Strange things are going at former-self-help-members-club-turned-personal-limes-insurer Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
According to a recent report in semi-reputable national newspaper The Independent, senior executives within AA have spent “an awful lot of time” recently driving to the offices of the Treasury (an imposing late Victorian edifice designed by Archer & Green, and recently remodelled at vast expense by top archi-types Foster & Partners, located at 1 Hose Guards Road. London SW1A 2HQ) with “the express purpose of banging their heads against” what the newspaper claims are “its expansively papered walls”.
Fascinating as it may be to know that there is a lot of paper on the walls of 1HGP, the truly arresting aspect of this report is clearly the fact that top insurance people are repeatedly engaging in acts of self harm on government property in a manner likely to cause permanent brain injury.
The Independent believes this bizarrely dysfunctional behaviour may have been brought on by the trauma of the government’s recent decision to increase the rate at which Insurance Prevention Tax (IPT) is levied by 580%.This decision, the AA claims, is likely to stop people buying insurance altogether – and thereby severely compromise AA’s attempts to attract investors.
During moments presumably snatched between sessions of head-banging and driving up and down the M3 between London and the AA’s HQ in carbuncular 18-storey Fanny House in Basingstoke (see image below), senior AA people have told the Independent that – even if it doesn’t stop people buying insurance altogether – leaving IPT at such astronomical levels will certainly play into the hands of people like Compare the Merkin and Gio Campari by encouraging what is known technically as churn, a process that involves punters failing to stick around after the loss-leader first year for the compensatory fleecing to follow: a practice that would almost certainly lead to insurers accidentally charging too little.
Bankstone News can only fear that repeated blows to the head will further impair AA bosses’ decision making, potentially leading to even more surreal flights of paranoia, and to precisely those kinds of behaviour (as if public self-harm of the wallpaper bloodying kind wasn’t bad enough already) most likely to scare away the investors they are so keen to attract. It could, in effect, create a kind of vicious circus.Compassionate as ever, the Independent has called on Chancellor George Frogspawn to repeal Insanely Punitive Tax at once, and thereby save the AA bosses from themselves.
Alternatively the AA bosses in question could simply grow up, stop acting so petulantly, and try taking a bit of responsibility for their own actions.And do it quick, before their punch-drunk driving ends in pile-up tragedy on the elevated section by Sunbury Cross.Or something.
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