Peter Rhodes: What about corruption in middle-class finance industry?

AND off to Halfords which is what you have to do today when a headlamp bulb fails. In the old days you fixed it at the roadside in five minutes. Today, a Halfords lad reaches deep into the tight, hidden recesses of the bonnet, locates the old bulb, removes it and slips the new one into place, all without being able to see the socket. He'd make a terrific magician. Or a midwife.

EVEN if you fancied replacing the bulb yourself, the system conspires against you. The owner's manual for my car runs to 280 pages but there is nothing under "B for bulbs" about changing bulbs. That information is thoughtfully tucked away under "D for dipped beam" and even if you find it, the job is far too tricky for mere motorists.

MY 280-page owner's manual is by no means the thickest on the market. A Daily Telegraph reader pointed out a few days ago that while the handbook for his family saloon runs to more than 300 pages, the flight manual for a Lancaster bomber in the Second World War was 20 pages.

DANIEL Radcliffe has been saying some wise things about avoiding excessive attention by refusing to use Twitter or Facebook. So here's a tip in return, Daniel. Trim those eyebrows before you turn into Rudolf Hess.

ATTORNEY General Dominic Grieve warns about corruption within ethnic communities. Damn right, Dom. And let's start by cleaning up the most devious and dangerous community of all. From the banking crisis to the crooked selling of insurance, Britons have been robbed and robbed again by a community of professional people who are overwhelmingly white male Brits. Last week a listener on You and Yours (Radio 4) explained how she became a typical victim. She was persuaded to "invest" more than £100,000 with her reputable, trusted high street bank. A few months later, after her money almost halved in value, she panicked and reinvested it with another bank which managed to lose a few more thousand. She ended up with just £12,000, some of which was recovered by a specialist company - charging 45 per cent commission. This week we hear that RBS allegedly drove small firms out of business in order to acquire their assets. In China, they still shoot people for this sort of behaviour; in Britain we tend to give them knighthoods. By all means root out vote-rigging, palm-greasing and nepotism in the ethnic communities. But let's not overlook the corruption we have seen practised on a massive scale, year after year, by home-grown white, middle-class professionals.

WE babyboomers should have one advantage in dealing with money men. By now, we ought to be streetwise. We learned long ago that the finance industry is institutionally dishonest. Back in the 1980s we were assured by smiling, trust-me men in smart suits that if we took out an endowment mortgage it would not only pay off our mortgage 25 years hence but produce a whopping great lump sum. What endowment mortgages actually produced was a whopping great black hole and lots of sleepless nights. These days my default position is to regard any banker, mortgage broker, financial adviser or pension expert as a lying toad until he proves otherwise.

A READER recounts a chilling experience in a power cut which put out all the street and house lights. Bowling merrily down the unlit pitch-black road was a vehicle showing no lights and with no road tax, driver's licence or insurance which was miraculously avoided by other vehicles - a disability scooter. These scooters in the 21st century are like handguns in the 20th century. Something will eventually be done, but only after a large number of people have been killed.

A READER tells me he missed the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special at the weekend but is planning to catch it in 1957.