The Daily Telegraph was experiencing severe undergarment torsion just the other day over the best thing to come out of Luxembourg since vaguely pervy Eurotrash alt-rockers Placebo.
We refer of course to the famous Vnuk Ruling and the consequent ECJ-imposed requirement for compulsory insurance on anything with wheels that you can sit on.
Now obviously Bankstone News is not so grossly unpatriotic as to imagine that anything of continental origin can possibly be a good thing, but it does rather seem that compulsory cover for quad bikes, lawn mowers, golf karts, tractors, mobility scooters, Segways, fork lifts and the like could be a nice little earner for the much abused, put upon, and otherwise beleaguered UK motor insurance sector.
As a paper that’s supposedly pro-business, one might have imagined The Telegraph could see that. But, oh no, in a very whingey article published really not that long ago the paper demanded incredulously ‘Do I really need a policy for my lawnmower?’
To which, of course, the correct answer is ‘Yes, you bl**min’ well do, Cheapskate!’ Because otherwise what would happen if you used it to knock someone off a ladder (as unfortunate Slovenian farmhand Damijan Vnuk (Vnuk v Zavarovalnica Triglav C-162/13) was knocked off a ladder back in 2007)? And, more to the point, how else is the UK motor insurance industry going to drum up some new (driverless technology proof) business out of thin air?
Boris Johnson recently characterised the hopelessly foreign sound Vnuk Ruling as a typical example of bendy-banana-style EU over-regulation. But hopefully that won’t stop it happening here before we Leave and it’s too late. A Department for Transportationment consultation on how to implement Vnuk closed on 13 April, and it seems likely that most, if not all, things with wheels that you can sit on will ultimately come with a legal requirement to insure.
Whether or not this will include the ‘creaking children’s quad bike carrying Boris Johnson around his garden’ about which the Telegraph article affected to fret (along with ‘a hay baler baling hay’ and ‘a lawn mower mowing laws [sic]’) remains unclear. But even if vehicles intended for creaking children do end up uncovered, we’ll hopefully still have a bunch of new stuff to insure some time in the nearish future.
It’s an ill unelected supranational institution that blows no good, we say here at Bankstone News, as we wait patiently for the day when the restraining hand of Euroland is finally batted away and we’re finally free to do stuff like discriminating on the basis of sex again.
But that, as they say, is a whole nother story.
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