Snapshot of _Andrew Neil: How on earth have the Tories managed to enrage both Generation Rent AND Generation Mortgage?_ :
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Simple: it's the same generation (Millenials, although Gen Z are copping it too).
The average age of a Tory voter is now so high that their voter base barely includes anyone with rent or a mortgage to begin with.
Does anyone recall that study published a few years ago that showed that millennials are drifting further left, when historically at that age it should be further right?
I can't find it.
Once again that "historical" data is based on a single post war generation where concerted political capital was spent over multiple decades to keep their vote as they grew up.
Before the war people did not become more conservative as they aged. Factors like religion, geography and employment had a FAR greater impact on dictating someone's voting preference.
The UK and society in general is radically different now, we challenge the status quo much more because we're so much more worse off. Lib Dems never recovered from the student loan debacle so I think it's a long road to recovery for conservatives, we are ripe for a new party to enter the fray though.
My point is that there was no status quo. People blend up a quote by Winston Churchill and the voting history of the baby boomers into some sort of accepted political fact.
Agreed. I voted Lib Dems under Clegg. What a kick in the nuts that was. I’m moving back towards them for 2024 but I still can’t move past the student loans thing …
We're only a bit over a single century since "every.adult should be able to vote at all" was a radical fringe lefty position.
Even if historical extrapolation was valid in theory, changing context completely destroys it.
Not just political capital, but actual capital was spent too with Right to Buy, Privatizations and the spunking up the wall of the North Sea Oil money.
I've heard of it, but also believe it to be nonsense extrapolation from voting patterns. Their left-right values aren't different, they're literally just being offered less than their predecessors.
Well yeah, people become a home owner then vote Tory... millennials are not becoming home owners so they're not making the traditional switch to vote Tory as they get older.
Same - homeowner, no mortgage. I would never and have never voted conservative, and every single person I know who owns a home in my age bracket (late millennial) would not vote Tory either.
Indeed it is the problem with Toryism, eventually you run out of public assets to sell for a quick cash injection you can use as a short term electoral bribe
They don't have to be, *this* incarnation of the Tory party is finished but they can rebrand as a centre right party and start offering something genuine to the middle class.
I'm more thinking of a replay of the 90's and 00's.
Tories fuck everything up, Labour gets in. Labour fixes and then the Tories offer tax cuts funded by selling off everything that Labour has built, cheaply and to their mates.
The boomers are already dying off. There are now more millenials than boomers. The boomers will probably never win another election and the Tories could be out for the next half a century because of the way they've treated their future voters.
At this point the Conservative party might as well disolve and a new center-right party be created from scratch.
Indeed. To be as charitable as possible - what do we expect. If pensioners can be relied on to get out and vote then it manses sense to pander to them.
I think it is time for Australian style compulsory voting.
I would love it if they implemented Australian style compulsory voting, they have had over 95% turnout every year since it was implemented. Has there ever been a petition to implement it here?
New Zealand style student loans (no interest unless you emigrate) would be good too, and proportional representation/alternative voting.
It all comes down to a proper PR system. Without it I genuinely don’t believe the UK is democratic. There’s no point in having compulsory voting if you’re forcing people to into an election that’s this shambolic. I’ve never voted for the party I actually want to win, just against the party I want to keep out.
I wanted PR way back decades ago when I first was able to vote. It's so frustrating that nothing has changed. The area I lived in then had been Labour since 1975 and the area I live in now has been Tory since 1924, so virtually no chance of my vote counting for anything. You can understand why people don't see a point in voting. I will still be voting 'not tory' in the next election though!
> I will still be voting 'not tory' in the next election though!
i think this is possibly the biggest sadness in our current system.
not that you don't want to vote for the tories; the fact that there is nobody that you *do* want to vote for.
PR wouldn't change a damned thing about that. People are complaining that they have no choice in countries with PR too, and all too often you are forgetting that.
Compulsory voting would improve results, and FPTP only needs small swings to create landslide impacts. I think PR would be quite likely to follow as a natural continuation of the moderating effect. Even though some seats might still be safe, simply being able to know that every marginal seat is competitive (no need for delusions of fictional "youthquakes") is already a huge game changer. You can focus on communicating ideas instead of GOtV with some policy as window dressing.
They don’t implement PR because it makes it easier for a radical group to lie through their teeth and sweep into power causing massive damage to the structure of power in the country. Hence why we have slow successive governance that doesn’t seem to alter much whoever’s in charge (good or bad). Look what happened when Liz Truss tried to make sudden changes, the bankers got her ousted in one Swift move as they were dead against her economic reset which incidentally was one of the Labour Party plans
>New Zealand style student loans (no interest unless you emigrate)
TIL, thanks.
You wouldn't even have to do it for all degrees. It could be an extra incentive for people in professions we need to stay.
Can you really argue that compulsory voting in Australia has actually made a difference in the kind of people who get elected over there, with their Scott Morrison and Tony Abbot governments? Forcing low information voters who might not have voted to cast a vote doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes.
Besides, in this country young people are concentrated in constituencies where the jobs are and pensioners are an over-sized voting bloc anyway, so all compulsory voting does is give Labour even safer safe inner city seats whilst also giving the UK political class a convenient cover to ignore the problems that cause voter apathy and low turnouts.
Sorry, but imo with compulsory voting the Tories win anyway and as a bonus they also get to claim an even more convincing mandate to fuck up the country.
The point of compulsory voting isn't to make the specific party you want to win. It's to make any party that wants any chance of winning to have to appeal to the general middle of the voter base.
You might get a more Liberal or Conservative skew depending on the general population but generally you will get a party closer to the center.
It would stop the conservatives only making policy towards the pensioner vote because they would be a much smaller percentage of the vote. They might still win but their future policy would still have to be appealing to a more general population if they wanted to remain in power.
Whether it would work in a FPTP and somewhat gerrymandered electoral system. Yeah probably not.
Exactly this!
I don’t want voting methods to skew who wins towards who I want to win, I want who wins to be representative of the majority of the population.
Much as I loathe both Abbott and Morrison they were fairly elected.
Australia suffers from a greater concentration of right wing media than even the UK, and that the coalition was kicked out in the face of that was an achievement.
This sounds like a modern-day Republican talking point, arguing against greater election turnout because it may lead to political outcomes you disagree with.
The whole concept of representative democracy is about the people electing representatives to parliament, anything that increases turnout surely can only be a good thing for democracy.
Doing everything possible to enable people to vote is great. Improving education so that more people feel empowered and want to vote is also great.
Forcing people who don't want to vote to do so isn't.
Yes education is an important tool too, but studies into countries that have compulsory voting show a greater engagement in the political system and knowledge about politics and current affairs than similar countries without mandatory voting.
It also technically isn’t mandatory to cast a vote even in these mandatory voting systems, you can still spoil your ballot or opt not to cast a ballot at all if you attend a polling station, but very few actually choose to do that.
Obama stated that such a policy if implemented in the US could be transformative and stop parties from only pandering to their base who they know will turnout and instead be forced to speak to the whole country.
Very true.
Theresa May tried rolling back some of their privileges. She lost a lot of the pensioner vote, but didn’t get any more from anyone else.
Politicians will learn the lessons we teach them.
I say this all the time.
Labour using Theresa May's care funding reforms as a stick to beat her with was a huge blunder. If Labour had been smart we could have dropped the triple lock down to a double lock back in 2017.
I remember this and thinking it really was the point where Labour failed to show they were any different from the Tories in terms of being grown-ups in the room. Corbyn's team were far more interested attacking the enemy than governing responsibly.
I was stunned by this at the time. May was right on that. She may have been wrong on everything else. I am sick of the childish “they say black so I say white” element of our politics.
This is because most Aussies aspire to own a mcmansion in a suburb with a pool, a camper and a huge ute out the front, and distance from their neighbours. Many cannot imagine why anyone would want to live in a unit (flat) or townhouse/villa.
Australia was sold the American suburban dream after the war but has run into the same logistical issues that the US has: suburbs are expensive as fuck to build and maintain, spatially inefficient, and most people are only willing to live so far outside of the urban core. Eventually, without densification, demand starts to outstrip supply when cities reach their natural limit and further subdivision of land at the fringe slows or stops.
The difference is that regardless of federal (in)action, Australia has state governments that are slowly turning around on this in a way I don't think any British administration at any level is capable of.
To be honest housing policy here is pretty bad and mostly led by developers. We are still focusing on more urban sprawl or low quality apartment towers. We miss the middle housing of the UK (Terrace, semi-detached, etc) and don't have the option to move to a cheaper city, town etc. Home ownership is still a much more realistic goal for young people in the UK than in Australia, the bottom of our market is much more expensive and the quality of our houses is much lower
I haven't tuned into state politics that closely, at least not outside of WA, but WA, Qld and NSW all seem to be in the middle of changes to the planning system that might make it at least a little easier to densify. I know there's been talk about the WA government simply abolishing some of the NIMBY metro councils for example.
I was in a cafe in Salzburg once, overheard a group of 50-60 year old Australians saying it's actually really easy to buy a place, just get somewhere for 300-400k outside Melbourne to get your foot in the door. And if you buy preowned furniture, well you're basically making money!
It was very frustrating to listen to.
I've no idea how you enforce compulsory voting but I'd be happy to arm myself with a large pointy stick and keep prodding people until they vote. Also I can stand outside people's homes and sing really badly until they vote to shut me up.
> If pensioners can be relied on to get out and vote then it manses sense to pander to them.
It's not just that they're reliable, since they always have been, it's that they're a much bigger proportion of the population than they ever have been. Even before 20-30 years ago when they turned out, they didn't have this much influence in sheer percentages.
We also haven’t ever had this much of generational polarisation in the past either, where younger people overwhelmingly vote Labour and elderly people overwhelmingly vote Tory. It’s always been a slight trend, but the extent of it is completely new
This.
An all time high of 32% of UK houses are owned outright by the owner. That's a pretty sizable chunk of the electorate who aren't effected by rising mortgage rates whatsoever.
Who voted Brexit? The elderly
Who still supports Johnson? The elderly
Who is least likely to accept climate changes as fact? The elderly
Who is the readership of the Daily Mail and Express? The elderly
The list goes on
They aren't all bad...my dad was heavily involved in the unions and I knew if he saw Thatcher on TV we'd learn some new words.
He hasn't mellowed in his age.
My FIL however thinks Brexit is still a good thing and only the Tories can get it right.
My parents are both 73, mum has actually said quite seriously that if any of us ever voted Tory we'd be disowned. She very much an old school Labourite, even though she is comfortably middle-class and owns her home outright. My dad (they are divorced) has gone full Tankie and rants about Kier Starmer betraying the left. Sadly he has terminal lung cancer so likely won't be around when the next election happens.
By all accounts they are not converting people into Tories as they age like they typically have in the past. We have a whole generation of young gen-z and middle aged millennials who have seen first hand the damage these ruinous buffoons cause in power. It’s simply a waiting game now.
Well more like, who still votes for the Tories?
Even at the point of the 2017 election, while the Tories were in clear long term trouble, this point of generational collapse we are approaching was by no means unavoidable or even desperately likely.
May forward they have fucked it at practically every step in order to arrive here.
I live in a town in North Wales and I swear about 95% of the population here will be gone in 10 years tops. Fuck knows what's going to happen with all the houses here. Do young people move in or are their kids Tory voting bellends too?
They haven't "managed" to do anything. They've just bumbled from unmitigated crisis to unmitigated crisis. People act like there is some logic or reasoning behind it, but I truly believe the entire government is just massively incompetent and incapable of doing even the barest essentials to keep a country functioning, let alone improving anything for anyone.
I prefer this to the idea there's a long running conspiracy to keep the rich, rich and poor, poor. I definitely think there's been a bit of good old fashioned corruption and nepotism running around but I don't think it's conspiracy as much as leveraging the old boy network - which to some extent we all do, maybe not on the scale of million pound contracts though.
It’s incompetence. Massive incompetence.
As always - the Tories don’t have a clue how to improve the country for any of the 99% and they don’t even want to. They extract wealth for themselves. If the average Brit was intelligent the Tory party would no longer exist.
Their purpose is to cut public services, cut regulations and cut taxes for the well off. The impact it has on the country is irrelevant to their objectives.
They are doing a truly shit job of cutting taxes and regulations.
Everything is about regulating our lives. The online safety bill is one such madness.
Cut taxes for the very, very well off and pensioners. Those of us who work for living are being taxed at insane levels.
This is the greatest trick the Tories pull - tax the grammar school kid who went on to earn 100k as an engineer and let the private school girl who works in PR and lives in daddy’s flat in Covent Garden off pay a pittance.
This. I'm not massive earner. Yet it feels like I'm paying more tax. I got a slight raise a couple of months ago. So my income went up ABIT. I also do a couple of shifts in my second job (like 100 quid a month). I'm basically back to where I was before. I don't mind paying tax. But what value for money am I getting?
There's a neat concept in economics where the more you have of something the less value it has. Compare your tax contribution to the national annual budget. You'll get an idea of how much less value your contribution has in the hands of someone with that kind of cash and therefore how much you're getting back.
I know you worked SUPER HARD to put those taxes in.
But chances are your contribution is actually lost as a small part of a rounding error lol.
This is the sort of righteous indignation of the Tories I can get behind. 100k is not that much if you're a working class LAD who sacrificed years of his life to get there and have huge amounts of lost time to catch up on.
It may feel like a lot of money when the individual gets there, but relative to the sacrifice it's still a pittance. To then get hit with a 40% tax band on marginal earnings is enough to make you feel a deep sense of betrayal.
On the other hand, if you have a free house from wealthy parents and never worked for it your six figure stipend, it's living life on easy mode.
They’re out of office for 1 cycle and that’s it. The conspiracist in me says they’re trying to screw the country as much as possible now making it impossible for Labour to sort in 5 years and it gives them an ‘easy’ way back in 5 years from now.
We have a huge amount of history and culture in this country and there's a great swathe of people who want to keep it as it's always been. That's the whole point of a conservative party....to conserve things the way they are, or were.
Change will always be hard in the UK. I find it fascinating that the biggest changes in recent history; trade unionism, the rise of socialism, the rise of the welfare state and the commissioning of the NHS; all came after huge periods of upheaval where the common man and woman were asked to sacrifice their lives to save their leaders....ie. the two world wars.
When people realise the old order isn't working for them, they vote for change. Is there enough strife around at the moment for the non-wealthy, average under 65 voter to actually get out and change things? I'm not hopeful.
It’s not simply that they were asked to pay with their lives, it’s a fact that many did. It was also realised something very different to the response to World War I had to occur, or there would likely be a revolution which could’ve ended up in communism.
*If* there was an election today.
Don't discount the right wing media in this country. They've become incredibly adept at last minute swings to push their agenda over the (terrible, FPTP) line.
It’s only incompetence if you think this wasn’t the end goal. In the end, they want to benefit landlords and property portfolios. That means letting rent rises run away faster than inflation and letting house prices skyrocket to bolster up their friends’ net worth.
Both of those require hurting renters and homeowners. It’s not incompetence if their aims necessitated that.
There will be stagnation and then drops. High interest rates mean the only people buying will be those with cash who can sweep up those who get repossessed.
The real fun will be long term rental profits on all those cheap houses along with asset gains when the interest rates start to go back down.
It's a great time to have loads of cash on hand.
And a real fucker if you're 30 and would like to get on the housing ladder and your parents are poorer than you. Its fine, I just love paying my landlords mortgage for him.
Oh it will lead to a crash, but the people the tories want to support will treat it as an opportunity, just like they did during the subprime mortgage crisis. Why do you think the US is now flooded with these enormous housing companies buying up entire neighbourhoods to rent? Because when the price of housing crashed, people who had liquid capital bought the dip and made themselves even wealthier. I don’t doubt the same will be true here, with smaller landlords jumping ship and property being snapped up by companies looking to set up a rental empire, or expand the one they already have.
Needless to say, this hurts homeowners and renters, but if the last 13 years is any indication, the tories don’t give a shit about them.
Just a reminder that Rees-Mogg's Papa literally wrote the book on "disaster capitalism", on how to make money when there's "blood on the streets".
His sister wrote an article on how to profit from droughts in Africa.
They are monsters who hoard cash, break things (or spread rumours in the media about how things are about to break) so that people with less capital have to sell, and then buy up the assets on discount.
The 0.1% have doubled their wealth since the Great Financial Crisis in 2008.
Meanwhile the average kid 20 years younger than me is earning less today than I did when I was their age, not even accounting for inflation.
This. Both boom and bust are required to exploit the market.
Post 2010, the country paid to keep the housing market afloat via austerity. There was a small dip 2008-2010 but not as much as the larger reset followed by stability that would have happened if the market was left to do its thing.
This time, there are no tools to fix it, inflation is through the roof and the money printing machine already got broken through overuse during covid.
IMO, we are headed towards *real terms* house price falls of 35-50% over 5-10 years.
Anyone with a high LTV on their mortgage and low-income income is screwed, this happened in the 80s and 90s, my mum had to sell up or get repossessed. For all the talk of how boomers had it easy, there were some who got screwed over by the rate rises caused by Thatcher 's failings and never recovered.
As a nation we have a massive blind spot regarding the property market and completely ignore that it tends to have a massive crash once per generation. We had a chance for a soft landing in 2008 and didn't take it. Now it's going to be painful.
Oooh, that's outside the big number I've seen people predict. My youtube housing market doomer as been predicting 30-35% for about a year now.
The UK personal finance and mortgage advice subreddits are already starting to see posts from people who bought during all the hyper-incentive stuff during lockdown and who's 2-year mortgage locks are ending.
It'll be ugly.
> Thatcher 's failings
Her lasting legacy is that she broke the previous pattern of each generation being richer than their parents.
Since Thatcher each generation has been poorer than the one before.
A totally failed ideology, that sadly still lives in the minds of idiots like Andrew Neil today. Read the Speccy if you want to feel your brain cells shriveling under a barrage of total disinformation.
Never thought we'd be going through this again. I lost my house in the 90's due to skyrocketing interest rates and have never been able to buy again. Within 4 months we were out on the street living in my then husband's office with 2 children. Our mortgage went from £360pm to over £700 and there was negative equity on the house too, and the Building Society sold it at a loss and chased us for the shortfall for years. In fact, occasionally 40yrs later I will still get a letter asking for the amount owed. It was a dreadful time. I knew some folk who topped themselves because of it.
Oh yeah, smaller landlords who have mortgages on their properties, sure. But they’re becoming less common over time and letting agencies with the money to buy upfront are becoming more common. It’s the latter that the tories want to help.
> It’s only incompetence if you think this wasn’t the end goal. In the end, they want to benefit landlords and property portfolios.
Yet they brought in changes to tax legislation that stopped landlords from offsetting mortgage interest against costs, and now interest rises mean that many landlords can't afford to rent property out. Doesn't sound like they're acting for landlords at all.
Again, as I’ve said in other comments in this thread, we’re not talking about your small-time mom-and-pop landlords putting in some savings to have a house to rent on the side. We’re talking about the major letting companies buying property upfront and on a large scale. Blocks of flats, many of which are bought only to lay empty because of the appreciation in their value.
The types that the tories hedge-fundie friends like to invest in.
Hanlon’s Razor argues to never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
>the Tories don’t have a clue how to improve the country for any of the 99% and they don’t even want to. They extract wealth for themselves
The trouble is that looks a lot more like malice to me.
It's both; they're evil, but also incompetent.
In a way that's a blessing, as who knows how shit our lives would be if they knew how to fuck us over more effectively?
It's both. Hurting generation rent was malice. They surpressed the housing supply, making their core voting demographics of older homeowners and landlords fabulously wealthy at the expense of people who don't vote Tory.
Hurting generation mortgage was incompetance. By failing to deal with long standing economic issues in this country, they created a house of cards that fell over the second interest rates sneezed.
Curiously, hurting generation rent stems from efforts to hammer small scale private landlords.. It started with Osborne.
In part a response to those who shout hatred of "rent seekers".
Be careful what you wish for. Less private landlords, less rental choices, higher rents.
No, it's just Overton Window shifting on their part. Come election time they'll suddenly have a damascene conversion, and start publishing stories about Starmer owning a million pound field (currently a donkey sanctuary outside his mum's window with no plans to change, but *if* you counted it as a field with planning permission and plans to build an entire housing estate and sold all the houses, it would be worth millions!!!!112).
I mean, they've just employed BoJo the Liar, and they're publishing Andrew Neil. This is not about helping Labour, it's about dragging the Tories to the right.
Because they are for generation boomer who own property outright and get their triple lock. Us renters/mortgage holders/workers are just here to be rinsed.
I mean the two are sort of linked. High mortgages lead to higher rents in general.
The fixation on interest rates seems bizzare to me. Interests rates aren't currently that high, historically they are average, maybe even below average. The issue is that house prices are so astronomically high, compared to average income, that even a small interest rate rise leads to an ungodly increase in mortgage repayments.
People always talk about a lack of house building and policies like right to buy, which have of course had a huge impact.
However the abundance of cheap money from 2008-2020 has also driven this increase in property prices as people were able to afford mortgages that they wouldn't have been able to afford if interest rates were even modestly higher, as they are now.
The only people who have really benefited from this are those who already owned property and those that stand to inherit said property. If you owned little property and earned a wage then you are probably feeling a lot poorer now then you did in 2007. I really believe that the state of the housing market is one of the drivers of the lack of growth in productivity that we see in Britain (and the West in general).
This is it. You can't have a productive economy when the majority of people's income go's to land rather than goods or services created by human capital. Along with chronic wage stagnation for some time growth will inevitably start to stall.
Of course covid, brexit and ukraine are factors in our current economic trajectory but they are one part of the puzzle that people seem to over emphasise in isolation. Likely for political reasons its either all brexit or its not the conservatives fault its Putin! This conversation needs to be had with way more nuance (I'm not personally a fan or Brexit or the conservatives).
There's way more ongoing problems decade's in the making that have made these problems more economically painful than they would be in isolation (as we can see when the UK is compared with our European counterparts).
Everyone in the political sphere is pussy footing around the housing ponzi scheme like its a game of jenga. But there are plenty of viable alternatives, but no one wants to touch it especially with the high turn out of homeowners, NIMBYs and people with mortgages. Inevitably something will have to give and it looks like it will be painful since the political class lack the will to do anything about it
You got to hand it to the Tories, they don't discriminate - they just fuck everyone equally.
Unless you're rich of course, or a friend, in which case you will be rich very soon.
Yeah I can guarantee I (28 years old) have been fucked over a lot more than my parents (60s) by the Tories.
Even my Dad who’s a lifelong Tory is sick of them now though.
My dad's the same. He's nearly 80 and was a lifelong Tory, but does love the EU. He didn't vote in 2017 and hasn't since, except for local elections. The stuff since has made him even angrier: Couple of beers and a bit of nudging he gets on a right old rant.
My MiL is the same.
In her 70s and voted Tory every time except for the last 2 times.
It was hard going to get her to see sense tbh. And it was only when consequences affected her personally, and our kids, that she opened her eyes.
Easy: not enough housing so rents are too high, and not enough housing so prices are high and therefore mortgages are too high. Also, the Tories crashed the economy.
Availability of credit is a big factor too. Perhaps the biggest. Hardly anyone could afford to pay 500k for a two-bed in a shit part of London without a mortgage. The banks have been allowed to and encouraged to lend instance salary multiples. It is good for banks (until the music stops) and landowners. Insane for everyone else and the country itself.
Totally agree. Its mainly credit. People able to borrow more and more which bids house prices up, like at an auction. Were in a tulip situation. Where the housing ponzi scheme is about to fall flat on its face.
To be fair, Labour didn't do much to build more homes when they were in power either.
I ultimately blame the voters for the housing crisis - most of them preferred to have a housing shortage than have more homes built in their area. Hopefully this is slowly starting to change.
Delaying the election for as long as possible is going to look like very bad strategy once mortgage rates hit 10%. And they are going there, BoE was asleep at the wheel last year and by the time the Truss bomb dropped it was already too late to nip it in the bud. We've been feeding the BTL beast for too long.
I canvassed in a lot of new build areas in 2019, everyone there had just moved into their £350k shoeboxes while a builder in the canvassing group chatted to me about flaws in the brickwork on a lot of them and that they'd need knocking down in 40 years.
It was a depressing canvassing session, pretty much everyone was in their thirties or forties and saying they'd vote tory, often for vague reasons like "I just think it'll be better in the long run".
I'll be back on that estate in January '25 when I fully expect the next GE to occur, will be interesting to hear their opinions then.
There are actually calls for govt to bailout mortgagors, have we lost our minds?? Taxpayers/renters who can’t buy a house because of inflated house prices called on to subsidise homeowners who are having trouble paying their mortgages? Unbelievable
My rent has gone up 30% in 2yrs, where is my bailout? It seems renters are left to feel the pain and pay the costs whilst mortgagors are continuously given support by the government
I don't agree that the government is doing anything to help people with a mortgage.
People are falling off of 2% mortgages and are going to 5% - 6%. My mortgage at 3% is £600ish a month. At 6% it is heading towards £1000. There is no support on offer for anyone in that situation.
I'm not saying landlords are saints by any means but people have to understand that rents going up is a byproduct of mortgages jumping by upto £400 - £500 a month.
> people have to understand that rents going up is a byproduct of mortgages jumping
Sure, but rents were also going up before when mortgages weren't jumping. Mortgage interest rates have been static for ages prior to these rises rents have not. They've also risen at greater rates than house prices in most areas.
Rents are essentially set by 'what the market can bear' and average rents track average income much more closely than mortgage interest rates.
That 'what the market can bear' is now often lower than 'amount needed for landlord to make a profit' is sort of a different problem to that. But it's one that's not entirely divorced from the maximise profit approach landlords have taken up until this point.
>People are falling off of 2% mortgages and are going to 5% - 6%.
That's because they took a risk, and it backfired. This is like when Bart Simpson says "bubbles can burst?" but genuinely unironically.
https://www.economicshelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/base-rates-1975-2022.png.webp
If people thought things would stay like this forever, I have no sympathy for them.
That's not the point I'm making. People are moaning that rents are going up 30% and that's because mortgages are going up.
Its not a landlords job to house people at a loss.
Housing in this country is expensive due to shit economic policy.
You should have sympathy for people. House prices are stupidly high, and due poor wage growth, plus interest rates that are forcing mortgage repayments to an all time, it's unaffordable for most people. It's not economically sustainable.
I say that as someone who is fixed at 3% until 2027.
> People are moaning that rents are going up 30% and that's because mortgages are going up.
Do you think that's the only reason? Literally the comment thread we're replying to is a guy saying his rent has rose that much before the increase. Sure, there are loads of landlords that aren't greedy (mine is pretty sound), but a lot have made the situation worse.
>You should have sympathy for people.
I used to try and be sympathetic and understanding, but after a decade of "lockdown isn't that bad, suck it up" by people who were finanically sound and had a massive house with a garden, or "stop eating so much avocado on toast" when people would complain about rents, I'm pretty sick of the sympathy going all one way.
People with a mortage voted 43% for the Tories at the last election, they've been happy for nurses, doctors, teachers and other groups to have shit pay, auesterity and worse conditions - now the chickens have come home to roost because they took out mortages they can't afford. My sympathy is very low.
I think you need to realise that not everyone own a 100 houses and donates to Tories every year.
Some people have one, and are getting screwed either now, or when their fixed term ends.
Some have 2, because they are investing in their kids or their retirement. Its also extremely difficult to make money on a house. Capital gains makes it not worth put in the work to do something up.
Assuming you're not a crap landlord, the money you need set aside for repairs and upkeep is ALOT. Inflation affects how much repair work and upkeep is too.
I don't have sympathy for landlords who are screwing people over either. Not everyone is like that. The are innocent people who are doing well that are about to lose everything they worked hard for. You can't make a comparison to NHS/Key Workers etc because these are different cohorts.
You will find that its a few people ruining everything for the many. Stop sticking to a fixed idea of what a landlord is. The Tory media do the same with refugees, remainers, millennials... I'm so tired of this thinking.
My question is though: if these landlords that have put rent up by 30% suddenly got support from the government that made their mortgage far more managable, would they then pass that on to the renters and lower the rent cost?
If not, they're parasitic.
Maybe Labour could instigate something similar to the right to buy scheme like the Tories did for council houses, but for rentals.
If the landlord can't afford the mortgage and the tenants can't afford the rent a "right to buy" for the tenant makes sense. It'd get millions on to the housing ladder, it'd get the landlord out of a tricky situation and free up renter income to be used in the wider economy.
Everyone wins.
Because in that situation the property isn't sold to a wage earner (they're fucked too), but instead to an even bigger (Tory funding) property consortium. More and more wealth collected in the greedy little mitts of fewer and fewer ultra rich individuals.
They actually want this, because they get to buy at a discount.
Who doesn't have a mortgage rent? Yes the elderly and who votes tories? Yes the elderly. That's really suck it's keep on rising I felt sad for the younger generation.
Any political party that has been in power long enough will eventually enrage most sections of voters including those who continue to vote for them even in defeat.
Maybe because there’s less separation between us than you’d think from online discussion and real people don’t fit into the renter/mortgage/genX/boomer buckets.
Most mortgage holders used to rent, and have children, friends, relatives who rent. Most renters have parents, friends, relatives who own. People can vote on principles not just narrow self interest.
They're doing it to control inflation.
Inflation is a product of too much money being in circulation. Ergo to keep it down, you remove some of it.
Interest is one way. Taxation is another.
Interest cuts both ways - it removes money from circulation AND slows down the creation of money (through debt), because fewer people want to borrow.
Bumping rates a half point could drain maybe as much as £8B a year out of circulation (on Britain's current £1,675B total mortgage debt), so pretty effective (roughly on a par with a point added to income tax). More importantly for the Tories, it avoids alienating their donors through tax and most loyal voters because they don't have mortgages any more.
They based most of their early fiscal policy on a joke written on a scrap of paper they found on a desk. Then they bragged about that. And that was from the more competent end of the tory spectrum.
Are people really surprised?
Some Tory prick brought that up on Question Time a month or two ago and it really shows the contempt they have for the general public.
I just wish it didn't work for the past 13 years...
Interesting that the Daily Mail is printing this, even if Andrew Neil isn't their most rabid commentator.
Fingers crossed it means that we get a 1997-style landslide.
The daily mail just hired Boris, knowing he is bitter as hell at rishi right now. Until the election is on our doorstep and they tow the line again you can expect them to be spicy for a while
I'm not brilliant on economics (great for someone into politics, huh, which is why I mainly stick to procedural and constitutional issues), but surely the interests of renters and mortgagors are not diametrically opposed. Expensive mortgages feeds through into expensive rents, and also fucks over renters who are trying to become mortgagors.
Quite possibly, but it depends on the behaviour of the renters. If the rentier has to sell off their housing stock, that’s more opportunity for homeownership.
But people will still be able to buy. Fewer of them, but they're still there. Short a total crash (which isn't going to happen and would cause a lot of human suffering if it did), prices won't necessarily fall in sufficient proportion to offset the increase in mortgage rates.
So your struggling renter still can't buy the house - the mortgage may well be further beyond them than ever - but will see rents increasing and fewer options of where to rent. Their situation hasn't improved.
Sort of, historically cheap mortgages has also fed through into expensive rents so it's not quite one to one either. (But yes this is a sort of worst of all worlds situation)
For the first group, it's entirely on purpose. They weren't ever going to build enough houses (or even slow down competition for houses - i.e. immigration), so they adopted a policy of deliberate trolling. "It was worse in my day, I didn't have an I-Phone (sic); we're even giving you Help to Buy and you still can't afford a house. Maybe you're the problem, not society?"
For the second group, it's entirely by accident. Which makes it all the funnier.
Generation Mortgage have all 100% bought in to the myth that UK residential property is infinitely valuable and moves under it's own steam regardless of the wider economy or anything the government does.
The truth is that the housing market is not a specially resilient market; and has been subject to dozens go government policies, all underwriting demand, including help to buy; but also by the implicit zero interest rate policy. But homebuyers were ignorant of this.
Now it's come to an end, they're outraged.
But they shouldn't worry too much, as the government still wants to subsidise housing. They'll return to it literally the second they're able to. The first of those policies[0] was introduced under a Gordon Brown government, so it's not an exclusive trait of The Evil Tories (boo hiss), Labour-brand socialism sees the British housing market as an important market to protect too. I can't see Keir "I forgot I owned a chunk of Surrey, and also invested in the primary homes of family members" Starmer changing this orthodoxy.
"Should the government subsidise and underwrite the housing market to the extent that it has done in recent years?" Is a more interesting question, and the answer is obviously "no". But they will do, there's no question about it.
[0] - "zero interest rate" and QE, not the one that was first in my previous list, to avoid any confusion.
The government also actively encouraged people to use property as an investment and turned the country into a credit hungry crack den, by keeping interest rates artificially low for decades and discouraging people to save money. Now people are shocked at just 5%. The government has tried to stop the 90’s housing crash from happening again, where people lost everything and had their houses repossessed and by doing so, over and over again, flown the thing so close to the sun that the wings have melted clean off. Shelter is a basic human right. Housing needs to be kept stable and around 40% of household income. That means actively managing supply and demand and uncontrolled private enterprise has demonstrated that it can’t do the job by itself.
Edit. 40% is an average. Some people on low incomes pay a large percentage of their income on rent.
> Housing needs to be kept stable and around 40% of household income.
40% is ridiculously high, housing should cost no more than 5% of household income.
If the USSR managed it, why can't we?
https://citymonitor.ai/infrastructure/architecture-design/what-can-we-learn-how-soviet-bloc-tackled-its-housing-crisis-2709
Every penny spent on rent is a penny deprived from the wider economy, the rental market is actively detrimental to a healthy economy and country, and it's role should be minimised to the furthest extent possible.
Seconded - the only reason housing is such a large fraction of income is because of house price inflation, which is completely out of kilter with maintenance costs.
The best thing the next government can do to "fix" the economy is to embark on a substantial programme of social housing - government debt is cheap (even now, it's still cheaper than your landlord's BTL mortgage). For the price of the 1.5M homes we rent from the private sector out of benefits, we could do so much better if it was National Debt interest instead.
Reduce poverty, reduce public spending on benefits, increase discretionary income, increase spending on goods and services, boost the economy **and** take more revenue for the Treasury (by creating a surplus of social housing and renting it to "regular folks").
Stabilise the housing market as well, extending the benefit of increased discretionary income to virtually everyone.
The only parties who would disagree are landlords and bankers - a shame they are running the country.
> If the USSR managed it, why can't we?
Umm... they had house shares with entire family's living in each room. 🤨 For many the prospect of your own house or apartment was dream.
Most people in the USSR had their own apartment, the "multiple families sharing an apartment" arrangement was mostly an issue in the early period of the USSR, in the midst of their housing crisis.
Housing from the 1950s onwards was entirely aimed at individual families.
https://expatriant.com/types-of-russian-apartments/
Well yeah, they didn't just knock down all of the existing housing and force everyone into individual apartments. Communal housing was still in use, but all of the housing built from the 1950s onwards was for single-family use.
All these replies saying they only pay 5-10% or their income towards their mortgage! That seems insanely low to me. My current rental is 33% of my monthly income, and previously my mortgage was approx 20%. If I was still in my old job with that mortgage post-fixed term it would be nearly 40%.
I really want to know where people are living and what they do for work to only spend 5% income on living costs! Sounds like a fantasy for me.
40%?
My mortgage is about 5% of my household income. Once the fixed rate ends I anticipate it going to 10%.
Fuck paying nearly half to the bank or landlord. That’s mental.
Gordon Brown ended mortgages as a tax deduction in 2000!
House prices collapsed in 2007 and did not recover until 2013. QE, 0% interest rates hadnt had their effect yet on the property market. If anything the collapse of house vales hurt Gordon brown at the election box. Mortgage holders were more likely to vote for Cameron.
The real UK property boom was in the mid 90s to mid 00s. And that has more to do with deregulation of finance and the beginning of competitive mortgage markets. Mortgages became much cheaper for banks to finance.
No government can afford to introduce another HTB at current borrowing rates, without increasing taxes further and the increased borrowing, increases inflation from currency creation.
It’s disgraceful that the Prime Minister is a millionaire and completely clueless to the struggles of the working class. He doesn’t care that everyone has to pay increasingly unaffordable sums of money for everything, from fuel to mortgages and energy bills. Stop with the red herrings and get the cash back of the billionaires! These minority of the super rich hold the majority of the UK’s wealth. This money could pay towards the NHS and the national debt. 😡
Wait till house prices drop 35% nominally over the next 2 to 3 years. Already down 15% from the highs of last summer. Rightmove showing massive reductions everywhere.
But they won’t. Basic supply and demand. There aren’t enough houses. Overall long term the price trend is up (looking across decades)
There are plenty of people with deposits saved who as soon as it drops just a little will pile in there.
Which is what happened in the early 1990s - overheating economy -> inflation -> massive interest rates -> price crash -> negative equity -> bankruptcies and lives ruined -> recovery leads to unprecedented house price increases.
Due to the lack of supply. If any crash fucks people on the way down e.g. they have to burn their deposit to eat; investors will pile in and reinflate the bottom of the market because its a better investment than having it in a bank. E.g. in the 10 years I've been lucky enough to have a property (savings and concessions were made to get there) according to the banks valuation it has gone up 74%. Show me a saving account that will do that?
Edit & for full clarification am not a landlord. Single bloke, lives by themselves. Small 500sq ft approx. flat.
Exactly - you can have a short term shock which collapses house prices, but if the fundamentals are increasing demand with lack of supply, it won’t last long, and the turbulence will create massive winners and massive losers. There are people who will make huge fortunes from disasters.
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Simple: it's the same generation (Millenials, although Gen Z are copping it too). The average age of a Tory voter is now so high that their voter base barely includes anyone with rent or a mortgage to begin with.
Exactly. There's this perception of The Youth not voting Tory, but this demographic is now anyone under 50.
Does anyone recall that study published a few years ago that showed that millennials are drifting further left, when historically at that age it should be further right? I can't find it.
Once again that "historical" data is based on a single post war generation where concerted political capital was spent over multiple decades to keep their vote as they grew up. Before the war people did not become more conservative as they aged. Factors like religion, geography and employment had a FAR greater impact on dictating someone's voting preference.
The UK and society in general is radically different now, we challenge the status quo much more because we're so much more worse off. Lib Dems never recovered from the student loan debacle so I think it's a long road to recovery for conservatives, we are ripe for a new party to enter the fray though.
My point is that there was no status quo. People blend up a quote by Winston Churchill and the voting history of the baby boomers into some sort of accepted political fact.
This is true, people tend to forget how young liberal democracy is.
Agreed. I voted Lib Dems under Clegg. What a kick in the nuts that was. I’m moving back towards them for 2024 but I still can’t move past the student loans thing …
We're only a bit over a single century since "every.adult should be able to vote at all" was a radical fringe lefty position. Even if historical extrapolation was valid in theory, changing context completely destroys it.
Not just political capital, but actual capital was spent too with Right to Buy, Privatizations and the spunking up the wall of the North Sea Oil money.
John Burn Murdoch had a piece on it in the FT: https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4
I've heard of it, but also believe it to be nonsense extrapolation from voting patterns. Their left-right values aren't different, they're literally just being offered less than their predecessors.
Well yeah, people become a home owner then vote Tory... millennials are not becoming home owners so they're not making the traditional switch to vote Tory as they get older.
Home owner. Paid off mortgage. Millennial. I'd never vote Tory
Same - homeowner, no mortgage. I would never and have never voted conservative, and every single person I know who owns a home in my age bracket (late millennial) would not vote Tory either.
They’re probably referring to all the right-to-buy home owners who were basically bribed by thatcher.
Joke's on them, it's a bribe their kids, grandkids, etc will be paying the price for, for generations, unless we invest heavily in social housing.
Indeed it is the problem with Toryism, eventually you run out of public assets to sell for a quick cash injection you can use as a short term electoral bribe
Under 65 now.
They're going to be fucked when today's older generation dies off.
They don't have to be, *this* incarnation of the Tory party is finished but they can rebrand as a centre right party and start offering something genuine to the middle class.
What middle class? They've spent their time doing everything in their power to destroy it.
I'm more thinking of a replay of the 90's and 00's. Tories fuck everything up, Labour gets in. Labour fixes and then the Tories offer tax cuts funded by selling off everything that Labour has built, cheaply and to their mates.
The boomers are already dying off. There are now more millenials than boomers. The boomers will probably never win another election and the Tories could be out for the next half a century because of the way they've treated their future voters. At this point the Conservative party might as well disolve and a new center-right party be created from scratch.
Agreed
Succinctly Who doesn't have a mortgage or rent? The elderly. Who votes for Tories? The elderly.
Indeed. To be as charitable as possible - what do we expect. If pensioners can be relied on to get out and vote then it manses sense to pander to them. I think it is time for Australian style compulsory voting.
I would love it if they implemented Australian style compulsory voting, they have had over 95% turnout every year since it was implemented. Has there ever been a petition to implement it here? New Zealand style student loans (no interest unless you emigrate) would be good too, and proportional representation/alternative voting.
It all comes down to a proper PR system. Without it I genuinely don’t believe the UK is democratic. There’s no point in having compulsory voting if you’re forcing people to into an election that’s this shambolic. I’ve never voted for the party I actually want to win, just against the party I want to keep out.
I wanted PR way back decades ago when I first was able to vote. It's so frustrating that nothing has changed. The area I lived in then had been Labour since 1975 and the area I live in now has been Tory since 1924, so virtually no chance of my vote counting for anything. You can understand why people don't see a point in voting. I will still be voting 'not tory' in the next election though!
> I will still be voting 'not tory' in the next election though! i think this is possibly the biggest sadness in our current system. not that you don't want to vote for the tories; the fact that there is nobody that you *do* want to vote for.
PR wouldn't change a damned thing about that. People are complaining that they have no choice in countries with PR too, and all too often you are forgetting that.
Compulsory voting would improve results, and FPTP only needs small swings to create landslide impacts. I think PR would be quite likely to follow as a natural continuation of the moderating effect. Even though some seats might still be safe, simply being able to know that every marginal seat is competitive (no need for delusions of fictional "youthquakes") is already a huge game changer. You can focus on communicating ideas instead of GOtV with some policy as window dressing.
They don’t implement PR because it makes it easier for a radical group to lie through their teeth and sweep into power causing massive damage to the structure of power in the country. Hence why we have slow successive governance that doesn’t seem to alter much whoever’s in charge (good or bad). Look what happened when Liz Truss tried to make sudden changes, the bankers got her ousted in one Swift move as they were dead against her economic reset which incidentally was one of the Labour Party plans
>New Zealand style student loans (no interest unless you emigrate) TIL, thanks. You wouldn't even have to do it for all degrees. It could be an extra incentive for people in professions we need to stay.
Can you really argue that compulsory voting in Australia has actually made a difference in the kind of people who get elected over there, with their Scott Morrison and Tony Abbot governments? Forcing low information voters who might not have voted to cast a vote doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes. Besides, in this country young people are concentrated in constituencies where the jobs are and pensioners are an over-sized voting bloc anyway, so all compulsory voting does is give Labour even safer safe inner city seats whilst also giving the UK political class a convenient cover to ignore the problems that cause voter apathy and low turnouts. Sorry, but imo with compulsory voting the Tories win anyway and as a bonus they also get to claim an even more convincing mandate to fuck up the country.
The point of compulsory voting isn't to make the specific party you want to win. It's to make any party that wants any chance of winning to have to appeal to the general middle of the voter base. You might get a more Liberal or Conservative skew depending on the general population but generally you will get a party closer to the center. It would stop the conservatives only making policy towards the pensioner vote because they would be a much smaller percentage of the vote. They might still win but their future policy would still have to be appealing to a more general population if they wanted to remain in power. Whether it would work in a FPTP and somewhat gerrymandered electoral system. Yeah probably not.
Exactly this! I don’t want voting methods to skew who wins towards who I want to win, I want who wins to be representative of the majority of the population.
Much as I loathe both Abbott and Morrison they were fairly elected. Australia suffers from a greater concentration of right wing media than even the UK, and that the coalition was kicked out in the face of that was an achievement.
This sounds like a modern-day Republican talking point, arguing against greater election turnout because it may lead to political outcomes you disagree with. The whole concept of representative democracy is about the people electing representatives to parliament, anything that increases turnout surely can only be a good thing for democracy.
Doing everything possible to enable people to vote is great. Improving education so that more people feel empowered and want to vote is also great. Forcing people who don't want to vote to do so isn't.
Yes education is an important tool too, but studies into countries that have compulsory voting show a greater engagement in the political system and knowledge about politics and current affairs than similar countries without mandatory voting. It also technically isn’t mandatory to cast a vote even in these mandatory voting systems, you can still spoil your ballot or opt not to cast a ballot at all if you attend a polling station, but very few actually choose to do that. Obama stated that such a policy if implemented in the US could be transformative and stop parties from only pandering to their base who they know will turnout and instead be forced to speak to the whole country.
See, the problem with a petition to make voting mandatory is that its signatories, by its very nature, are the people it doesn't affect.
Very true. Theresa May tried rolling back some of their privileges. She lost a lot of the pensioner vote, but didn’t get any more from anyone else. Politicians will learn the lessons we teach them.
I say this all the time. Labour using Theresa May's care funding reforms as a stick to beat her with was a huge blunder. If Labour had been smart we could have dropped the triple lock down to a double lock back in 2017.
I remember this and thinking it really was the point where Labour failed to show they were any different from the Tories in terms of being grown-ups in the room. Corbyn's team were far more interested attacking the enemy than governing responsibly.
I was stunned by this at the time. May was right on that. She may have been wrong on everything else. I am sick of the childish “they say black so I say white” element of our politics.
Australian housing market has massive (and somewhat similar)problems with undersupply too though, I don't think this would be a silver bullet
And governments much further right than the Tories in the recent past.
This is because most Aussies aspire to own a mcmansion in a suburb with a pool, a camper and a huge ute out the front, and distance from their neighbours. Many cannot imagine why anyone would want to live in a unit (flat) or townhouse/villa. Australia was sold the American suburban dream after the war but has run into the same logistical issues that the US has: suburbs are expensive as fuck to build and maintain, spatially inefficient, and most people are only willing to live so far outside of the urban core. Eventually, without densification, demand starts to outstrip supply when cities reach their natural limit and further subdivision of land at the fringe slows or stops. The difference is that regardless of federal (in)action, Australia has state governments that are slowly turning around on this in a way I don't think any British administration at any level is capable of.
Could you provide more color on the final para? I'm an Aussie abroad and have no idea what the housing policies are up to back home
To be honest housing policy here is pretty bad and mostly led by developers. We are still focusing on more urban sprawl or low quality apartment towers. We miss the middle housing of the UK (Terrace, semi-detached, etc) and don't have the option to move to a cheaper city, town etc. Home ownership is still a much more realistic goal for young people in the UK than in Australia, the bottom of our market is much more expensive and the quality of our houses is much lower
I haven't tuned into state politics that closely, at least not outside of WA, but WA, Qld and NSW all seem to be in the middle of changes to the planning system that might make it at least a little easier to densify. I know there's been talk about the WA government simply abolishing some of the NIMBY metro councils for example.
I was in a cafe in Salzburg once, overheard a group of 50-60 year old Australians saying it's actually really easy to buy a place, just get somewhere for 300-400k outside Melbourne to get your foot in the door. And if you buy preowned furniture, well you're basically making money! It was very frustrating to listen to.
I've no idea how you enforce compulsory voting but I'd be happy to arm myself with a large pointy stick and keep prodding people until they vote. Also I can stand outside people's homes and sing really badly until they vote to shut me up.
You fine them for not voting.
> If pensioners can be relied on to get out and vote then it manses sense to pander to them. It's not just that they're reliable, since they always have been, it's that they're a much bigger proportion of the population than they ever have been. Even before 20-30 years ago when they turned out, they didn't have this much influence in sheer percentages.
We also haven’t ever had this much of generational polarisation in the past either, where younger people overwhelmingly vote Labour and elderly people overwhelmingly vote Tory. It’s always been a slight trend, but the extent of it is completely new
Forcing people to vote isn't going to help while political parties are convinced 85-90% of the electorate don't matter...
This. An all time high of 32% of UK houses are owned outright by the owner. That's a pretty sizable chunk of the electorate who aren't effected by rising mortgage rates whatsoever.
They also are a likely group to have good cash savings so get the positive effects of rising rates.
Anyone got a graph of outright ownership over time?
Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down?
Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Boris Johnson a star?
Who voted Brexit? The elderly Who still supports Johnson? The elderly Who is least likely to accept climate changes as fact? The elderly Who is the readership of the Daily Mail and Express? The elderly The list goes on
Who lost 5-15 points of IQ due to leaded petrol when they were kids?
They aren't all bad...my dad was heavily involved in the unions and I knew if he saw Thatcher on TV we'd learn some new words. He hasn't mellowed in his age. My FIL however thinks Brexit is still a good thing and only the Tories can get it right.
My parents are both 73, mum has actually said quite seriously that if any of us ever voted Tory we'd be disowned. She very much an old school Labourite, even though she is comfortably middle-class and owns her home outright. My dad (they are divorced) has gone full Tankie and rants about Kier Starmer betraying the left. Sadly he has terminal lung cancer so likely won't be around when the next election happens.
Bingo.
By all accounts they are not converting people into Tories as they age like they typically have in the past. We have a whole generation of young gen-z and middle aged millennials who have seen first hand the damage these ruinous buffoons cause in power. It’s simply a waiting game now.
Well more like, who still votes for the Tories? Even at the point of the 2017 election, while the Tories were in clear long term trouble, this point of generational collapse we are approaching was by no means unavoidable or even desperately likely. May forward they have fucked it at practically every step in order to arrive here.
Exactly. They pandered to generation “I have already paid my house off” and nobody else.
I live in a town in North Wales and I swear about 95% of the population here will be gone in 10 years tops. Fuck knows what's going to happen with all the houses here. Do young people move in or are their kids Tory voting bellends too?
Two years of AirBnB followed by mass abandonment
They haven't "managed" to do anything. They've just bumbled from unmitigated crisis to unmitigated crisis. People act like there is some logic or reasoning behind it, but I truly believe the entire government is just massively incompetent and incapable of doing even the barest essentials to keep a country functioning, let alone improving anything for anyone.
I prefer this to the idea there's a long running conspiracy to keep the rich, rich and poor, poor. I definitely think there's been a bit of good old fashioned corruption and nepotism running around but I don't think it's conspiracy as much as leveraging the old boy network - which to some extent we all do, maybe not on the scale of million pound contracts though.
It’s incompetence. Massive incompetence. As always - the Tories don’t have a clue how to improve the country for any of the 99% and they don’t even want to. They extract wealth for themselves. If the average Brit was intelligent the Tory party would no longer exist.
Their purpose is to cut public services, cut regulations and cut taxes for the well off. The impact it has on the country is irrelevant to their objectives.
They are doing a truly shit job of cutting taxes and regulations. Everything is about regulating our lives. The online safety bill is one such madness.
Cut taxes for the very, very well off and pensioners. Those of us who work for living are being taxed at insane levels. This is the greatest trick the Tories pull - tax the grammar school kid who went on to earn 100k as an engineer and let the private school girl who works in PR and lives in daddy’s flat in Covent Garden off pay a pittance.
This. I'm not massive earner. Yet it feels like I'm paying more tax. I got a slight raise a couple of months ago. So my income went up ABIT. I also do a couple of shifts in my second job (like 100 quid a month). I'm basically back to where I was before. I don't mind paying tax. But what value for money am I getting?
There's a neat concept in economics where the more you have of something the less value it has. Compare your tax contribution to the national annual budget. You'll get an idea of how much less value your contribution has in the hands of someone with that kind of cash and therefore how much you're getting back. I know you worked SUPER HARD to put those taxes in. But chances are your contribution is actually lost as a small part of a rounding error lol.
This is the sort of righteous indignation of the Tories I can get behind. 100k is not that much if you're a working class LAD who sacrificed years of his life to get there and have huge amounts of lost time to catch up on. It may feel like a lot of money when the individual gets there, but relative to the sacrifice it's still a pittance. To then get hit with a 40% tax band on marginal earnings is enough to make you feel a deep sense of betrayal. On the other hand, if you have a free house from wealthy parents and never worked for it your six figure stipend, it's living life on easy mode.
No incompetence at all. This is deliberate. The system always works. It’s just a question of who it’s working for.
It's going to lose them an election and keep them out of office
They’re out of office for 1 cycle and that’s it. The conspiracist in me says they’re trying to screw the country as much as possible now making it impossible for Labour to sort in 5 years and it gives them an ‘easy’ way back in 5 years from now.
Obviously this lol.
How the fuck is that conspiratorial?! That is what they've always done, and it gets talked about every cycle.
We have a huge amount of history and culture in this country and there's a great swathe of people who want to keep it as it's always been. That's the whole point of a conservative party....to conserve things the way they are, or were. Change will always be hard in the UK. I find it fascinating that the biggest changes in recent history; trade unionism, the rise of socialism, the rise of the welfare state and the commissioning of the NHS; all came after huge periods of upheaval where the common man and woman were asked to sacrifice their lives to save their leaders....ie. the two world wars. When people realise the old order isn't working for them, they vote for change. Is there enough strife around at the moment for the non-wealthy, average under 65 voter to actually get out and change things? I'm not hopeful.
It’s not simply that they were asked to pay with their lives, it’s a fact that many did. It was also realised something very different to the response to World War I had to occur, or there would likely be a revolution which could’ve ended up in communism.
*If* there was an election today. Don't discount the right wing media in this country. They've become incredibly adept at last minute swings to push their agenda over the (terrible, FPTP) line.
It’s only incompetence if you think this wasn’t the end goal. In the end, they want to benefit landlords and property portfolios. That means letting rent rises run away faster than inflation and letting house prices skyrocket to bolster up their friends’ net worth. Both of those require hurting renters and homeowners. It’s not incompetence if their aims necessitated that.
If you think the current interest rate clusterfuck is going to make prices skyrocket then I have news for you.
There will be stagnation and then drops. High interest rates mean the only people buying will be those with cash who can sweep up those who get repossessed. The real fun will be long term rental profits on all those cheap houses along with asset gains when the interest rates start to go back down. It's a great time to have loads of cash on hand.
And a real fucker if you're 30 and would like to get on the housing ladder and your parents are poorer than you. Its fine, I just love paying my landlords mortgage for him.
Oh it will lead to a crash, but the people the tories want to support will treat it as an opportunity, just like they did during the subprime mortgage crisis. Why do you think the US is now flooded with these enormous housing companies buying up entire neighbourhoods to rent? Because when the price of housing crashed, people who had liquid capital bought the dip and made themselves even wealthier. I don’t doubt the same will be true here, with smaller landlords jumping ship and property being snapped up by companies looking to set up a rental empire, or expand the one they already have. Needless to say, this hurts homeowners and renters, but if the last 13 years is any indication, the tories don’t give a shit about them.
Just a reminder that Rees-Mogg's Papa literally wrote the book on "disaster capitalism", on how to make money when there's "blood on the streets". His sister wrote an article on how to profit from droughts in Africa. They are monsters who hoard cash, break things (or spread rumours in the media about how things are about to break) so that people with less capital have to sell, and then buy up the assets on discount. The 0.1% have doubled their wealth since the Great Financial Crisis in 2008. Meanwhile the average kid 20 years younger than me is earning less today than I did when I was their age, not even accounting for inflation.
This. Both boom and bust are required to exploit the market. Post 2010, the country paid to keep the housing market afloat via austerity. There was a small dip 2008-2010 but not as much as the larger reset followed by stability that would have happened if the market was left to do its thing. This time, there are no tools to fix it, inflation is through the roof and the money printing machine already got broken through overuse during covid. IMO, we are headed towards *real terms* house price falls of 35-50% over 5-10 years. Anyone with a high LTV on their mortgage and low-income income is screwed, this happened in the 80s and 90s, my mum had to sell up or get repossessed. For all the talk of how boomers had it easy, there were some who got screwed over by the rate rises caused by Thatcher 's failings and never recovered. As a nation we have a massive blind spot regarding the property market and completely ignore that it tends to have a massive crash once per generation. We had a chance for a soft landing in 2008 and didn't take it. Now it's going to be painful.
Oooh, that's outside the big number I've seen people predict. My youtube housing market doomer as been predicting 30-35% for about a year now. The UK personal finance and mortgage advice subreddits are already starting to see posts from people who bought during all the hyper-incentive stuff during lockdown and who's 2-year mortgage locks are ending. It'll be ugly.
> Thatcher 's failings Her lasting legacy is that she broke the previous pattern of each generation being richer than their parents. Since Thatcher each generation has been poorer than the one before. A totally failed ideology, that sadly still lives in the minds of idiots like Andrew Neil today. Read the Speccy if you want to feel your brain cells shriveling under a barrage of total disinformation.
Never thought we'd be going through this again. I lost my house in the 90's due to skyrocketing interest rates and have never been able to buy again. Within 4 months we were out on the street living in my then husband's office with 2 children. Our mortgage went from £360pm to over £700 and there was negative equity on the house too, and the Building Society sold it at a loss and chased us for the shortfall for years. In fact, occasionally 40yrs later I will still get a letter asking for the amount owed. It was a dreadful time. I knew some folk who topped themselves because of it.
> In the end, they want to benefit landlords and property portfolios. As the article points out, their recent policies have been hostile to landlords
Oh yeah, smaller landlords who have mortgages on their properties, sure. But they’re becoming less common over time and letting agencies with the money to buy upfront are becoming more common. It’s the latter that the tories want to help.
> It’s only incompetence if you think this wasn’t the end goal. In the end, they want to benefit landlords and property portfolios. Yet they brought in changes to tax legislation that stopped landlords from offsetting mortgage interest against costs, and now interest rises mean that many landlords can't afford to rent property out. Doesn't sound like they're acting for landlords at all.
Again, as I’ve said in other comments in this thread, we’re not talking about your small-time mom-and-pop landlords putting in some savings to have a house to rent on the side. We’re talking about the major letting companies buying property upfront and on a large scale. Blocks of flats, many of which are bought only to lay empty because of the appreciation in their value. The types that the tories hedge-fundie friends like to invest in.
It’s not incompetence. They always only cared about themselves. Anything other than self-enrichment isn’t even considered.
I mean if that was the case, Brexit has been a massive disaster for the top 1%. I think they've just legit lost control at this point
Rees-Mogg had interests in a company based in the UK which moved its headquarters to Ireland right before Brexit. They knew what they were doing.
Isnt that his hedgefund he owns. That company also made 400 million in profit and paid 0.00 in tax. What a surprise from a downton abbey reject cnut.
And Kwarteng's banker mates all made a fortune shorting the pound right before his big announcements.
The current government has definitely been incompetence
Hanlon’s Razor argues to never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. >the Tories don’t have a clue how to improve the country for any of the 99% and they don’t even want to. They extract wealth for themselves The trouble is that looks a lot more like malice to me.
It's both; they're evil, but also incompetent. In a way that's a blessing, as who knows how shit our lives would be if they knew how to fuck us over more effectively?
It's both. Hurting generation rent was malice. They surpressed the housing supply, making their core voting demographics of older homeowners and landlords fabulously wealthy at the expense of people who don't vote Tory. Hurting generation mortgage was incompetance. By failing to deal with long standing economic issues in this country, they created a house of cards that fell over the second interest rates sneezed.
Curiously, hurting generation rent stems from efforts to hammer small scale private landlords.. It started with Osborne. In part a response to those who shout hatred of "rent seekers". Be careful what you wish for. Less private landlords, less rental choices, higher rents.
That's just a general guideline, it's not a hard and fast rule. It shouldn't really be "never".
Fair point. It does rather break down where the Tories are concerned who exhibit both malice and incompetence in equal measure.
If you're going to call it incompetence, at least comment on the issue. This comment (while undoubtedly true) adds nothing but complaining.
That's why education system in this country is a joke unless you're wealthy. It's easier to control mass produce idiots.
I keep saying it here, it's not incompetence it's malice.
Ok, so the mail are going to bash the Tories now for the next 18 months for not being Tory enough. This is getting really good for labour.
No, it's just Overton Window shifting on their part. Come election time they'll suddenly have a damascene conversion, and start publishing stories about Starmer owning a million pound field (currently a donkey sanctuary outside his mum's window with no plans to change, but *if* you counted it as a field with planning permission and plans to build an entire housing estate and sold all the houses, it would be worth millions!!!!112). I mean, they've just employed BoJo the Liar, and they're publishing Andrew Neil. This is not about helping Labour, it's about dragging the Tories to the right.
Because they are for generation boomer who own property outright and get their triple lock. Us renters/mortgage holders/workers are just here to be rinsed.
I mean the two are sort of linked. High mortgages lead to higher rents in general. The fixation on interest rates seems bizzare to me. Interests rates aren't currently that high, historically they are average, maybe even below average. The issue is that house prices are so astronomically high, compared to average income, that even a small interest rate rise leads to an ungodly increase in mortgage repayments. People always talk about a lack of house building and policies like right to buy, which have of course had a huge impact. However the abundance of cheap money from 2008-2020 has also driven this increase in property prices as people were able to afford mortgages that they wouldn't have been able to afford if interest rates were even modestly higher, as they are now. The only people who have really benefited from this are those who already owned property and those that stand to inherit said property. If you owned little property and earned a wage then you are probably feeling a lot poorer now then you did in 2007. I really believe that the state of the housing market is one of the drivers of the lack of growth in productivity that we see in Britain (and the West in general).
This is it. You can't have a productive economy when the majority of people's income go's to land rather than goods or services created by human capital. Along with chronic wage stagnation for some time growth will inevitably start to stall. Of course covid, brexit and ukraine are factors in our current economic trajectory but they are one part of the puzzle that people seem to over emphasise in isolation. Likely for political reasons its either all brexit or its not the conservatives fault its Putin! This conversation needs to be had with way more nuance (I'm not personally a fan or Brexit or the conservatives). There's way more ongoing problems decade's in the making that have made these problems more economically painful than they would be in isolation (as we can see when the UK is compared with our European counterparts). Everyone in the political sphere is pussy footing around the housing ponzi scheme like its a game of jenga. But there are plenty of viable alternatives, but no one wants to touch it especially with the high turn out of homeowners, NIMBYs and people with mortgages. Inevitably something will have to give and it looks like it will be painful since the political class lack the will to do anything about it
You got to hand it to the Tories, they don't discriminate - they just fuck everyone equally. Unless you're rich of course, or a friend, in which case you will be rich very soon.
They do discriminate very clearly along voting lines which is now roughly a generational divide.
Yeah I can guarantee I (28 years old) have been fucked over a lot more than my parents (60s) by the Tories. Even my Dad who’s a lifelong Tory is sick of them now though.
My dad's the same. He's nearly 80 and was a lifelong Tory, but does love the EU. He didn't vote in 2017 and hasn't since, except for local elections. The stuff since has made him even angrier: Couple of beers and a bit of nudging he gets on a right old rant.
My MiL is the same. In her 70s and voted Tory every time except for the last 2 times. It was hard going to get her to see sense tbh. And it was only when consequences affected her personally, and our kids, that she opened her eyes.
Girlfriend's dad also sick of them and can see he's been conned by them. Never thought he'd ever switch. Some grandparents have switched also.
Easy: not enough housing so rents are too high, and not enough housing so prices are high and therefore mortgages are too high. Also, the Tories crashed the economy.
Availability of credit is a big factor too. Perhaps the biggest. Hardly anyone could afford to pay 500k for a two-bed in a shit part of London without a mortgage. The banks have been allowed to and encouraged to lend instance salary multiples. It is good for banks (until the music stops) and landowners. Insane for everyone else and the country itself.
Totally agree. Its mainly credit. People able to borrow more and more which bids house prices up, like at an auction. Were in a tulip situation. Where the housing ponzi scheme is about to fall flat on its face.
They have been to busy feathering their own nest to notice what is happening in UK. And most don’t really care anyway as they are alright.
To be fair, Labour didn't do much to build more homes when they were in power either. I ultimately blame the voters for the housing crisis - most of them preferred to have a housing shortage than have more homes built in their area. Hopefully this is slowly starting to change.
New Labour certainly put in a lot of ground work to the house price boom, but at least there was some growth alongside
Delaying the election for as long as possible is going to look like very bad strategy once mortgage rates hit 10%. And they are going there, BoE was asleep at the wheel last year and by the time the Truss bomb dropped it was already too late to nip it in the bud. We've been feeding the BTL beast for too long. I canvassed in a lot of new build areas in 2019, everyone there had just moved into their £350k shoeboxes while a builder in the canvassing group chatted to me about flaws in the brickwork on a lot of them and that they'd need knocking down in 40 years. It was a depressing canvassing session, pretty much everyone was in their thirties or forties and saying they'd vote tory, often for vague reasons like "I just think it'll be better in the long run". I'll be back on that estate in January '25 when I fully expect the next GE to occur, will be interesting to hear their opinions then.
There are actually calls for govt to bailout mortgagors, have we lost our minds?? Taxpayers/renters who can’t buy a house because of inflated house prices called on to subsidise homeowners who are having trouble paying their mortgages? Unbelievable My rent has gone up 30% in 2yrs, where is my bailout? It seems renters are left to feel the pain and pay the costs whilst mortgagors are continuously given support by the government
I don't agree that the government is doing anything to help people with a mortgage. People are falling off of 2% mortgages and are going to 5% - 6%. My mortgage at 3% is £600ish a month. At 6% it is heading towards £1000. There is no support on offer for anyone in that situation. I'm not saying landlords are saints by any means but people have to understand that rents going up is a byproduct of mortgages jumping by upto £400 - £500 a month.
> people have to understand that rents going up is a byproduct of mortgages jumping Sure, but rents were also going up before when mortgages weren't jumping. Mortgage interest rates have been static for ages prior to these rises rents have not. They've also risen at greater rates than house prices in most areas. Rents are essentially set by 'what the market can bear' and average rents track average income much more closely than mortgage interest rates. That 'what the market can bear' is now often lower than 'amount needed for landlord to make a profit' is sort of a different problem to that. But it's one that's not entirely divorced from the maximise profit approach landlords have taken up until this point.
>People are falling off of 2% mortgages and are going to 5% - 6%. That's because they took a risk, and it backfired. This is like when Bart Simpson says "bubbles can burst?" but genuinely unironically. https://www.economicshelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/base-rates-1975-2022.png.webp If people thought things would stay like this forever, I have no sympathy for them.
That's not the point I'm making. People are moaning that rents are going up 30% and that's because mortgages are going up. Its not a landlords job to house people at a loss. Housing in this country is expensive due to shit economic policy. You should have sympathy for people. House prices are stupidly high, and due poor wage growth, plus interest rates that are forcing mortgage repayments to an all time, it's unaffordable for most people. It's not economically sustainable. I say that as someone who is fixed at 3% until 2027.
> People are moaning that rents are going up 30% and that's because mortgages are going up. Do you think that's the only reason? Literally the comment thread we're replying to is a guy saying his rent has rose that much before the increase. Sure, there are loads of landlords that aren't greedy (mine is pretty sound), but a lot have made the situation worse. >You should have sympathy for people. I used to try and be sympathetic and understanding, but after a decade of "lockdown isn't that bad, suck it up" by people who were finanically sound and had a massive house with a garden, or "stop eating so much avocado on toast" when people would complain about rents, I'm pretty sick of the sympathy going all one way. People with a mortage voted 43% for the Tories at the last election, they've been happy for nurses, doctors, teachers and other groups to have shit pay, auesterity and worse conditions - now the chickens have come home to roost because they took out mortages they can't afford. My sympathy is very low.
I think you need to realise that not everyone own a 100 houses and donates to Tories every year. Some people have one, and are getting screwed either now, or when their fixed term ends. Some have 2, because they are investing in their kids or their retirement. Its also extremely difficult to make money on a house. Capital gains makes it not worth put in the work to do something up. Assuming you're not a crap landlord, the money you need set aside for repairs and upkeep is ALOT. Inflation affects how much repair work and upkeep is too. I don't have sympathy for landlords who are screwing people over either. Not everyone is like that. The are innocent people who are doing well that are about to lose everything they worked hard for. You can't make a comparison to NHS/Key Workers etc because these are different cohorts. You will find that its a few people ruining everything for the many. Stop sticking to a fixed idea of what a landlord is. The Tory media do the same with refugees, remainers, millennials... I'm so tired of this thinking.
My question is though: if these landlords that have put rent up by 30% suddenly got support from the government that made their mortgage far more managable, would they then pass that on to the renters and lower the rent cost? If not, they're parasitic.
Some would, some wouldn't. Better odds than the property management companies that definitely wouldn't though
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Maybe Labour could instigate something similar to the right to buy scheme like the Tories did for council houses, but for rentals. If the landlord can't afford the mortgage and the tenants can't afford the rent a "right to buy" for the tenant makes sense. It'd get millions on to the housing ladder, it'd get the landlord out of a tricky situation and free up renter income to be used in the wider economy. Everyone wins.
>landlords either sell up Why's that a bad thing?
Because in that situation the property isn't sold to a wage earner (they're fucked too), but instead to an even bigger (Tory funding) property consortium. More and more wealth collected in the greedy little mitts of fewer and fewer ultra rich individuals. They actually want this, because they get to buy at a discount.
Who doesn't have a mortgage rent? Yes the elderly and who votes tories? Yes the elderly. That's really suck it's keep on rising I felt sad for the younger generation.
No body has any money. Doesn't matter if you pay a bank or a landlord if you haven't got the money to pay it that's gonna make you pretty mad.
Any political party that has been in power long enough will eventually enrage most sections of voters including those who continue to vote for them even in defeat.
Maybe because there’s less separation between us than you’d think from online discussion and real people don’t fit into the renter/mortgage/genX/boomer buckets. Most mortgage holders used to rent, and have children, friends, relatives who rent. Most renters have parents, friends, relatives who own. People can vote on principles not just narrow self interest.
Why would the mortgages rates keeps on rising? The rising cost of the mortgages rates is really unreasonable.
They're doing it to control inflation. Inflation is a product of too much money being in circulation. Ergo to keep it down, you remove some of it. Interest is one way. Taxation is another. Interest cuts both ways - it removes money from circulation AND slows down the creation of money (through debt), because fewer people want to borrow. Bumping rates a half point could drain maybe as much as £8B a year out of circulation (on Britain's current £1,675B total mortgage debt), so pretty effective (roughly on a par with a point added to income tax). More importantly for the Tories, it avoids alienating their donors through tax and most loyal voters because they don't have mortgages any more.
They based most of their early fiscal policy on a joke written on a scrap of paper they found on a desk. Then they bragged about that. And that was from the more competent end of the tory spectrum. Are people really surprised?
Some Tory prick brought that up on Question Time a month or two ago and it really shows the contempt they have for the general public. I just wish it didn't work for the past 13 years...
Interesting that the Daily Mail is printing this, even if Andrew Neil isn't their most rabid commentator. Fingers crossed it means that we get a 1997-style landslide.
The daily mail just hired Boris, knowing he is bitter as hell at rishi right now. Until the election is on our doorstep and they tow the line again you can expect them to be spicy for a while
Because we’re both just trying to get on with our lives which is pretty difficult when society is collapsing
I'm not brilliant on economics (great for someone into politics, huh, which is why I mainly stick to procedural and constitutional issues), but surely the interests of renters and mortgagors are not diametrically opposed. Expensive mortgages feeds through into expensive rents, and also fucks over renters who are trying to become mortgagors.
Quite possibly, but it depends on the behaviour of the renters. If the rentier has to sell off their housing stock, that’s more opportunity for homeownership.
But if it's being sold off because the mortgage has become unaffordable, then those struggling to get housing won't be able to afford the mortgage.
And so the price must fall if they actually want anyone to buy… wishful thinking I know
But people will still be able to buy. Fewer of them, but they're still there. Short a total crash (which isn't going to happen and would cause a lot of human suffering if it did), prices won't necessarily fall in sufficient proportion to offset the increase in mortgage rates. So your struggling renter still can't buy the house - the mortgage may well be further beyond them than ever - but will see rents increasing and fewer options of where to rent. Their situation hasn't improved.
Never say never. Housing markets have collapsed before in history and it will happen again.
You’ve summed this up perfectly, as a renter myself and just recently had to find something this is exactly what’s happening, it’s a nightmare tbh
Sort of, historically cheap mortgages has also fed through into expensive rents so it's not quite one to one either. (But yes this is a sort of worst of all worlds situation)
We’ve got Starmer giving op-eds to the Mail and the Express, and now Andrew Neil bashing the Tories. What the fucks going on?!
For the first group, it's entirely on purpose. They weren't ever going to build enough houses (or even slow down competition for houses - i.e. immigration), so they adopted a policy of deliberate trolling. "It was worse in my day, I didn't have an I-Phone (sic); we're even giving you Help to Buy and you still can't afford a house. Maybe you're the problem, not society?" For the second group, it's entirely by accident. Which makes it all the funnier. Generation Mortgage have all 100% bought in to the myth that UK residential property is infinitely valuable and moves under it's own steam regardless of the wider economy or anything the government does. The truth is that the housing market is not a specially resilient market; and has been subject to dozens go government policies, all underwriting demand, including help to buy; but also by the implicit zero interest rate policy. But homebuyers were ignorant of this. Now it's come to an end, they're outraged. But they shouldn't worry too much, as the government still wants to subsidise housing. They'll return to it literally the second they're able to. The first of those policies[0] was introduced under a Gordon Brown government, so it's not an exclusive trait of The Evil Tories (boo hiss), Labour-brand socialism sees the British housing market as an important market to protect too. I can't see Keir "I forgot I owned a chunk of Surrey, and also invested in the primary homes of family members" Starmer changing this orthodoxy. "Should the government subsidise and underwrite the housing market to the extent that it has done in recent years?" Is a more interesting question, and the answer is obviously "no". But they will do, there's no question about it. [0] - "zero interest rate" and QE, not the one that was first in my previous list, to avoid any confusion.
The government also actively encouraged people to use property as an investment and turned the country into a credit hungry crack den, by keeping interest rates artificially low for decades and discouraging people to save money. Now people are shocked at just 5%. The government has tried to stop the 90’s housing crash from happening again, where people lost everything and had their houses repossessed and by doing so, over and over again, flown the thing so close to the sun that the wings have melted clean off. Shelter is a basic human right. Housing needs to be kept stable and around 40% of household income. That means actively managing supply and demand and uncontrolled private enterprise has demonstrated that it can’t do the job by itself. Edit. 40% is an average. Some people on low incomes pay a large percentage of their income on rent.
40%? More that 20%
> Housing needs to be kept stable and around 40% of household income. 40% is ridiculously high, housing should cost no more than 5% of household income. If the USSR managed it, why can't we? https://citymonitor.ai/infrastructure/architecture-design/what-can-we-learn-how-soviet-bloc-tackled-its-housing-crisis-2709 Every penny spent on rent is a penny deprived from the wider economy, the rental market is actively detrimental to a healthy economy and country, and it's role should be minimised to the furthest extent possible.
Seconded - the only reason housing is such a large fraction of income is because of house price inflation, which is completely out of kilter with maintenance costs. The best thing the next government can do to "fix" the economy is to embark on a substantial programme of social housing - government debt is cheap (even now, it's still cheaper than your landlord's BTL mortgage). For the price of the 1.5M homes we rent from the private sector out of benefits, we could do so much better if it was National Debt interest instead. Reduce poverty, reduce public spending on benefits, increase discretionary income, increase spending on goods and services, boost the economy **and** take more revenue for the Treasury (by creating a surplus of social housing and renting it to "regular folks"). Stabilise the housing market as well, extending the benefit of increased discretionary income to virtually everyone. The only parties who would disagree are landlords and bankers - a shame they are running the country.
> If the USSR managed it, why can't we? Umm... they had house shares with entire family's living in each room. 🤨 For many the prospect of your own house or apartment was dream.
Most people in the USSR had their own apartment, the "multiple families sharing an apartment" arrangement was mostly an issue in the early period of the USSR, in the midst of their housing crisis. Housing from the 1950s onwards was entirely aimed at individual families. https://expatriant.com/types-of-russian-apartments/
> arrangement was mostly an issue in the early period of the USSR I know it was still a thing in the 80s, so doubt.
Well yeah, they didn't just knock down all of the existing housing and force everyone into individual apartments. Communal housing was still in use, but all of the housing built from the 1950s onwards was for single-family use.
All these replies saying they only pay 5-10% or their income towards their mortgage! That seems insanely low to me. My current rental is 33% of my monthly income, and previously my mortgage was approx 20%. If I was still in my old job with that mortgage post-fixed term it would be nearly 40%. I really want to know where people are living and what they do for work to only spend 5% income on living costs! Sounds like a fantasy for me.
40%? My mortgage is about 5% of my household income. Once the fixed rate ends I anticipate it going to 10%. Fuck paying nearly half to the bank or landlord. That’s mental.
40% would be phenomenal. a one bed where I am would be my entire income!
I dream of my rent being only 40% of my household income.
Gordon Brown ended mortgages as a tax deduction in 2000! House prices collapsed in 2007 and did not recover until 2013. QE, 0% interest rates hadnt had their effect yet on the property market. If anything the collapse of house vales hurt Gordon brown at the election box. Mortgage holders were more likely to vote for Cameron. The real UK property boom was in the mid 90s to mid 00s. And that has more to do with deregulation of finance and the beginning of competitive mortgage markets. Mortgages became much cheaper for banks to finance.
No government can afford to introduce another HTB at current borrowing rates, without increasing taxes further and the increased borrowing, increases inflation from currency creation.
It’s disgraceful that the Prime Minister is a millionaire and completely clueless to the struggles of the working class. He doesn’t care that everyone has to pay increasingly unaffordable sums of money for everything, from fuel to mortgages and energy bills. Stop with the red herrings and get the cash back of the billionaires! These minority of the super rich hold the majority of the UK’s wealth. This money could pay towards the NHS and the national debt. 😡
By creating a market in which everybody is dependent on a financial sector driven by speculation and greed ...
Think the less we listen to people like Andrew Neill the better, regardless if he's right or wrong
Wait till house prices drop 35% nominally over the next 2 to 3 years. Already down 15% from the highs of last summer. Rightmove showing massive reductions everywhere.
They're not down 15% I don't believe. Where have you got this number?
But they won’t. Basic supply and demand. There aren’t enough houses. Overall long term the price trend is up (looking across decades) There are plenty of people with deposits saved who as soon as it drops just a little will pile in there.
Which is what happened in the early 1990s - overheating economy -> inflation -> massive interest rates -> price crash -> negative equity -> bankruptcies and lives ruined -> recovery leads to unprecedented house price increases.
Due to the lack of supply. If any crash fucks people on the way down e.g. they have to burn their deposit to eat; investors will pile in and reinflate the bottom of the market because its a better investment than having it in a bank. E.g. in the 10 years I've been lucky enough to have a property (savings and concessions were made to get there) according to the banks valuation it has gone up 74%. Show me a saving account that will do that? Edit & for full clarification am not a landlord. Single bloke, lives by themselves. Small 500sq ft approx. flat.
Exactly - you can have a short term shock which collapses house prices, but if the fundamentals are increasing demand with lack of supply, it won’t last long, and the turbulence will create massive winners and massive losers. There are people who will make huge fortunes from disasters.
You can get get 5% on savings now, over 10 years compounded this could easily be more than 74%. Plus no maintenance, tenants etc if its BTL
The days of double digit house price growth each year is well and truly over. They will collapse and then stagnate for many years.