Reform's plan for pension schemes smells like a £500bn rat

During the 1970s, the decade of the oil crises that severely aggravated the UK economy’s proneness to inflation, my colleague Adrian Hamilton and I wrote an article in the Financial Times advocating the creation of a sovereign wealth fund.

- William Keegan

(Leon Neal/Getty Images)

The idea was to make good use of the bonus of North Sea oil revenues, to invest for the future. Opec had quintupled the price of oil, and the revenues from oil and gas production in the North Sea promised to be a great benefit to the UK.

But the Treasury was against the idea. So were the main political parties. In one of the most cynical, but honest, accounts of where the extra revenues went, a Labour MP asked “what sense does it make... for all the resources of the North Sea to be spent on unemployment benefit?”

The tragedy was that much of Britain’s industry and workforce suffered during that period, and there was precious little in the shape of enlightened regional policies to offset the social damage. Indeed, the ramifications of this damage are still being felt today, and are seen in the way the Reform party has been capitalising on widespread social discontent.