Another raid on my future pension

Much of the excitement around today's European Court of Justice ruling in insurance premiums has focused on the effects on motor insurance policies.  Young male drivers are dramatically more likely to kill or injure themselves or others than young women, and currently their premiums reflect this fact.  From December 2012, this will be illegal, and on the face of it, women will have to cross-subsidise less safe male drivers.

At the other end of the age range, pension annuities for men currently cost less for the same annual income than those for women, because men have a lower life expectancy.  This ruling will mean that they have to pay more. At the moment, the less well (impaired lives) or the older annuity buyers receive more for the same pot of money, but this could be judged discriminatory too.  We have a whole profession dedicated to this calculation - actuaries - and they could now become an endangered species.  Or they could be employed to find crafty ways and cunning proxies for age, sex and state of health, to circumvent the ruling.

 The Gordon Brown raid on pensions dividend income, poor investment returns, the financial crisis, and now this new ruling, all conspire to reduce my future pension further and further.  Those lucky enough to have a public sector pension won't be affected.  I bet that applies to the ECJ justices.

Labour's "Cadbury law" - another stinker from the Brown bunker

According to the BBC, Labour is to propose a "Cadbury's law" in its manifesto, restricting takeovers of British firms on "public interest grounds".

The report says that the manifesto is to contain proposals to ensure that if a company is designated "strategic", or if the national interest is concerned (i.e. the Government of the day thinks that intervention will be popular), two-thirds of its shareholders will have to vote yes to a takeover.

This is another piece of economic illiteracy by Labour and its chums in the Lib-Dems. If political interference is allowed to dictate whether acquisitions can go ahead, owners of companies will be prevented from achieving a fair value for their shares. A big proportion of the owners of companies are the pension funds. These have already been devastated by the removal of the dividend tax credit, weakened by raids from the Pension Protection Fund, and softened further by the recession fuelled by Labour's boom-to-bust policies.

This proposal is another stinker from the bunker of Brown's zombie administration. Let's hope it doesn't happen.

Speed limits

Driving along the A31 from Winchester to Alton, you pass through the village of Four Marks. It made me chuckle one day when someone had added 'out of 10' at the bottom of the sign. The A31 is an old coaching and trunk road. It used to be three lanes wide for much of its length, and in Four Marks, even wider.

For obvious safety reasons, in the built-up area, the main road was restricted to 40 miles per hour. Until recently. It's now a 30 mph limit all the way through the village (it feels like two miles), even at those parts where there's a separate service road so that local traffic and pedestrians can be kept away from through traffic.

This is one of the fruits of the Village 30 initiative. Hampshire County Council quotes revised Government guidance on setting speed limits states that "villages should have comparable speed limits to similar roads in urban areas" meaning that a 30mph limit should be the norm in villages. ("Setting Local Speed Limits", Department for Transport Circular 01/2006).

Since people like to build houses, for convenience, within easy reach of main roads, many parts of the main road network in Hampshire will meet the criterion of 20 houses within 600 metres.

Yes, there are places that need 30 mph limits. In the past, these have been set in built-up areas, which have street lighting, narrower roads, pavements, etc. The safety reasons are clear and compelling. Indeed, in residential areas, the 20 mph sign is becoming a common sight.

Now the 30 limit can be anywhere that has just enough houses, 24 x 7, 365 days a year. Journey times will increase by a third (or even more where a 50 mph is reduced to a 30). 39 villages had this change in the last quarter of 2008, another 79 in 2009. For heaven's sake. Is this another attempt by Brown's nanny state to kill the countryside?

Banking oblivion

So, as expected, the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England has reduced base rates to 1%. I no longer think the Bank is independent - it's been cowed by the criticism of its role in the Northern Rock debacle.

This will further drive retail savers away from the commercial banks; building societies have less political pressure to reduce saver and borrower rates because they're not seen as 'guilty'. It also reduces the cost of government borrowing, at least where it has a captive depositor base, such as some National Savings products, and reserve deposits at the Bank of England.

So it's not inconceivable that this is part of a fiendish game plan by HM Government. Why? So that it can nationalise all of the banks, which will soon have little liquidity except that supplied from government schemes.