Tory Country

[lifetime fan]

24 minutes ago, Strontium said:

 

Don't really understand because context is only relevant if I'm offering an opinion, and I wasn't offering an opinion. Maybe you should stop seeing things that aren't there.

Ahahahahahaha

[Fugitive]

2 hours ago, Strontium said:

 

I agree with you that the coalition did a great job keeping interest rates at 0.5% for five years.

 

Fuck sake, is it any wonder you get shit on here. You are a born and bred politician and that’s why nobody likes you. I think you are alright but shit like this makes you really unlikable. 

 

 

[Strontium]

12 minutes ago, Fugitive said:

Fuck sake, is it any wonder you get shit on here. You are a born and bred politician and that’s why nobody likes you. I think you are alright but shit like this makes you really unlikable. 

 

Come on, it was funny.

[No2]

13 hours ago, Gnasher said:

Five months ago.

 

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/inflation-bank-of-england-governor-andrew-bailey-spring-fall-b1054398.html?s=09

 

 

Now now Gnash, not really fair to be dragging up old comments when you were fully in support of the good inflation not so long ago.

[Scott_M]

10 hours ago, Fugitive said:

It’s not an official agreement and they are friends. I could literally walk out now but I’m holding on because I love the place and anywhere else around here right now to rent is a lot more than I’m actually paying. I’m paying £900 and there is a place a few doors down that is going for £1200 and it’s identical. I’ve been looking elsewhere but the rental market in Glasgow right now is horrific and to get somewhere affordable is basically a one bed in a shit area which does not work with a little girl.

 

As I said, I was saving to buy the place off them and they were on board with that but  it’s not possible at the minute. People are now bidding against each other for anything in Glasgow due to the severe lack of rental places and the high demand.

 

Think I’ll just take on the extra hours doing an additional job after I finish work. They will definitely drop the rent when the interest rates go down. It’s just a matter of when. I just want my little girl to have stability and to live in a nice area.

Unfortunately you’ve left yourself open to it without a proper tenancy agreement. 
 

If you’d have signed something for £600 per month for 6 months, it’s on them to pay the extra until the tenancy agreement is up for renewal. 
 

They could obviously have jacked it up at the end of the tenancy, if they were friends you’d hope you would have got fair warning on it. 
 

Obviously don’t know the full details of the product, if you’re currently paying £900, you can expect another £50-£100 on top of that based on yesterdays announcement. 
 

Also, without a tenancy agreement, is it even a Buy-To-Let product? If the bank was made aware they were leasing a residential property, they could apply more interest to the property. 
 

I know they might be friends and it might be a challenging conversation, I think you need to protest yourself here. Get a proper agreement and ask them to look at changing the product / term length as that should lower payments. 
 

If it isn’t a BTL product and a standard Residential mortgage, there are more options for them to change. 
 

Alternatively, some banks are giving 100% mortgages now. If they are open to selling,  maybe look into it. 

[Scott_M]

Although it is obviously been great interest rates have been low for such a long time, in situations like we’re in now, it’s counter productive.

 

Peoples have become used to having more expendable funds, they are used to more meals out, nicer clothes, nicer / more frequent holidays, a 2nd car etc etc etc…. it’s a very difficult conversation making people realise that they simply aren’t going to be able to afford everything they could 12/18 months ago and they need to change their lifestyle accordingly.

 

I know that might seem simples, I can assure you not everybody sees it that way. 

[Gnasher]

25 minutes ago, No2 said:

Now now Gnash, not really fair to be dragging up old comments when you were fully in support of the good inflation not so long ago.

 

Nah to add context, a certain level of controlled inflation normally shows a healthy robust economy. Theirs little to fear.  This is different, as its out of control and wages are now lagging well behind. Outside factors such as Putin, Brexit, Covid, Sanctions, have contributed to the problem but the main reason for spiralling inflation is Governments and Bank of England incompetence. Plus corporate greed.

[Pete]

I'm just glad we fixed ours for another 5 years in January with an increase of £60.   God help anyone not on a fixed rate or renting a property where the landlord isn't on a fixed rate.   Even on two decent salaries things get a little hairy toward the back end of the month for us.   

 

[A Red]

51 minutes ago, Scott_M said:

Unfortunately you’ve left yourself open to it without a proper tenancy agreement. 
 

If you’d have signed something for £600 per month for 6 months, it’s on them to pay the extra until the tenancy agreement is up for renewal. 
 

They could obviously have jacked it up at the end of the tenancy, if they were friends you’d hope you would have got fair warning on it. 
 

Obviously don’t know the full details of the product, if you’re currently paying £900, you can expect another £50-£100 on top of that based on yesterdays announcement. 
 

Also, without a tenancy agreement, is it even a Buy-To-Let product? If the bank was made aware they were leasing a residential property, they could apply more interest to the property. 
 

I know they might be friends and it might be a challenging conversation, I think you need to protest yourself here. Get a proper agreement and ask them to look at changing the product / term length as that should lower payments. 
 

If it isn’t a BTL product and a standard Residential mortgage, there are more options for them to change. 
 

Alternatively, some banks are giving 100% mortgages now. If they are open to selling,  maybe look into it. 

Sounds like fugitive might be unknowingly complicit in helping the property owners dodge capital gains tax. No tenancy agreement, buy to let mortgage (if thats the case)and no bond makes it difficult for the tax man (woman/person/pixie) to trace. They can try to hike the rent without worrying about fair rent tribunals.

 

 

[Carra_is_legend]

1 hour ago, Scott_M said:

Although it is obviously been great interest rates have been low for such a long time, in situations like we’re in now, it’s counter productive.

 

Peoples have become used to having more expendable funds, they are used to more meals out, nicer clothes, nicer / more frequent holidays, a 2nd car etc etc etc…. it’s a very difficult conversation making people realise that they simply aren’t going to be able to afford everything they could 12/18 months ago and they need to change their lifestyle accordingly.

 

I know that might seem simples, I can assure you not everybody sees it that way. 

 

It is equally counter productive to keep increasing the interest rate because its only making the people suffer more whilst not having much of an impact on inflation. At the time when energy prices were at the highest and cost of food through the roof. 

[No2]

1 hour ago, Gnasher said:

 

Nah to add context, a certain level of controlled inflation normally shows a healthy robust economy. Theirs little to fear.  This is different, as its out of control and wages are now lagging well behind. Outside factors such as Putin, Brexit, Covid, Sanctions, have contributed to the problem but the main reason for spiralling inflation is Governments and Bank of England incompetence. Plus corporate greed.

It was out of control when you where swallowing more Tory lies and celebrating it.

 

To preempt your answer, if it wasn't out of control then by definition it was under control. So who was it that had it under control?

[Scott_M]

10 minutes ago, Carra_is_legend said:

 

It is equally counter productive to keep increasing the interest rate because its only making the people suffer more whilst not having much of an impact on inflation. At the time when energy prices were at the highest and cost of food through the roof. 

 

There is a multitude of different reasons - Brexit, Russia, COVID19 etc - why this is happening.

 

The point of raising the interest rates is that peoples mortgage is their priority and other areas should stop increasing their prices accordingly. 
 

Energy prices have increased. However, instead of keeping the energy prices the same and eating into energy companies profits, they’ve passed the additional cost onto the public in an attempt to kept their profits the same.
 

It’s a similar story with supermarkets and other areas of retail. 
 

IMO, the government should be intervening in practice like that but that’s another story. 

 

People can live without or on limited energy. Obviously it’s not preferable, but it can be done. Not having a roof over your head is a far worse situation. 
 

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, that’s the theory. 

[skend04]

I know people are focused on mortgage rates but there are millions living on credit cards and loans too. These arbitrary increases in rates won't just hurt homeowners. 

 

Completely ignoring why some businesses have to increase costs and pass on to the consumer isn't helping either. But both main parties are taking the same head in the sand approach so I don't expect much to change.

[Scott_M]

1 minute ago, skend04 said:

I know people are focused on mortgage rates but there are millions living on credit cards and loans too. These arbitrary increases in rates won't just hurt homeowners. 

Although not my specific area, part of my wider team looks at Unsecured Collections.

 

There isn’t nearly the amount of increases in Unsecured as there is in mortgages. 
 

BTL properties on variable rates are the hardest hit but in general, all mortgages products / repayment types in arrears  are rapidly increasing. 

[Scott_M]

54 minutes ago, A Red said:

Sounds like fugitive might be unknowingly complicit in helping the property owners dodge capital gains tax. No tenancy agreement, buy to let mortgage (if thats the case)and no bond makes it difficult for the tax man (woman/person/pixie) to trace. They can try to hike the rent without worrying about fair rent tribunals.

 

 

I’d certainly say Fugitive isn’t as well protected as he could / should be. To be honest, neither party are.

[TheBitch]

In fairness to Fuge and his mates he was renting off, the situation was probably working well for both parties until the world, and particularly this country turned into a fucking basket case run by psychopaths. 

[Scott_M]

8 minutes ago, TheBitch said:

In fairness to Fuge and his mates he was renting off, the situation was probably working well for both parties until the world, and particularly this country turned into a fucking basket case run by psychopaths. 

Although true, you have tenancy agreements for these eventuality’s. 
 

Although nobody thought they’d go this high, this quickly, they were never staying at 0.5% forever. 

[Gnasher]

25 minutes ago, No2 said:

It was out of control when you where swallowing more Tory lies and celebrating it.

 

To preempt your answer, if it wasn't out of control then by definition it was under control. So who was it that had it under control?

 

It was under the Untied States for most of that time. I believe their interest rate is under 5%, which is OK and where we should be aiming at. Our government did nothing to stop profiteering from big businesses and supermarkets who used the cost of living crisis as an excuse to ramp up prices and award big dividends. Added to outside factors and inflation was always going to spiral. It's got little to do with wages as they are below inflation. The 12/13 continuous interest rises have not worked in curbing inflation.

[Kepler-186]

https://www.itv.com/news/2023-06-21/british-children-shorter-than-other-five-year-olds-in-europe
 

In 1985, the UK recorded the 69th tallest five-year-olds in the world. 

But this has significantly dropped to 96th for girls, and boys' average heights have fallen even further, to 102nd place. 
 

“They’ve fallen by 30 places, which is pretty startling,” said Professor Tim Cole, an expert in child growth rates at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London told The Times newspaper. “The question is why?”

The professor, who was not involved in the most recent study, said wider data on the height of 19-year-olds suggested that growing up in the 2010s “which happens to coincide with the period of austerity . . . tells me that austerity has clobbered the height of children in the UK.”

2010-2015 coalition government: Good times, good politics. 

 

 

[Mudface]

7 minutes ago, Kepler-186 said:

https://www.itv.com/news/2023-06-21/british-children-shorter-than-other-five-year-olds-in-europe
 

In 1985, the UK recorded the 69th tallest five-year-olds in the world. 

But this has significantly dropped to 96th for girls, and boys' average heights have fallen even further, to 102nd place. 
 

“They’ve fallen by 30 places, which is pretty startling,” said Professor Tim Cole, an expert in child growth rates at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London told The Times newspaper. “The question is why?”

The professor, who was not involved in the most recent study, said wider data on the height of 19-year-olds suggested that growing up in the 2010s “which happens to coincide with the period of austerity . . . tells me that austerity has clobbered the height of children in the UK.”

2010-2015 coalition government: Good times, good politics. 

 

 

 

Got to pay for plastic bags, though. Well worth stunting children's growth and prospects.

[Scott_M]

Allowing customers payment holidays and temporary IO for the next 12 months - that’s my job classed as crisis management for the next 2 years. 

[Section_31]

Makes me laugh how one of the helping hands they give you is to become interest only, yeah great - may as well put it all in a one armed bandit. 

[A Red]

5 hours ago, Scott_M said:

I’d certainly say Fugitive isn’t as well protected as he could / should be. To be honest, neither party are.

Fugitive is saving the property owners quite a sum in capital gains tax when they sell the property but also income tax on the rent they receive from him. (Mortgage payments are not tax deductible)

 

I would suggest that the benefits of him renting off a friend only flow 1 way.

[Scott_M]

4 minutes ago, A Red said:

Fugitive is saving the property owners quite a sum in capital gains tax when they sell the property but also income tax on the rent they receive from him. (Mortgage payments are not tax deductible)

 

I would suggest that the benefits of him renting off a friend only flow 1 way.

 

Just re-read the property is in Scotland. In England or Wales, it would protect Fugitive if they stopped paying the mortgage. The account would fall into arrears, an LPA would collect payment from Fugitive to apply to the mortgage.

 

In Scotland, that wouldn't happen. It would straight to a Solicitor and a Decree.

[Kepler-186]

You know the central conceit of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, of course you do. A lad of sun-kissed beauty is presented with a stunning likeness of himself. Disturbed at the notion that he will grow old while the painting doesn’t, he locks it away – where it is the portrait that ages and uglifies while Dorian stays boyish and beautiful. But perhaps you’ve forgotten what happens next.

 

The story has come to my mind many times, as the foulness of British politics becomes ever harder to ignore. Genteel liberals wonder how their land of cricket whites and orderly queues could be ruled by a grasping liar such as Boris Johnson and I hear a whisper on the wind: Dorian Gray. The New York Times and Der Spiegel report in bewilderment on a country with pockets of deep poverty and unslaked anger, and again rasps that hoarse voice: the horror was hidden here all along.

 

Now it’s all out in the open. In one of the richest societies in human history, inhabitants are starting to twig that by 2030 or thereabouts they will earn less per head than the Poles they so recently patronised. Whatever the politicians and pundits may argue, this debacle owes nothing to Jeremy Corbyn or Brexit or any supposedly un-British “populism”. It is homegrown and has deep roots.

 

Like Dorian Gray, Britain has for too long presented one face to the world while concealing the awful truth. The author of that novel, Oscar Wilde, was the son of an Irish nationalist and a graduate of Oxford, where he became a fine student of the British upper classes and their mellifluous hypocrisy. He would have recognised much of the mess we’re in, because it grew among shadows and cover-ups.
 

From Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia through to George Osborne’s “march of the makers”, our rulershave trumpeted every false success, while ugly facts have been waved away as anomalies: from the former manufacturing suburbs and towns turned into giant warehouses of surplus people, to the fact that 15% of adults in England are on antidepressants.
 

We’re winning the global race, claimed David Cameron, even as the population’s life expectancy fell far behind other rich countries. We shan’t stunt future generations with debt, he boasted, as our five-year-olds became the shortest in Europe.

 

 

Or take the housing bubble that politicians pretended was true prosperity – until this week, as the Bank of England hiked rates for the 13th time in a row and the prospect of it bursting began to terrify them. Yet the Westminster classes blew their hardest into that bubble. As soon as estate agents were out of lockdown, Rishi Sunak gave up £6bn of taxpayers’ moneyfor a stamp duty holiday – an act as prudent as pouring petrol on a fire. Many of those he lured up the property ladder will be hardest hit by rising mortgage rates. 
 

Analysis done for me by UK Finance suggests that 465,000 house purchases during that tax break were financed with two- or three-year fixed rate mortgages – the very ones running out right now. In other words, nearly half a million households took the chancellor’s inducement; many will plunge into dangerous financial straits; some face losing their homes. They were mis-sold a dream by Sunak. Still, at least the Tories enjoyed a bounce in the polls.

 

“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face,” Dorian is told by his portraitist Basil Hallward. “If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even … But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face and your marvellous untroubled youth – I can’t believe anything against you.”

 

The picture of Dorian, which would have revealed the grotesque truth, is hidden away.

 

So, too, has the UK avoided admitting its ills. Even now, in a country where patently so little works for people who rely on work for their income, commentators and frontbenchers still blame supposedly all-powerful interlopers: Boris, Nigel, Jeremy. And from Sunak to Starmer, all push growth and jobs as the remedy for what ails us.

 

Yet growth in this country is falling and not because of Ukraine or Covid or Brexit. Since the 1950s, the growth rate adjusted for inflation has been on a gentle but insistent downward slide.

 

Our economy has become ever more stagnant and dependent on debt. It is fatuous to pretend this is going to turn around through magicking Britain into an AI free-for-all or a jolly green industrial giant. Employment? One in four employees are on low weekly wages – either because the pay is too low or the hours aren’t enough – while the average real wage has flatlined for many years.

Much of this analysis comes from a new book, When Nothing Works, written by a team of scholars. Although specialising in economics and accountancy, what they have produced is an essential text for understanding British government: the polarised politics of a highly unequal and increasingly stagnant society.

Take the issue at the top of today’s agenda: wages. Why can’t you and I take home more money? Because of a lack of productivity, politicians will say. Yet the researchers point to how labour has got a smaller and smaller share of economic output since the 1970s.

 

If the same share of GDP was paid out in wages today as in 1976, the average working-age household would have an extra £9,744 a year. We haven’t lost that 10 grand a year through laziness at work but because politicians from Thatcher onwards smashed up trade unions, undermined labour rights, and crowed over the result as a “flexible labour market”. What they really created was a low-wage workforce, in a low-growth country ruled by politicians with low ambitions for everyone bar themselves.

“The prayer of your pride has been answered,” Basil counsels Dorian, when he finally sees the portrait and its horrific truth. “The prayer of your repentance will be answered also.”
 

When Nothing Works will inevitably be termed pessimistic, but it is no such thing. Realism comes from facing who we are and dropping the pretence that a growth miracle is just around the corner. Instead of trying to boost “the economy”, it is high time to boost our people: to ensure they have the basics they need to live a life free from indignity and free to flourish. This will come from redistribution rather than growth, from replacing extractive businesses with fair ones.
 

Such ideas will not go down well in SW1, where both Tory and Labour are increasingly hostile to pluralism and brittle in their dogmatism. Self-knowledge is the hardest knowledge, as one of the book’s authors, Karel Williams, says. And self-delusion leads eventually to disaster.

 

Unable to face his loathsome self-image, Dorian slashes that portrait. He is found by servants. “Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not till they examined the rings that they recognised who it was.”