That’s it, then. Game’s up. Fun while it lasted, it may have been, but with Chancellor Gigi Bl**dy Osborne whacking standard rate IPT up to a stonking 9.5%, there’s b*gger all chance of anyone buying insurance now!
A stunned and appalled Steve Wipe, Chief Cheese with leading retro fashion house and insurance broking lobby body BIBA, brushed away a manly tear and pronounced himself “extremely disappointed”.
And well he might be! Just when you think you have government and regulators fully housetrained and pantingly eager to obey your every whim, something like this goes and happens. Gutting.
Refusing to dismiss the possibility that Gideon George might somehow have raised IPT by mistake, Mr Wipe said he hoped HMG would “correct” their error in “further budgets” (of which there are almost certain to be some over the remaining term of the present administration, and, indeed, quite possibly thereafter).
As disbelief turned to anger, BIBA branded the hateful IPT a “stealth tax.” Although some people might regard the T bit of its name as rather giving the game away. At any rate, it’s clearly blatantly unfair. Almost as bad as if insurers were roped into the dreaded VAT. God forbid.
Razor-witted analyst Daniel Lyons at Deeeee-loitte is surely right to suspect that “The increase in IPT is likely to be passed on to policyholders by insurance companies.”
Should that turn at to be the case – as we may reasonably suspect it could – no-one’s going to want to buy insurance.
Who elected these hooligans?
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