are cracked up to be, but they are a convenient fiction for a government which lacks any guiding principles for spending and investment otherwise and therefore fears that everyone would just be asking for more resources in its absence, and they would have no way of deciding between them.

Boxes

24. October 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Birmingham, COVID-19, Legal, Media & Politics, Regulation, Risk
The warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark

In the year when I was born, Malvina Reynolds recorded a song called Little Boxes when she was a year younger than I am now. If you haven’t heard it before, you can listen to it here. You might want to listen to it while you read the rest of this.

I remember the first time I felt panic during the pandemic. It was a couple of months in, we had been working very hard: to put our teaching processes online, consulting widely about appropriate remote assessments and getting agreement from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) for our suggested approach at Leicester, checking in with our students, some of who had become very isolated as a result of lockdowns, and a million other things. I was just sitting at my kitchen table and suddenly I felt tears welling up and I was unable to speak without my voice breaking down. It happened at intervals after that, usually during a quiet moment when I, consciously or unconsciously, had a moment to reflect on the enormity of what was going on. I could never point to anything specific that triggered it, but I do know that it has been a permanent change about me, and that my emotions have been very much closer to the surface ever since. I felt something similar again this morning.

What is going on? Well I haven’t been able to answer that satisfactorily until now, but recently I read an article by David Runciman in the LRB from nine years ago when Donald Trump got elected POTUS the first time. I am not sure that everything in the article has withstood the test of time, but in it Runciman makes the case for Trump being the result of the people wanting “Trump to shake up a system that they also expected to shield them from the recklessness of a man like Trump.”. And this part looks prophetic:

[Trump is]…the bluntest of instruments, indiscriminately shaking the foundations with nothing to offer by way of support. Under these conditions, the likeliest response is for the grown-ups in the room to hunker down, waiting for the storm to pass. While they do, politics atrophies and necessary change is put off by the overriding imperative of avoiding systemic collapse. The understandable desire to keep the tanks off the streets and the cashpoints open gets in the way of tackling the long-term threats we face. Fake disruption followed by institutional paralysis, and all the while the real dangers continue to mount. Ultimately, that is how democracy ends.

And it suddenly hit me that this was something I had indeed taken for granted my whole life until the pandemic came along. The only thing that had ever looked like toppling society itself was the prospect of a nuclear war. Otherwise it seemed that our political system was hard to change and impossible to kill.

And then the pandemic came along and we saw government national and local digging mass graves and then filling them in again and setting aside vast arenas for people to die in before quietly closing them again. Rationing of food and other essentials was left to the supermarkets to administer, as were the massive snaking socially-distanced queues around their car parks. Seemingly arbitrary sets of rules suddenly started appearing at intervals about how and when we were allowed to leave the house and what we were allowed to do when out, and also how many people we could have in our houses and where they were allowed to come from. Most businesses were shut and their employees put on the government’s payroll. We learned which of us were key workers and spent a lot of time worrying about how we could protect the NHS, who we clapped every Thursday. It was hard to maintain the illusion that society still provided solid ground under our feet, particularly if we didn’t have jobs which could be moved online. Whoever you were you had to look down at some point, and I think now that I was having my Wile E. Coyote moment.

The trouble is, once you have looked down, it is hard to put that back in a box. At least I thought so, although there seems to have been a lot of putting things in boxes going on over the last few years. The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has made itself available online via a YouTube channel, but you might have thought that a Today at the Inquiry slot on terrestrial TV would have been more appropriate, not just covering it when famous people are attending. What we do know is that Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Advisor throughout the pandemic, has said that another pandemic is “absolutely inevitable” and that “we are not ready yet” for such an eventuality. Instead we have been busily shutting that particular box.

The biggest box of course is climate change. We have created a really big box for that called the IPCC. As the climate conferences migrate to ever more unapologetic petro-states, protestors are criminalised and imprisoned and emissions continue to rise, the box for this is doing a lot of work.

And then there are all the NHS boxes. As Roy Lilley notes:

If inquiries worked, we’d have the safest healthcare system in the world. Instead, we have a system addicted to investigating itself and forgetting the answers.

But perhaps the days of the box are numbered. The box Keir Starmer constructed to contain the anger about grooming gangs which the previous 7 year long box had been unable to completely envelop also now appears to be on the edge of collapse. And the Prime Minister himself was the one expressing outrage when a perfectly normal British box, versions of which had been giving authority to policing decisions since at least the Local Government (Review of Decisions) Act 2015 (although the original push to develop such systems stemmed from the Hillsborough and Heysel disasters in 1989 and 1985 respectively) suddenly didn’t make the decision he was obviously expecting. That box now appears to be heading for recycling if Reform UK come to power, which is, of course, rather difficult to do in Birmingham at the moment.

But what is the alternative to the boxes? At the moment it does not look like it involves confronting our problems any more directly. As Runciman reflected on the second Trump inauguration:

Poor Obama had to sit there on Monday and witness the mistaking of absolutism for principle and spectacle for politics. I don’t think Trump mistakes them – he doesn’t care enough to mind what passes for what. But the people in the audience who got up and applauded throughout his speech – as Biden and Harris and the Clintons and the Bushes remained glumly in their seats – have mistaken them. They think they will reap the rewards of what follows. But they will also pay the price.

David Allen Green’s recent post on BlueSky appears to summarise our position relative to that of the United States very well:

Humpty Dumpty and the Terrorism Act

07. July 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Cartoons, Legal, Media & Politics
Illustration of Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass, by John Tenniel, 1871.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

This is the country we are now living in. Because 4 members of a group sprayed red paint on some aircraft and caused some damaged using crowbars at an Oxfordshire base, as part of a series of protests designed to end international support for Israel’s war in Gaza for which they have all been arrested and charged, the whole organisation has been “proscribed” following a vote of 385 votes to 26 in the House of Commons and the order subsequently signed by the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, putting it on a par with organisations like ISIS (a full list of the 81 organisations proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000 and the 14 Northern Ireland organisations proscribed under previous legislation can be found here).

Proscription makes it a criminal offence to:

  1. belong, or profess to belong, to a proscribed organisation in the UK or overseas (section 11 of the act)
  2. invite support for a proscribed organisation (the support invited need not be material support, such as the provision of money or other property, and can also include moral support or approval) (section 12(1))
  3. express an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation (section 12(1A)) – this one was added by the Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019.
  4. arrange, manage or assist in arranging or managing a meeting in the knowledge that the meeting is to support or further the activities of a proscribed organisation, or is to be addressed by a person who belongs or professes to belong to a proscribed organisation (section 12(2)); or to address a meeting if the purpose of the address is to encourage support for, or further the activities of, a proscribed organisation (section 12(3))
  5. wear clothing or carry or display articles in public in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that the individual is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation (section 13)
  6. publish an image of an item of clothing or other article, such as a flag or logo, in the same circumstances (section 13(1A)) this one was also added by the Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019.

References are to sections of the Terrorism Act 2000.

In order to be proscribed, the Terrorism Act states that an organisation must have:

  1. committed or participated in acts of terrorism;
  2. prepared for terrorism;
  3. promoted or encouraged terrorism (including the unlawful glorification of terrorism); or
  4. be otherwise concerned in terrorism.

And terrorism is defined as:

the use or threat of action which: involves serious violence against a person; involves serious damage to property; endangers a person’s life (other than that of the person committing the act); creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or section of the public or is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

The use or threat of such action must be designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and must be undertaken for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.

As a consequence, 29 people were arrested under terrorism legislation for protesting about the proscription, including an 83 year old retired priest, arrested after appearing to be in possession of a placard. I assume it was the one shown here.

The organisation’s website now displays the following message:

Co-founder of Palestine Action Huda Ammori is seeking to bring a legal challenge against the Home Office with a hearing for permission to bring a judicial review set to take place during the week of 21 July. Meanwhile a new group has suddenly appeared, armed with a fresh supply of red paint and targetting Time Logistics (which they say supplied one of Israel’s biggest weapons companies) lorries near Birmingham.

And the name of the new group? Yvette Cooper.

The Sopranos 17 years apart

01. March 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Legal, Media & Politics, Risk

For reasons I won’t go into involving a green double decker bus, a holiday cottage in St Ives and some raw scallops, I started watching a box set of the Sopranos in September 2023, rather later than the rest of the world, which had finished with the mobsters from Brooklyn in June 2007. We finally reached the 21st episode of series 6 a few months before Christmas 2024. And reacted in much the same way as I now gather (having researched it primarily to check I hadn’t got an incomplete box set) the rest of the world did over 17 years ago.

There are many advantages to watching something so long after the media around it has moved on. You get left in peace to watch it at your own pace. No one is giving you spoilers in little teasers stuck between other programmes. The chat shows are not talking about it. You don’t have to hear what every minor celebrity thought about it. You aren’t being constantly encouraged to get excited about it. You can just watch it.

However, now I have read up on the reaction at the time and the increasingly irritated responses of the show’s creator David Chase to the line of questioning he was getting about it, I think there is something for us here in March 2025. In particular, I am thinking about the following comment Chase made soon after the last episode first aired:

[The ending] said much more than Tony facedown in a bowl of onion rings with a bullet in his head, or taking over the New York mob. Tony Soprano had been people’s alter ego. They gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted “justice”. I thought that was disgusting, frankly.

Chase also made reference to the fact that the US was involved in war against the Taliban in Afghanistan at the time and the Al-Qaeda unexploded car bombs in London that month:

There was a war going on that week and attempted terror attacks in London. But these people were talking about onion rings.

Which brings me to Donald Trump. Chase was interviewed by, amongst others, The Irish Times in 2019, the 20th anniversary of the first episode, and Trump perhaps inevitably came up in response to a question about the influences The Sopranos has had:

The use of a deeply flawed hero and his problems. And when news shows talk about Trump, for example, they’ll say it’s like The Sopranos. People, including your own paper, use The Sopranos as an example of crookedness and culpability. I don’t watch a lot of series television. Unfortunately what I do is spend my time watching CNN, Fox and MSNBC. So I get good and depressed, and angry.

What struck me about The Sopranos was how chaos followed him everywhere he went. Any normal person who interacted with his people got exploited, corrupted if possible and often destroyed, whether it was an AA sponsor who gets drawn into gambling on a scale he can’t handle, or someone who wants to cooperate in a movie, or even the staff and other patients where Tony is recuperating from being shot. He appears to be behaving normally and then he will suddenly beat up his own bodyguard for no other reason than to show his people that he’s not over the hill. He is both ridiculously sentimental and utterly ruthless if he feels threatened. And yet you are still left rooting for him a lot of the time, which of course is what made it such a fascinating series and also explained the consternation when the screen went black.

Now this is all very well when we are talking about a fictional character heading up a mob operation in Brooklyn. However it becomes something else entirely when it is a real President of the United States. There are so many perils to dealing with Trump: those which are like The Sopranos, ie the danger of being exploited, corrupted and destroyed by him. We saw this in full operation yesterday in the extraordinary treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy by him and his chief henchman JD Vance.

The full Oval Office remarks of President Trump, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and Vice President Vance that ended in a contentious exchange over continued support amid the ongoing war with Russia. For more context and news coverage, click here: https://www.nbcnews.com

But what seems more important to me is that we focus on the perils of dealing with Trump which are not like The Sopranos at all: the inclination to cheer him on because he appears to be playing by different rules to the ones which we feel imprison us on a daily basis. So when he misuses charitable funds for political purposes and gets fined $2 million by the New York State Attorney General, we should refrain from cheering.

When Trump is fined $450 million dollars for financial fraud and illegal conduct, we should not just regard it as the rough and tumble of politics.

And when he is found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, making him a convicted felon, it is not, as he claims “a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt”, to be laughed off as just another one of Trump’s scrapes from which he emerges victorious.

We need to get our heads up out of the onion rings. This is not TV entertainment, it is the immediate future of the United States, impacting all of us whose countries need to interact with them without being exploited, corrupted or destroyed. He poses a serious risk to all of us.

So the question is what to do about it? This is what I intend to address in my next post.

I don’t know what I don’t know

22. January 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Legal, Regulation
A member splatted against the relentless forehead of a streamlined, efficient, simplified and clarified IFoA

So the proposals which I wrote about last month have been reconsidered by the newly elected Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) Council on 15 October, where they agreed some tweaks to the original proposals as follows:

Council devised and ultimately voted for revised measures based on the member feedback it had received on the previously approved reforms. You told us that you wanted the new President and Council (2023-2024) to reconsider the reforms and we agreed this at our meeting on 1 September 2023. You told us that you wanted better communication and more engagement and we have embarked on one of the biggest member engagement exercises in our history which will continue next year into the role of Council. You told us that you were uncomfortable with the idea that actuaries would be in the minority on the board. We have responded by changing the makeup of the new IFoA Board so that it will continue to have a majority of actuaries. You told us that you wanted safeguards to ensure the IFoA Board could be held to account and that a “bad board” could not self-perpetuate. We have responded by ensuring that appointments of members and independents to the IFoA Board will need to be ratified by Council on first appointment and every 3 years for the remainder of their term.

So am I happy now? The answer is no in some respects and I don’t know in others. No I am not happy that a member vote still seems to be proposed for 2026, giving this proposal the inside track to becoming the final permanent governance structure by only asking for a vote after most of us will have become quite hazy about what went before it.

I don’t know because we are still not going to be given sight of any part of the DAC Beachcroft report to which these proposals are supposed to be a response. We are therefore being asked to completely trust the description of what was in it by the very people trying to sell us their proposals. That is a big ask in my view.

However it is also difficult to raise any formal objections to the proposed amendment to Regulations 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12 and 13 in this state of enforced ignorance. I will therefore be raising the concerns I have set out here by contacting the Corporate Secretary at the IFoA. If you feel that you can go further and formally object on the basis of what you have or have not been told, then those objections should be raised by 30 January to be considered.

Perhaps I am making too much of what I don’t know, but I was struck by the references here to any future consultation being confined to the role of Council, with the rest of the governance structure seemingly regarded as done and dusted. Also if you watch to the end of the little video there, you are confronted with this message:

Is our ability to continue to self-regulate at all really under threat? I would have expected to be told rather more about why this is before being asked for my views in a member organisation such as the IFoA.

I accept that many of the IFoA’s functions may need a more streamlined system to run them effectively. There are many different alternative structures which we could consider to achieve this. But these proposals are about changing the very nature of the IFoA and that requires full disclosure to members about why we are doing this and a chance to vote before we do so in my view. More than a tweak, in other words.

Horizon and its implications for us all

11. January 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Legal, Prediction, Professions, Regulation
Copyright ©Steve Bell 2009/All Rights Reserved e.mail: belltoons@ntlworld.com tel: 00 44 (0)1273 500664. Reproduced by kind permission of Steve Bell https://www.belltoons.co.uk/bellworks/index.php/leaders/2009/2913-16-10-09_BOINGUSES

We have been here many times before, even in recent memory. The 2008 banking crisis, memorably immortalised by the Steve Bell cartoon above; the MPs’ expenses scandal the following year; the successive disappointments of Brexit; and now the the Post Office Horizon scandal. All of these had in common an initial public expression of outrage, followed by loud condemnations of aspects of it from within the Establishment, followed by a series of measures which generally failed to change anything substantive. So the ring-fencing legislation brought in to isolate the risk taking within banking from retail customers has steadily been lobbied against and is now gradually being unravelled. MPs continue to have expenses scandals. I don’t know how to encapsulate in a sentence the Muppet Show of how the Establishment has been trying to deal with Brexit since 2016. And now this.

The Post Office scandal seems to be being discussed everywhere: beyond the TV, radio and social media, it is in the pub, the supermarket queue, in families and workplaces. The Establishment condemnation is already underway, as pithily summarised by Marina Hyde here. I do not really care about the implications for the honours lists, but very much hope that the sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses get the compensation they are seeking. However this time the response cannot stop there.

As David Allen Green has written in Prospect today (with a great overview of what has happened from a legal point of view), the scandal also represents a failure of the legal system. This was partly caused by the repeal, in 1999, of the part of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 which presumed in favour of individuals rather than computer systems. This has been particularly unfair in these cases as the evidence defendants needed to show that Horizon was at fault often remained undisclosed by the Post Office. It was also caused by the Post Office’s eagerness to pursue private prosecutions.

Coincidentally, I came across the concept of private prosecutions a couple of weeks ago while reading the excellent Butler to the World: How Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals by Oliver Bullough (which also suggested to me that I should revisit the issue of Scottish Limited Partnerships soon, but I digress). As Oliver points out:

Under measures introduced in the post-2010 austerity agenda, defendants…have no prospect of reclaiming their expenses from public funds if they are convicted. Even if they’re acquitted, they can only get their expenses back if a request for legal aid has previously been turned down…Meanwhile, private prosecutors – whether individual or companies – can claim back all reasonable expenses if they lose. Financially speaking, a private prosecution is a one-way bet. As long as you can afford the upfront cost of bankrolling the case, you’ll get your money back because under common law you are acting on behalf of the Crown.

David Allen Green has called for private prosecutions to be abolished, which I would agree with. But I also think the burden of proof needs to be returned to the operators of computer systems in what I predict will become increasingly frequent human-expert system disputes in the future. In fact we need to go further than that and have a full public consultation into what legal protections individual humans will need in a world increasingly driven by decisions and calculations made by non-human systems.

Over seven years ago I wrote an article in response to Cathy O’Neil’s excellent Weapons of Math Destruction, where she set out the case against devolving important decisions to mathematical models without adequate feedback loops. I said then (with an Oppenheimer reference too!) that:

If mathematical models are to be the dominant regulatory tool of a financial world, and of the consultancies and financial firms competing in that world, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of the highly paid professionals who followed inappropriate rules rather than exercising their own expert judgement when it mattered.

It is starting to look like we may be there already unless we act fast.

Volunteers and Democratic Deficits

07. December 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Legal, Regulation

My favourite bit of Scrooged is when Bill Murray is told that the people working in a homeless shelter cannot be fired because they are volunteers. It appears that the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) is instead in danger of morphing into such a sleek, streamlined, efficient, simplified and clarified organisation that noone would want to volunteer for it any more.

The long-running argument about the future governance of the IFoA grinds on. Four months after a small number of members alerted the rest of us to what was going on, and 194 members then objected in writing, the IFoA have now concluded a series of webinars explaining the proposals. I attended the final one on 28 November.

In a nutshell, the proposals are unchanged from those objected to, they are now being considered alongside the objections by the newly elected Council this month, which will be followed by a full consultation in January. The new governance structure will then be rolled out in the summer of 2024 and a member vote only allowed on the new structure two years later in 2026. Yes that’s right, not a typo: 2026!

The session I attended was all about how we needed to be more streamlined, more efficient, more credible in our governance. We needed to simplify our governance, clarify it. The recent embarrassments about outgoing CEOs was cited as an example of our poor governance without explanation. The independent report which they quoted from throughout to justify the proposals will not be provided to members as it includes contributions from people who only did so on the basis of anonymity.

There was a discussion about how the IFoA was both a business and a member organisation. But, in mentioning more than once how the proposals were only what any of the organisations members worked for would expect from their governance, the weighting given to these two roles was very clear. These were senior business leaders attempting to make the IFoA look more like the businesses they are more used to.

If you’re a senior business leader, then an organisation where any member can have some influence on its direction of travel must be incomprehensible. They are used to leading and being followed. Much was made of the waste of time that much Council business involved, and I am sure that is right. But that is just a motivation for change, as indeed was the entire presentation on 28 November. It was decidedly not a motivation for this change in particular.

We were told that other options had been considered, although bundling everything up into one board that did everything was the only one mentioned.

One of the other reasons given for the changes proposed was how much bigger the IFoA was now. Coincidentally, on 27 November, the Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords published its report ‘Making an independent Bank of England work better’. In it they made the following point:

The growth in the Bank’s remit has not been met with a commensurate increase in accountability and Parliamentary scrutiny. While an independent central bank reassures markets, critically important economic decisions are delegated to unelected officials. The Committee is concerned that a democratic deficit has emerged, which risks undermining confidence in the Bank and its operational independence.

We are being asked to quietly acquiesce to the creation of precisely this kind of democratic deficit in our own member organisation. Because, despite suggestions to the contrary in the webinar, we are primarily a member organisation and not like the organisations we all work for, something we have just been reminded of by being charged £750 for the privilege.

If we agree to this timetable, then by the time we get to 2026 I predict we will be assured that it would not be cost effective or a good use of the new unitary board’s time to uproot what will by then be the incumbent system. This would be giving these proposals an unfair advantage in deciding on the long-term governance of the IFoA.

My requests would be:

  1. Some summarised form of the independent report which protects people’s anonymity but allows us members to judge for ourselves the relative strengths and weaknesses of the analysis of our current governance and the options so far considered for change.
  2. An opportunity for a member vote on the structure adopted in 2024 alongside the consultation, rather than 2 years post adoption.

It is precisely at the stage of deciding that structure that all of the range of experience, talent and wisdom of the membership needs to be deployed, not at the point of rubber stamping a decision already made. If you agree with me that members are being sidelined in the decision-making process about the very nature of the IFoA’s future, then please send your feedback to governance@actuaries.org.uk.

A Tale of Two Weekends

08. May 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Climate Change, Legal, Regulation

If I were John and John were Me,

Then he’d be six and I’d be three.

If John were Me and I were John,

I shouldn’t have these trousers on.

AA Milne

Two weekends, two weeks apart.

In each children spent hours preparing their own personal tributes to the focus of the weekend. Parents arranged accommodation. Face paints were in profusion. Cardboard constructions abounded. There were placards and banners and flags.

One got minute by minute coverage in hushed tones, with talking heads running out of things to say after 6 hours or so and then needing to start projecting what various people, having their every movement and facial tic filmed, might be betraying in a momentary expression. The other one was almost totally ignored, despite both events occupying almost exactly the same space in central London.

Imagine if the media priorities had been reversed:

“And, as the man with the giant mosquito on his head, slowly makes his way around Parliament Square, we reflect on how many hours must have gone into constructing that mighty insect. And now we see the scientists, garbed in their traditional white coats, making the point that no nature means no future. What a riot of colour it is and so many volunteers have given up their time, not only today but in the months of preparation for the Big One. So, Sir David, are you surprised by the number of children in the procession today?” “Not really, Huw…”

“Meanwhile in other news, police arrested a Mr Charles Windsor and his wife Camilla at their home. Police seized several crowns, an orb, sceptres, rings, some very large chairs and other paraphernalia which could be involved in coronation activity. Royalists claimed that the police had been ridiculously heavy-handed. The police said that their actions had been entirely proportionate.”

In Christopher Clark’s new book about the revolutions throughout Europe in 1848, Revolutionary Spring, he talks about the origins of radicals and liberals in opposition to the establishments of the day, divisions which still seem to be with us today. But it is our Government which is radical, prepared to do great violence to the status quo, the opposition which seems to be liberal, bogged down in endless arguments about tiny differences, and the BBC which appears to be left on its own representing what it sees as the current Establishment.

Now there will be many who say that journalists should not be involved in defending any status quo, and I can understand that. However it can also be argued that a state broadcaster like the BBC does have some responsibilities in this respect. But which status quo do you defend?

The Government’s agenda is problematic – it’s not just about the lying and the corruption, but the constant changing of position, the most obvious being the Kwarteng fiscal event in the autumn. Climate protesters are remarkably consistent by comparison, not surprisingly really as the limits imposed by physics are not changing with each quarter. And their focus of sustainability is surely the most critical part of any status quo which needs defending, ie the ability of the planet to support life in all of its forms.

Television is extremely good at focusing our attention on something, and away from something else. This is why companies spend so much on television advertising and why our televised sports halls and pitches and the combatants within them are festooned with logos and messages from a myriad of sponsors. However, the Communications Act 2003 prohibits political advertising, which includes campaigning for the purposes of influencing legislation or executive action by local or national (including foreign) governments. The BBC have interpreted this as not allowing any form of protest to be visible during televised sporting events (most recent example being the Just Stop Oil protest with the orange powder at the World Snooker Championship), an event for which the title sponsor is Cazoo, Europe’s leading online car retailer. Similarly, the police have said that one of the considerations in their level of policing response to the Republic demonstrations this weekend, including pre-arrests before the procession or any protest had taken place, had been the wall-to-wall television coverage of the event.

46% of the UK population are very or extremely worried about climate change, but the biggest demonstration in the UK in the climate movements’s history was not covered on television at all. 62% of the UK population support the monarchy and we get all the main channels turned over to coronation coverage. I think what I am calling for is a bit more balance here, something we used to think, with some pride, was a national characteristic.

Day 1 of the UCU Strike and it feels like a class war entirely manufactured by the Government

01. February 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Legal, Regulation
Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers were on strike today. I was one of them. Meanwhile the Bill above is making its way through Parliament – it was voted through earlier this week by all but one of the Conservative MPs, but is currently getting rather more scrutiny and push back in the House of Lords.

It seems likely that there will be legal challenges to some elements of the Bill and that some of them will be successful. The Labour Party have promised to reverse it if they win the next election.

I spent my first strike day ever (yes, I know, I am just a political union member and a mere picket tourist – all of these criticisms are entirely justified) by attending a meeting of the Leicester Actuarial Science Society with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) President Matt Saker. It was a very well attended event and there were a lot of questions for Matt. These ranged from the IFoA strategy in Africa, to mutual recognition agreements with the Institute of Actuaries in India to the pros and cons of the recent vote to create a Chartered Actuary status for associates and fellows to the future relationship of the profession to AI applications, reflecting the global nature and broad range of interests of the student audience. I felt very much like I was witnessing the next generation of actuaries getting stuck into the issues that would be important to them through their careers, and it was inspiring to see.

Back to the strike. I differ from many of the strikers interviewed in that, in my view, I was not doing anything particularly altruistic by striking. I was standing up for my own pay and conditions. Which, it seems to me, everyone should be able to do in a free society. Years of anti union legislation, uberization and the growth of sectors with weak unions has made us used to having to negotiate for ourselves individually or in small groups against much more powerful employers. The fall in real pay over the last 12 years indicate that this has not really worked for us and perhaps a new era of collective bargaining is now necessary.

Meanwhile the Government thinks that it is a better idea to muzzle unions and repress future strike action than to deal with any of the grievances of the workers they represent. They think this is a better idea than to build anything, invest in anything, or do anything positive at all. You have to ask who such a move, temporary and largely struck down as illegal as it is likely to be, is designed to impress: future party donors perhaps?

The next generation I saw today did not strike me as one which will have much patience for such manufactured class wars and the governments which manufacture them.

It is my hope and, after today, my belief that they will think we have more important things to be doing.

Trade unionism: my part in its downfall (with apologies to Spike Milligan)

13. January 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Economics, Legal, Regulation
Source: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Trade Union Membership, UK 1995-2021: Statistical Bulletin, 25 May 2022

It all began for me on 23 September 1985, the first day in my first graduate role as a management trainee at the home counties factory of a security printing firm. From the beginning I was left in no doubt by my new employers that the fairly powerful print unions at the time (SOGAT and the NGA) were the biggest impediment to the captains of industry within the firm from running the business successfully. Occasionally I was allowed into management meetings, where all of the things we could do if it wasn’t for the unions were discussed endlessly.

During my time in this first role, the printing industry changed dramatically: the typesetting was computerised, massively reducing the number employed virtually overnight and Rupert Murdoch set up his non-unionised newspaper factories at Wapping. There had already been three pieces of trade union legislation in the 1980s by the time I started work, the latest being the Trade Union Act of 1984, which required secret ballots for union elections and strikes rather than the show of hands which had been possible up until then. The Miners Strike had also only just ended in March 1985, which had a devastating impact on the trade unions more generally.

Further legislation now quickly followed:

  • the Public Order Act 1986 (which introduced new offences related to picketing, and increased police powers over protests involving groups of 20 people or more);
  • the Wages Act 1986 (which reduced many of the restrictions on employers fining and deducting money from employees’ pay, removed statutory holiday entitlement and reduced state funding for redundancies);
  • the Employment Act 1988 (which gave workers the right to not join a union, and trade union members the right to challenge strike ballots);
  • the Employment Act 1989 (which restricted trade union officials’ time off for duties and abolished government support for redundancy payments);
  • the Employment Act 1990 (which finally removed the closed shop – ie a workplace where union membership was compulsory – and secondary action protection);
  • the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, which consolidated the legislation of the 80s and 90s, while clarifying that the right to take strike action was protected when it was “in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute”; and
  • the Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act 1993 (which gave trade unions a duty to inform employers of upcoming strikes).

This would appear to have given my first employers everything they could have wanted in terms of containing union power but, after some retrenchment in the 1990s owing to the incoming Labour Government taking the UK back into the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty (which we had originally opted out of in 1992) in 1997, there was further legislation in the form of the Trade Union Act of 2016, which, amongst other measures:

  • introduced a new requirement of 50% of union members to vote in a ballot for strike action;
  • required that workers in important services (health, school education, fire, transport, nuclear decommissioning and border security) must gain at least 40% support of those entitled to vote in a workplace for a strike to be legal;
  • required two weeks’ notice of industrial action to be given to an employer (the employer can agree to one week);
  • limited the right to take industrial action after a strike ballot to six months, or nine months if the employer agrees.

Over the period since 1985, wealth inequality, which had been steadily reducing since at least the end of World War I stalled and has been generally on a slightly increasing trend since:

Source: Resolution Foundation The UK’s Wealth Distribution, December 2020

And the position with respect to income inequality is even worse, with the UK having the 9th worst income inequality of the 38 countries in the OECD:

Source: Income inequality in the UK, House of Commons Library, 30 November 2021

However, perhaps this was a price worth paying, if the forces of creativity and entrepreneurship had at last been allowed full rein, freed from the stifling dead hand of union power? Unfortunately not (TFP stands for total factor productivity in the graph below):

Source: The UK Productivity “Puzzle” in an International Comparative Perspective, Fernald and Inklaar, April 2022

So whatever, the continuing problems of UK PLC, it does not look like union power was ever really one of the major ones. Undeterred, the Government is proposing further restrictions on trade unions and their members, including enforcing minimum service levels during strike action for ambulance staff, firefighters and railway workers and requiring some employees to work during a strike under threat of being sacked if they refuse.

The TUC has made a submission to the International Labour Organisation of the United Nations over what it sees as breaches of Conventions 87 (Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise) and 98 (Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining). As David Allen Green has blogged:

But regardless of your view on the ultimate rights and wrongs of strikes by public sector and other public service workers, there is something fundamentally objectionable in the current government’s proposals to compel certain “key” workers to attend work when they otherwise would be entitled to strike….Simply prohibiting other key workers from being able to strike, without sufficient alternative entitlements and arrangements to balance this loss of a right, is misconceived and illiberal.

It is an authoritarian gesture, rather than a solution to a problem.

Roy Lilley (at the Institute of Health and Social Care Management) in a postscript to a recent blog, focused on what a strategic failure the proposals represent within the NHS industrial dispute:

HMG plans, to ban strike action by some public workers is a further example of ‘push-back’ management. Push the disputes into the courts instead of dealing with the root-cause of strike action, improve industrial relations and representation.

So what has my part been in the downfall of trade unionism to date? In my first job, other than an abortive attempt to develop a new shift pattern(!) for the security guards in the factory, I had few skirmishes with union leaders compared to those with my management colleagues. In the finance sector, where I spent most of the middle 20 years of my working life, I rarely came across any staff representation at all. As a school teacher I joined the ATL rather than the NUT (they have since merged to form the National Education Union) due to its reputation for being determinedly non-militant. And, in my current role, I rather flounced out of the UCU over a difference of opinion over the pensions dispute raging at the time.

So I have not been a very good supporter of trade unionism over the years. However it now seems clear to me that the industrial austerity (ie the crushing of labour power within the economy, further discussed here) described above during my lifetime has been a political rather than an economic project all along. None of the economic justifications given for it since the 1980s have been borne out and the unopposed rugby of industrial management we have increasingly witnessed since has resulted, in my view, in poorer outcomes than if the 99% had been consulted regularly.

I sense that the current Government will only be satisfied when trade union membership levels fall to zero. So if, like me, you don’t want that to happen, the time to push back against running the economy at all times exclusively in the interests of the owners of capital is now.

I have rejoined the UCU.

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