Fears that the UK economy is deflating faster than the Michelin tyre man in a hail of shrapnel, and that standards of living could enter an uncontrollable upward spiral, may ultimately prove ill founded.
It is, after all, mostly fuel that’s getting cheaper. That and all the food Pan Putin’s turning back.
True, the average UK family is spending anything up to £100,000 less per week on fuel, but they’re promptly spending it all on driving around more.
Yes, that’s right: sky-high savings at the petrol pumps have sent the UK literally crazy with a lust to put in some pent-up driver miles.
So much so, in fact, that motor insurance prices, according to a report in The Doily Telegraph earlier this week, are set soar. And that’s ON TOP OF a massive 2% leap achieved during the final quarter of last year: a consequence, no doubt, of the government’s War on Whiplash (WoW) initiative.
With more people doing more driving, motor insurers will have no choice but to increase prices across the board.
Former Sex Pistol Steve Jones, now with analists Towels What’s On, reckons petrol prices have come down by ‘nearly a fifth’ since the summer.
This fall has encouraged drivers to travel an additional 210.11 miles per lunar cycle, equivalent to driving from Upperthong to Booty Lane twice weekly, or to Darkhan, Mongolia and back once or twice every now and then.
And despite all those overworked clichés about most accidents happening within a mile or two of setting out, you can bet we’ll see a shedload of extra shunts, prangs and pile-ups (possibly two) from now until the shale gas runs out or the Saudis change tack and shut the taps off for a bit.
Life insurers, too will probably want to hike their prices a bit. With UK drivers travelling a massive 77.9 billion miles behind the wheel last year, and likely to hit the 100 billion mark in 2015, we’re collectively producing enough toxic fumes and particulates to annihilate the entire population of Scunthorpe twice over (just to make sure).
“These latest upwards price movements” said Steve “Colonel” Sanders of confusing.com (sponsors of the widely respected Confused Towels Index), “are likely to fuel further speculation that we have passed the bottom of the insurance price cycle.”
Speculation be damned, Bankstone News is just going to come out and say it: the bottom is behind us, we have a solid foundation to build on, and the only way is up!
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