Fleshing out its detail, selling it to the country and building the necessary political consensus to make it last will require skill, determination and clout. For all his faults, Mr Blunkett might have been the man to do it. The anonymous Mr Hutton is a much more questionable appointment. A Blairite loyalist, it is not known how he stands with the Prime Minister in waiting, Gordon Brown.It must all make Lord Turner distinctly nervous as he puts the finishing touches to his recommendations. The hard graft of policy formation is in any case being done by Lord Turner's Pensions Commission, which reports later this month.Yet this cannot be the gimmicky, smash and grab policy so much favoured by New Labour It must instead be policy for the next 30 or 40 years. It's been hard enough to take this ambition seriously, given the record, but for one of his most trusted political allies in the project to be hounded out of office under a cloud is a further blow to meaningful progress.In fairness it might be said that John Hutton, the new man in the ejector seat, will just carry on where Mr Blunkett left off. The only winners in these wholly pointless legal marathons are the lawyers.
Anyone for pollock?Another Pensions Secretary goesTo lose one Secretary of State for Work and Pensions might be counted a misfortune, but to get through three of them in a year is more than just carelessness; it's a bad joke Small wonder that pensions policy is such a mess. No one is ever there long enough to do any more than make a bad situation even worse. The Blair Government's handling of the growing pensions crisis has been disastrous, from the Chancellor's raid on the tax privileges of pension funds to the recent climbdown on the retirement age for public sector workers. Yet the Prime Minister promises far reaching pensions reform as one of his key priorities for the remainder of his third term.
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Yet the judge intends to go further in exploring ways in which such litigation might be deterred. Why on earth would they do such a thing? The liquidators were unable to offer any convincing answer.Deloitte's stupidity was in failing to see that the Bank could never settle on such a charge, even for the purpose of preventing a lengthy and humiliating court battle. It is bad enough for a central bank to admit to negligence, but to concede dishonesty to any degree would destroy its credibility and reputation in financial markets for all eternity.This is the second hugely costly piece of litigation, pursued not in the expectation of a favourable judgement, but entirely for the purpose of a commercial settlement, to have collapsed in less than two months, the other one being Equitable Life's attempt to hold its former auditors, Ernst & Young, partially liable for members' losses.In themselves, these two cases should act as warning enough to future litigants. From the moment the case was conceived, this looked a ridiculous endeavour, and in truth the liquidators must have known it all along.