Member

The Principles for Responsible Investment are very clear that the signatories want to integrate ESG issues into investment and ownership practices. That feels to me as if they are dealing with a systemic issue, and we have more than £100 trillion signed up to the Principles for Responsible Investment. Clarification is helpful, and thinking about how we get the best clarification would be a good idea, but we ought to be careful because it is not easy to clarify. This systemic investment stuff was pioneered at Columbia University by one of my co-authors, Jon Lukomnik. There are many in the United States who now say that the politics of the United States is a systemic issue and that pension funds should be making a noise about that. I think we should scratch our heads really carefully before we encourage that sort of thing to happen because we need the Government to be the referee and not to be influenced in that way.