As committed as Bankstone News is to casting off from mainland Europe on whatever thrilling piratical adventures lie ahead abroad HMS Brexit, we were – along, no doubt, with every other decent honest motorist up and down the land – utterly sickened and dismayed to learn this week of one distinctly unwelcome side effect.
That £40 you’d mentally put aside for a few-expenses-spared family outing to your local Harvester. The one the government promised we’d be getting off our annual motor insurance premiums. Remember that? Well, don’t bother racking your brains too strenuously if you don’t. Because we won’t be getting it after all. Not any time soon, at least.
Why?, you demand to know in an alarmingly up-swooping high-pitched tone curiously reminiscent of that deployed by Jeremy Corbyn yesterday when demanding rhetorically to know why, if he were a tax evading, yacht owning, sleazy, multinational cartel of system-rigging supervillains, he’d be terrified at the prospect of an Old Labour victory in the forthcoming general election.
Because, we reply in a tone so emphatically neutral that there’s literally nothing to be said about it, HMG has decided that getting the Prisons, Courts and Whiplash Bill through parliament in the very limited pre-election time now available is one almost impossible task it can do without, especially with all its best almost-impossible-task people likely to be tied up with Brexit for some time to come.
Responding to a question in the House of Commoners yesterday, a government spokesperson confirmed somewhat technically that “bills that were introduced to this house quite late in the current parliamentary session and which received carry-over motions so that they could be debated in what would have been the third session of the current parliament will fall, including the Prisons and Courts Bill.”
So there it is. All our treasured dreams of claiming a whopping £40 off our annual motor insurance premium go up in smoke, simply because the government can’t be bothered to rush through the raising of the small claims limit to £5,000.00 and thereby end the sea of troubles that is whiplash (and all other lowish value PI claims). Shame! Shame on you, HMG.
Hopefully, once voters have come together to make Theresa May bigger, stronger, more powerful than her traitorous unpatriotic democracy-defying enemies could ever have imagined, the Prisco Bill will be reborn and decent honest claims-free motorists can finally reap the massive savings we’ve been promised.
Some pessimists, however, are even suggesting the Bill may be left to languish where it lies, on the basis that its whiplash-taming aspects are so riddled with flaws and fraught with the potential for unintended consequences that HMG would rather forget all about it.
Let’s just hope they’re wrong – or we may never see that longed for forty quid.
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