Of course Labour doesn’t trust people with their money: the party made little effort to teach them about it

Labour’s response to the biggest announcement of the Budget, on pensions reform, was never going to be snappy. It would be unfair to expect an Opposition to deliver an immediate response to such a surprising and complex reform. But that’s not to say that the way the party has responded has been exemplary. They were not helped by John McTernan’s Newsnight interview on Wednesday night in which he framed the debate about the pension reforms as being about whether or not governments should trust people to manage their own money. He’s a former party adviser so he doesn’t get the lines to take (which, according to Adam Boulton, were not all that inspiring), but saying ‘you can’t trust people to spend their own money sensibly’ immediately made the debate about whether Labour has any faith in the voters it hopes will elect it into government next year, rather than the details of the policy.