Tim Worstall:

And this is what he is going to say this afternoon:

Mr Miliband is proposing a sweeping new legal duty on any financial service which manages savings, including pension funds and banks, to maximise the saver’s returns. Failure to do so would mean them breaking the law.

There’s some other stuff there too, maximum charges and so on. But that’s the really problematical measure that is being floated. That’s the Mail of course, so we’d need confirmation that that is what was in the press release. Ah, here’s The Guardian:

Labour would impose a legal duty on any financial services firm that manages savings to maximise the saver’s returns.

[…]

It is obviously possible to argue that investment in tobacco, or booze, arms, mining, is not as profitable as other investments. But that would be the only reasoning available to fund managers: consideration of any of those other values would be illegal.

Given that the Labour Party, indeed all points left, have been arguing for decades that those other values must indeed be considered, even given priority over purely financial considerations, our conclusion simply has to be that they do not understand the effect of that new law that they propose.

Stock up on the popcorn, indeed.

Will The Labour Party Entirely Abolish Ethical Investing? – Forbes.

/ht Samizdata