Peter Rhodes on soaring insurance, a galactic conspiracy and after the jailings, how long before the appeals?
Last week, as I reported, our home insurance company sent us a tale of woe about their rising costs, preparing the ground for a zonking increase in premiums. Sure enough, five days later came their demand for the coming year. It is up by an eye-watering 48 per cent.
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Shop around, you may be thinking. But a trawl through the comparison websites shows our new quote is actually about par for the course, unless you want to be covered by some suspiciously cheap outfit you've never heard of. What's more, it seems we are being offered a lower price than we'd get as new customers, which is a novelty. So we bite the bullet and pay up, in the hope that next year their costs may fall and their premiums might come down. That noise you hear is my hollow laugh.
After the initial fury of the courts in sentencing rioters, how long before the first appeals appear? I can picture m'learned friends queuing up to complain that their client's three-year stretch looks more like state revenge than pure justice. How many rioters still to be judged will find themselves allocated prison cells recently vacated by some of the earlier defendants, freed on appeal?