Papers

Pantomime by Abbey could have been the title of yesterday's shareholders meeting in London to rubber-stamp the deal with Banco Santander, but which gave smaller shareholders a chance to vent their anger.

A play on the tag-line from the 1992 US presidential election sums up the media jump on the issue of pensions today with the release of the Turner report into the lack of pensions savings.

Gordon Brown has pre-empted tomorrow's Pensions Commission report into ways to improve provision in the UK by ruling out tax increases to pay for an improved state pension, The Times reports.

The Financial Service Authority would be done away with as just one of the proposals put forward at the Conservative Party conference yesterday, according to reports in The Daily Telegraph.

Letters being sent to some six million people who opted out of the State Second Pension have prompted opposition parties to call for the scrapping of S2P and raised fears of another mis-selling scandal, The Times reports.

The annual Conservative Party conference kicks off under a cloud of doubt following another drubbing in a local by-election last week and concerns the party is still without an effective leader.

Tony Blair's speech yesterday to the Labour core at the party's annual conference resulted in promises of an increased basic state pension "at the heart of a domestic programme" trying to win votes at the next election, The Daily Telegraph writes.

Angela Knight, chief executive of the Association of Private Client Investment Managers and Stockbrokers, has accused the FSA of adopting a ‘slash and burn' approach to regulation since former chairman Howard Davies left office.

Tony Blair's government faces a second day of bashing by a multilateral organisation over his economic policies after the OECD criticised the UK's pensions regime as inadequate and likely to precipitate long-term economic troubles.

SMOKERS IN their 40s are more likely to die in their 60s than non-smokers, according to a life insurance report published in the Guardian .