In a perfect market you would use a broker or other qualified adviser whom you

In a perfect market you would use a broker, or other qualified adviser, whom you pay, to find the most suitable investment plan at the best price. The financial institutions put their own interests first.
You are on your own. That is why unit trust groups urge you to invest in the stock market at the very moment when the professionals expect it to boil over. That is why the big insurance companies cheerfully persuaded thousands of individuals to leave occupational pensions schemes and to buy personal pensions when it was unwise to do so. Likewise, the executives with whom you do business are largely if not wholly motivated by commission.

The truth is that the directors of financial institutions are much more concerned with what their company gets out of each trans- action than with what is appropriate for you. Unfortunately, this 19th-century tradition has become attenuated as societies convert themselves into shareholder-owned companies. Because in the past all building societies and many insurance companies were mutual societies, consumers assume that a notion of co-operation for a common end still exists. Insurance companies, building societies, banks, unit trust groups, investment managers and the like see you, the customer, as sheep to which they will regularly take the shears. Is it likely that a body whose objective is to improve the public’s understanding of pensions, life assurance and other financial products will be sufficiently cynical about the City? The Government is to back a new initiative, the Personal Finance Education Group This is what it ought to teach, but probably won’t

You are there to be fleeced. Perhaps this was one of the earliest examples of the employment of shock troops

P M LARG
Bampton, Devon.

Sir: In the dialogue about the history of the kilt (Letters, 4 December) none of your correspondents has had anything to say about the custom of those Highlanders too poor to afford a targe removing their philimohrs entirely to wrap round their non-sword arm as a substitute, and charging down upon the Redcoats, or any other enemy, stark naked. The antibiotics employed – tetracycline, for example – are in common use in human medicine, and cattle and humans have considerable intestinal flora in common, E coli being a prominent example.C COLEMANLondon WC1. Dairy cows are given sufficient antibiotics that their residue prevents milk from souring: typical pasteurised British cow’s milk will kill an introduced yoghurt culture, unless the milk has been first heated nearly to boiling to destroy the antibiotics it contains.
The likelihood of this practice encouraging the development of antibiotic- resistant bacteria which pose a danger to human health is not remote. If Mr Gummer were really concerned about the possibility of farming practices generating resistant bacteria, he might consider the present use of antibiotics in dairy and stock herds. I think it is safe to say that maize and farm animals, or humans, have very few diseases in common: on the surface, the likelihood that the resistant qualities of the altered maize would encourage resistance in the gut flora of farm animals or humans seems slim. One gathers that the maize in question has been made to have greater resistance to the ills that afflict it while growing. Sir: John Gummer hopes to promote banning the import of genetically altered maize (“Ministers face maize breakout”, 4 December).