By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
No pensioner should be leveraged on property, apart from those who've taken an equity release which I believe typically won't need repaying via mortgage or interest rates?
The fact many are, is part of the madness of the housing market that is long overdue a correction.
The problem is you have a generation of mortgagees who have known nothing other than low rates and low inflation. Things have changed and the kind of pain many older home owners went through in the late 80s and 90s is being visited on a new group.
When low interest rates arrived, not only did Mrs Stodge and I clear our mortgage but we borrowed back against the mortgage (at 0.49%) to completely renovate our property and then paid that off. There was created in the late 00s and 10s a class of wealthy home owners who cleared their mortgage debt and retained an asset increasing in value above inflation. You can understand why there is resistance to any changes to the status quo from which millions have done very well.
Speaking of debt, I see numbers indicating consumer and mortgage debt is already rising fast as the good times come to an end. We continue to spend but now paying for it via increased debt as the cash piles accumulated in Covid are spent away.
The people sneering at mortgage holders are living in a( fantasy land.
It’s kind of despicable to gloat at the pain suffered by 25% of the population.
Nobody but nobody expected rates at 5/6%. As it happens I think they will spike and then hopefully decrease.
The Fed has held rates constant this month and we are starting to see whispers of *deflation* in US and Europe.
I am unconvinced that the BOE is following an anti-inflation strategy. It really seems that causing a recession is the main motivating factor, hence when inflation levels off, they may still raise rates to 'really see it off' and when inflation rises, they will raise rates to deal with the inflation.
They are following an anti-inflationary policy - problem is that we usually have interest rates higher than the US and the 2 meetings where they did less than the market expected has come back to bite them (as I suspected it would).
We will probably end up with interest rates 0;5% higher than they would have been.
Andrew Bailey has not been very successful. Not surprisingly, as he was chosen in part for his Brexitability.
Simon Case is a similar…er…case. Not so much Brexit in his instance as biddabilty, albeit chosen by the architects of the Brexit revolution.
Although much of Britain’s problems are systemic and go back a long time, this acute phase of sickness often leads back to Brexit.
The people sneering at mortgage holders are living in a( fantasy land.
It’s kind of despicable to gloat at the pain suffered by 25% of the population.
Nobody but nobody expected rates at 5/6%. As it happens I think they will spike and then hopefully decrease.
The Fed has held rates constant this month and we are starting to see whispers of *deflation* in US and Europe.
You might not have expected them in the same way that you might not have expected a pandemic and a war, but it should never ever have been discounted as a possibility.
Most of us remember 1992.
I remember 1992.
I remember the Barcelona Olympics.
I do not remember interest rates - I know about them as I learnt about them subsequently, but it was not something I knew from first hand experience.
Virtually nobody under 50 will have been paying a mortgage in 1992.
The people sneering at mortgage holders are living in a( fantasy land.
It’s kind of despicable to gloat at the pain suffered by 25% of the population.
Nobody but nobody expected rates at 5/6%. As it happens I think they will spike and then hopefully decrease.
The Fed has held rates constant this month and we are starting to see whispers of *deflation* in US and Europe.
You might not have expected them in the same way that you might not have expected a pandemic and a war, but it should never ever have been discounted as a possibility.
Most of us remember 1992.
I do, but no one under 40 does.
The people in the banks should, even if their borrowers don't.
What did people expect would happen? People have had years of almost zero interest and they thought this would last forever and could borrow vast sums, in some cases on interest-only mortgages. The interest rates we had were way below historical norms and there would always be a moment when interest rates would rise.
The rate rises are going to punish the reckless and ill-advised. Unfortunately, there are vast numbers of these. The housing market has a big correction coming its way. Good news at least for those who have not yet been able to get on the housing ladder.
It's fairly obvious that despite the supposedly stricter lending conditions far too many people have been absolute idiots and managed to borrow to the hilt with the expectation that the historically all-time lowest ever interest rates were now the norm. They are screwed.
Nobody ever seems to learn lessons like this.
And despite lenders being required to do affordability calculations, those are based on the same false assumptions.
IIRC the affordability checks only covered a 3% rise in interest rates. We’ve already exceeded that & could easily go higher.
The people sneering at mortgage holders are living in a( fantasy land.
It’s kind of despicable to gloat at the pain suffered by 25% of the population.
Nobody but nobody expected rates at 5/6%. As it happens I think they will spike and then hopefully decrease.
The Fed has held rates constant this month and we are starting to see whispers of *deflation* in US and Europe.
Base rates were 5% 15 years ago, so well within the sort of window of time someone should consider when taking out a mortgage, and if not them the lender should think about it. Nor is 5% high historically.
I agree with Gardenwalker. Less well off house buyers are seeking on the whole to buy a home, not a fancy palace. What has happened is that with ultra low interest rates for a long time the market price of unfancy homes shot up, giving average people little choice but to pay loads for an unfancy home, knowing perfectly well that the future was an unknown and that they had to take the chance or go without.
Now quite few of them, given the randomness of luck, will be in difficulties. On the whole they have not brought it on themselves.
FWIW I have always thought that the almost 0% interest rate was a terrible idea, sustained too long, allowed a property price boom that helped few and hindered many, and that rates should have started rising slowly and early.
Finally, apparently the idea is out of fashion with economists, but it has always seemed to me that if you print money in sufficient quantities you will get inflation. 'QE' was the new name for it this time. But it was the old trick in new language. First it raised house prices, now its doing it to everything.
It is also the rate of increase. If rates had gone up the same over a longer period then it would have been an adjustment that more could cope with.
The people sneering at mortgage holders are living in a( fantasy land.
It’s kind of despicable to gloat at the pain suffered by 25% of the population.
Nobody but nobody expected rates at 5/6%. As it happens I think they will spike and then hopefully decrease.
The Fed has held rates constant this month and we are starting to see whispers of *deflation* in US and Europe.
I did. That's why I fixed for five years two years ago.
Although you may be right they will go down, but I doubt if they will ever go as low as they were then.
Snap, my 10 year fix was predicated on just such a rise, which was obviously coming. Where rates will be in 10 years is anybodies guess, but the target for inflation is 2 %.
My new Party disagrees and has a policy of a fully public NHS
New Party? Sounds a tad Mosleyite!
Plus - will they commit to buying all the drugs from the National Drug Company? Will they buy the beds from the National Bed Company? Are all staff to be 100% employed by the NHS, full time*?
etc etc
The NHS has alway bought stuff from the private sector. The question is what?
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
I wholeheartedly agree we need to build more houses.
But leveraged buy to let landlords selling up helps fix some of the flaws of the market as it stands.
If that then makes people less NIMBY as they're no longer fretting about their property portfolio as they no longer have one, all the better.
I don’t think movement in BTL makes much difference, to be honest. I’ve no real sympathy with them as a class, but if we’re interested in overall distributional effects I think they are marginal.
A raise in interest rates right now,
Hurts mortgage holders (ie “every day families”) Hurts renters (ie the “young”) Benefits savers (ie pensioners)
Savers have effectively had negative interest rates for a very long time. They still do - indeed, they are more negative than they have been for most of the past ten years.
I'm not sure how a situation that rewards debt is a good thing. It can only lead to trouble, as we are seeing.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
I wholeheartedly agree we need to build more houses.
But leveraged buy to let landlords selling up helps fix some of the flaws of the market as it stands.
If that then makes people less NIMBY as they're no longer fretting about their property portfolio as they no longer have one, all the better.
I don’t think movement in BTL makes much difference, to be honest. I’ve no real sympathy with them as a class, but if we’re interested in overall distributional effects I think they are marginal.
A raise in interest rates right now,
Hurts mortgage holders (ie “every day families”) Hurts renters (ie the “young”) Benefits savers (ie pensioners)
It hurts mortgage holders, yes, but not as dramatically as is made out by some for the reason I've already said.
It has a mixed effect on renters and will be helping many.
Falling property prices and forced sales are great news for renters looking to get on the market, especially for those whom the largest barrier to entry into the market is the deposit.
Saving for a deposit when house prices are surging can be like running on a treadmill, no matter how fast you save the deposit you need keeps going up too as the house prices are going up. And people who already own property are seeing their deposits (their equity in their property) going up faster too which means they can outbid you.
When the music stops and prices fall, then those who're relying on equity to get more equity step out of the market and stop competing against renters looking to buy. And cash in your bank account can suddenly be a higher percentage for a deposit than it would have been otherwise.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
That graphic sums up everything that is wrong with the housing market today. Its insane.
Those percentages really should be reversed in order, and I suspect they would have been in prior decades.
IIRC the affordability checks only covered a 3% rise in interest rates. We’ve already exceeded that & could easily go higher.
Which is plainly nuts because we've had "lowest rates in 300 years" and banks aren't even considering rates seen this century.
I think I need to add my usual thought about this and frankly pretty much everything nowadays, it genuinely amazes me at times that civilization continues to exist.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
By what measure?
Back in the autumn, the pound crashed and bond yields went vertical. What's happened today?
Bond yields have now surpassed their 'mini budget' highs. Confuses the heck out of me, I thought it was all going to be fine because the 'grown ups were back in the room'.
The people sneering at mortgage holders are living in a( fantasy land.
It’s kind of despicable to gloat at the pain suffered by 25% of the population.
Nobody but nobody expected rates at 5/6%. As it happens I think they will spike and then hopefully decrease.
The Fed has held rates constant this month and we are starting to see whispers of *deflation* in US and Europe.
I am unconvinced that the BOE is following an anti-inflation strategy. It really seems that causing a recession is the main motivating factor, hence when inflation levels off, they may still raise rates to 'really see it off' and when inflation rises, they will raise rates to deal with the inflation.
They are following an anti-inflationary policy - problem is that we usually have interest rates higher than the US and the 2 meetings where they did less than the market expected has come back to bite them (as I suspected it would).
We will probably end up with interest rates 0;5% higher than they would have been.
Andrew Bailey has not been very successful. Not surprisingly, as he was chosen in part for his Brexitability.
Simon Case is a similar…er…case. Not so much Brexit in his instance as biddabilty, albeit chosen by the architects of the Brexit revolution.
Although much of Britain’s problems are systemic and go back a long time, this acute phase of sickness often leads back to Brexit.
Not obsessed.
Denial is a not a river in Egypt etc.
OK, let's reframe it neutrally.
In the aftermath of 2016, the talent pool for public office shrank a lot, like a garden pond in summer. Some of that was old lags wandering off, some of it was because it was necessary to be loyal to the new paradigm to get on. No pointing fingers about why it happened, or whether it was the goodies or baddies who left the field, but the observation that there were fewer people on the field is simple counting.
And if there's less competition for roles, your appointees are going to be weaker. Again, that's just maths.
The great shakeup in and after 2016 might be worthwhile, but one of the inevitable transient effects of a shakeup is that governance is going to be wonky for a while.
Is that OK?
(It doesn't help that by the time of Bailey's appointment, the UK government was headed by a mendacious buffoon who subcontracted his thinking to a psychopath. That wasn't inevitable after 2016, though it was pretty damn likely.)
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
Link to the source? (So that I can understand what it's really saying.)
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
What is that, number of mortgages, or value of mortgages? I'm assuming it's the former, which therefore probably isn't helpful in this discussion.
Its tremendously useful.
Why on earth do pensioners have 3x as many mortgages as 25-34 year olds? It makes no sense whatsoever. Its not because they need somewhere to live and are paying for their mortgage out of their wages.
The majority of mortgages are held by the over 55s. Why?
Barely a quarter of mortgages are held by the under 44s. Why?
Young people should be the ones with the mortgages. They're not. That's part of what's wrong with this country.
PS Number of mortgages is the right figure to use since each mortgage = 1 house presumably. Value of mortgages just means re-weighting the figures to massively inflate what's happening in London.
Good to see Tom Watson's getting a little attention.
Starmer's a teensy weensy (*) hypocritical in going on about Johnson's list, when Starmer put Watson's name forward after it had initially been rejected by the committee.
(*) Actually, a lot.
I have some very solid anecdotal evidence from the time (1980s) to suggest Carl Beech was not entirely wrong. Beech took allegations that were already in the public domain and embellished them as his own experience which was patently untrue.
The evidence I have is about someone now dead so I can comfortably share my story, but I won't. One of Beech's greatest disservices from being exposed as a 24 carat bullshitter was that those who probably still had questions to answer (even if they were now dead) have been given a clean bill of health.
Watson, by taking Beech's bait was very unwise, not just for his harassment of the innocent but for his inadvertent exoneration of the guilty.
Jessops believes the Watson parry was a magnificent win for Sunak today so who am I to rain on his parade?
Your last line rather makes the rest of your rant a bit sus.
I've not said it was a magnificent 'win' for Sunak. I've not mentioned anything like that. All I said was that Starmer was being hypocritical with his criticism.
My story about McAlpine: back in 1997, I got an invite into parliament. Whilst there, the guy who invited me mentioned the rumours about McAlpine (because I was interested in engineering). The allegations about McAlpine were in the 'public domain'; that does not make them true. He had to live with rumours and tittle-tattle behind his back - until people were stupid enough to actually put it down in writing.
My anecdotes do not relate to McAlpine.
The sources of the stories I have been told about one of Beech's "victims" also passed on details of Janner, which turned out to be incontrovertibly true.
I'm sure you'll understand that "a bloke I know told me" is not sufficient proof.
I haven't mentioned the "victim's" name, I am merely pointing out that although Beech was a bullshitter those eager to apportion "innocence" to ALL his "victims" might be making a false extrapolation.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Or, as it seems some on here think: Innocent until proven Tory...
But that's just a misstatement of a rule of criminal law, not a general rule of logic. As someone else has pointed out, Savile was never convicted of anything, so that is him off the hook. And indeed in the year after his death suggestions that he was what he was, were met with exactly this sort of response about unproven backbiting now he is not here to defend himself etc.
Savile was never convicted of anything, but there was a large inquiry after he died that produced a lot of evidence of wrongdoing. That's a very different situation to the one we're talking about here.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
What is that, number of mortgages, or value of mortgages? I'm assuming it's the former, which therefore probably isn't helpful in this discussion.
Its tremendously useful.
Why on earth do pensioners have 3x as many mortgages as 25-34 year olds? It makes no sense whatsoever. Its not because they need somewhere to live and are paying for their mortgage out of their wages.
The majority of mortgages are held by the over 55s. Why?
Barely a quarter of mortgages are held by the under 44s. Why?
Young people should be the ones with the mortgages. They're not. That's part of what's wrong with this country.
Are any of these pensioners using equity release with a lifetime mortgage? Seems very odd otherwise.
Rents are going up. They’re going up because supply is pretty fixed, or even contracting as BTLers exit the market, and because demand (or wage growth) is up.
House prices are falling, both in real and nominal terms. That doesn’t help wannabe buyers though because mortgages are higher than ever, and actually banks are tightening lending.
So the current state affairs is shit for renters and shit for mortgage holders.
It’s middling good for outright homeowners with savings and index-proofed pensions.
The people sneering at mortgage holders are living in a( fantasy land.
It’s kind of despicable to gloat at the pain suffered by 25% of the population.
Nobody but nobody expected rates at 5/6%. As it happens I think they will spike and then hopefully decrease.
The Fed has held rates constant this month and we are starting to see whispers of *deflation* in US and Europe.
I am unconvinced that the BOE is following an anti-inflation strategy. It really seems that causing a recession is the main motivating factor, hence when inflation levels off, they may still raise rates to 'really see it off' and when inflation rises, they will raise rates to deal with the inflation.
They are following an anti-inflationary policy - problem is that we usually have interest rates higher than the US and the 2 meetings where they did less than the market expected has come back to bite them (as I suspected it would).
We will probably end up with interest rates 0;5% higher than they would have been.
Andrew Bailey has not been very successful. Not surprisingly, as he was chosen in part for his Brexitability.
Simon Case is a similar…er…case. Not so much Brexit in his instance as biddabilty, albeit chosen by the architects of the Brexit revolution.
Although much of Britain’s problems are systemic and go back a long time, this acute phase of sickness often leads back to Brexit.
Not obsessed.
Denial is a not a river in Egypt etc.
OK, let's reframe it neutrally.
In the aftermath of 2016, the talent pool for public office shrank a lot, like a garden pond in summer. Some of that was old lags wandering off, some of it was because it was necessary to be loyal to the new paradigm to get on. No pointing fingers about why it happened, or whether it was the goodies or baddies who left the field, but the observation that there were fewer people on the field is simple counting.
And if there's less competition for roles, your appointees are going to be weaker. Again, that's just maths.
The great shakeup in and after 2016 might be worthwhile, but one of the inevitable transient effects of a shakeup is that governance is going to be wonky for a while.
Is that OK?
(It doesn't help that by the time of Bailey's appointment, the UK government was headed by a mendacious buffoon who subcontracted his thinking to a psychopath. That wasn't inevitable after 2016, though it was pretty damn likely.)
Thank you, says it much better. Suffer in your jocks, @DavidL.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
What is that, number of mortgages, or value of mortgages? I'm assuming it's the former, which therefore probably isn't helpful in this discussion.
Its tremendously useful.
Why on earth do pensioners have 3x as many mortgages as 25-34 year olds? It makes no sense whatsoever. Its not because they need somewhere to live and are paying for their mortgage out of their wages.
The majority of mortgages are held by the over 55s. Why?
Barely a quarter of mortgages are held by the under 44s. Why?
Young people should be the ones with the mortgages. They're not. That's part of what's wrong with this country.
Are any of these pensioners using equity release with a lifetime mortgage? Seems very odd otherwise.
Lifetime mortgage equity release would be reasonable and fair enough.
I doubt it though. Especially given the hefty chunk of 55-64s which presumably aren't that yet are much higher than lower age groups too.
I suspect its buy-to-let etc mortgages in which case if those are force-sold at a discount then it would do wonders for generational inequality and it won't mean anyone losing their own home.
Good to see Tom Watson's getting a little attention.
Starmer's a teensy weensy (*) hypocritical in going on about Johnson's list, when Starmer put Watson's name forward after it had initially been rejected by the committee.
(*) Actually, a lot.
I have some very solid anecdotal evidence from the time (1980s) to suggest Carl Beech was not entirely wrong. Beech took allegations that were already in the public domain and embellished them as his own experience which was patently untrue.
The evidence I have is about someone now dead so I can comfortably share my story, but I won't. One of Beech's greatest disservices from being exposed as a 24 carat bullshitter was that those who probably still had questions to answer (even if they were now dead) have been given a clean bill of health.
Watson, by taking Beech's bait was very unwise, not just for his harassment of the innocent but for his inadvertent exoneration of the guilty.
Jessops believes the Watson parry was a magnificent win for Sunak today so who am I to rain on his parade?
Your last line rather makes the rest of your rant a bit sus.
I've not said it was a magnificent 'win' for Sunak. I've not mentioned anything like that. All I said was that Starmer was being hypocritical with his criticism.
My story about McAlpine: back in 1997, I got an invite into parliament. Whilst there, the guy who invited me mentioned the rumours about McAlpine (because I was interested in engineering). The allegations about McAlpine were in the 'public domain'; that does not make them true. He had to live with rumours and tittle-tattle behind his back - until people were stupid enough to actually put it down in writing.
My anecdotes do not relate to McAlpine.
The sources of the stories I have been told about one of Beech's "victims" also passed on details of Janner, which turned out to be incontrovertibly true.
I'm sure you'll understand that "a bloke I know told me" is not sufficient proof.
I haven't mentioned the "victim's" name, I am merely pointing out that although Beech was a bullshitter those eager to apportion "innocence" to ALL his "victims" might be making a false extrapolation.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Or, as it seems some on here think: Innocent until proven Tory...
But that's just a misstatement of a rule of criminal law, not a general rule of logic. As someone else has pointed out, Savile was never convicted of anything, so that is him off the hook. And indeed in the year after his death suggestions that he was what he was, were met with exactly this sort of response about unproven backbiting now he is not here to defend himself etc.
Savile was never convicted of anything, but there was a large inquiry after he died that produced a lot of evidence of wrongdoing. That's a very different situation to the one we're talking about here.
The people sneering at mortgage holders are living in a( fantasy land.
It’s kind of despicable to gloat at the pain suffered by 25% of the population.
Nobody but nobody expected rates at 5/6%. As it happens I think they will spike and then hopefully decrease.
The Fed has held rates constant this month and we are starting to see whispers of *deflation* in US and Europe.
You might not have expected them in the same way that you might not have expected a pandemic and a war, but it should never ever have been discounted as a possibility.
Most of us remember 1992.
I remember 1992.
I remember the Barcelona Olympics.
I do not remember interest rates - I know about them as I learnt about them subsequently, but it was not something I knew from first hand experience.
Virtually nobody under 50 will have been paying a mortgage in 1992.
I bought my first house in 1992, a 2 up 2 down terrace in Leicester. I paid £42 000, and now they go for 5x that. I think the highest rate I paid was 13.5%, and it was half my salary as a junior doctor, with a staff nurse salary too from Mrs Foxy. Cheaper house, but as big a share of income as it would be now at much lower interest.
The biggest problem was getting a mortgage though. Negative equity meant that valuations were priced low, and deposits often had to be 15% or more of the asking price. That was a bigger obstacle for us, and we lost a couple of houses because we couldn't bridge the gap between price and valuation, and had to start again.
A colleague of mine had 2 years in a hospital flat as he couldn't sell his flat in another city as it has £20 000 of negative equity. Negative equity is a miserable thing. Unable to sell, unable to move, even for young professionals.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
Link to the source? (So that I can understand what it's really saying.)
I've got a spreadsheet tracking a theoretical 100% 25 yr mortgage on a theoretical average (Nationwide) property. (Since 1991) The peak in real terms was late 2007. Affordability now is very similar to early in 1991.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
What is that, number of mortgages, or value of mortgages? I'm assuming it's the former, which therefore probably isn't helpful in this discussion.
Its tremendously useful.
Why on earth do pensioners have 3x as many mortgages as 25-34 year olds? It makes no sense whatsoever. Its not because they need somewhere to live and are paying for their mortgage out of their wages.
The majority of mortgages are held by the over 55s. Why?
Barely a quarter of mortgages are held by the under 44s. Why?
Young people should be the ones with the mortgages. They're not. That's part of what's wrong with this country.
PS Number of mortgages is the right figure to use since each mortgage = 1 house presumably. Value of mortgages just means re-weighting the figures to massively inflate what's happening in London.
Mortgages for homes they aren’t themselves living in, obvs
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
What is that, number of mortgages, or value of mortgages? I'm assuming it's the former, which therefore probably isn't helpful in this discussion.
Its tremendously useful.
Why on earth do pensioners have 3x as many mortgages as 25-34 year olds? It makes no sense whatsoever. Its not because they need somewhere to live and are paying for their mortgage out of their wages.
The majority of mortgages are held by the over 55s. Why?
Barely a quarter of mortgages are held by the under 44s. Why?
Young people should be the ones with the mortgages. They're not. That's part of what's wrong with this country.
Are any of these pensioners using equity release with a lifetime mortgage? Seems very odd otherwise.
Lifetime mortgage equity release would be reasonable and fair enough.
I doubt it though. Especially given the hefty chunk of 55-64s which presumably aren't that yet are much higher than lower age groups too.
I suspect its buy-to-let etc mortgages in which case if those are force-sold at a discount then it would do wonders for generational inequality and it won't mean anyone losing their own home.
BTL is only about 10 - 15% of current mortgages though. Something somewhere doesn't add up!
The people sneering at mortgage holders are living in a( fantasy land.
It’s kind of despicable to gloat at the pain suffered by 25% of the population.
Nobody but nobody expected rates at 5/6%. As it happens I think they will spike and then hopefully decrease.
The Fed has held rates constant this month and we are starting to see whispers of *deflation* in US and Europe.
You might not have expected them in the same way that you might not have expected a pandemic and a war, but it should never ever have been discounted as a possibility.
Most of us remember 1992.
I remember 1992.
I remember the Barcelona Olympics.
I do not remember interest rates - I know about them as I learnt about them subsequently, but it was not something I knew from first hand experience.
Virtually nobody under 50 will have been paying a mortgage in 1992.
I bought my first house in 1992, a 2 up 2 down terrace in Leicester. I paid £42 000, and now they go for 5x that. I think the highest rate I paid was 13.5%, and it was half my salary as a junior doctor, with a staff nurse salary too from Mrs Foxy. Cheaper house, but as big a share of income as it would be now at much lower interest.
The biggest problem was getting a mortgage though. Negative equity meant that valuations were priced low, and deposits often had to be 15% or more of the asking price. That was a bigger obstacle for us, and we lost a couple of houses because we couldn't bridge the gap between price and valuation, and had to start again.
A colleague of mine had 2 years in a hospital flat as he couldn't sell his flat in another city as it has £20 000 of negative equity. Negative equity is a miserable thing. Unable to sell, unable to move, even for young professionals.
Its a problem yes, but a dramatically overblown problem. Yes it hurts mobility, but you still have a house of your own, that's more than most young people have today.
And after the negative equity of the 90s people who didn't have a property so had no negative equity were able to save to afford a deposit because prices were reasonable.
Hurting mobility is a problem but it is not as big a problem as people spending decades renting and paying others mortgages and never being able to save a deposit for a home of their own as the prices keep rising and rising and rising as has happened in the past couple of decades.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
Link to the source? (So that I can understand what it's really saying.)
It would be very useful to know the outstanding balance of those mortgages and how many are BTL mortgages used as a pension on a second property.
I bet the youngsters have far more outstanding than someone who bought 20 years ago, particularly as a percentage of value.
Good to see Tom Watson's getting a little attention.
Starmer's a teensy weensy (*) hypocritical in going on about Johnson's list, when Starmer put Watson's name forward after it had initially been rejected by the committee.
(*) Actually, a lot.
I have some very solid anecdotal evidence from the time (1980s) to suggest Carl Beech was not entirely wrong. Beech took allegations that were already in the public domain and embellished them as his own experience which was patently untrue.
The evidence I have is about someone now dead so I can comfortably share my story, but I won't. One of Beech's greatest disservices from being exposed as a 24 carat bullshitter was that those who probably still had questions to answer (even if they were now dead) have been given a clean bill of health.
Watson, by taking Beech's bait was very unwise, not just for his harassment of the innocent but for his inadvertent exoneration of the guilty.
Jessops believes the Watson parry was a magnificent win for Sunak today so who am I to rain on his parade?
Your last line rather makes the rest of your rant a bit sus.
I've not said it was a magnificent 'win' for Sunak. I've not mentioned anything like that. All I said was that Starmer was being hypocritical with his criticism.
My story about McAlpine: back in 1997, I got an invite into parliament. Whilst there, the guy who invited me mentioned the rumours about McAlpine (because I was interested in engineering). The allegations about McAlpine were in the 'public domain'; that does not make them true. He had to live with rumours and tittle-tattle behind his back - until people were stupid enough to actually put it down in writing.
My anecdotes do not relate to McAlpine.
The sources of the stories I have been told about one of Beech's "victims" also passed on details of Janner, which turned out to be incontrovertibly true.
I'm sure you'll understand that "a bloke I know told me" is not sufficient proof.
I haven't mentioned the "victim's" name, I am merely pointing out that although Beech was a bullshitter those eager to apportion "innocence" to ALL his "victims" might be making a false extrapolation.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Or, as it seems some on here think: Innocent until proven Tory...
But that's just a misstatement of a rule of criminal law, not a general rule of logic. As someone else has pointed out, Savile was never convicted of anything, so that is him off the hook. And indeed in the year after his death suggestions that he was what he was, were met with exactly this sort of response about unproven backbiting now he is not here to defend himself etc.
Savile was never convicted of anything, but there was a large inquiry after he died that produced a lot of evidence of wrongdoing. That's a very different situation to the one we're talking about here.
Because of this, I'm fairly happy to call both of those paedophiles.
But you are not capable of forming your own judgment on any question which has not been investigated by The Authorities?
Fair enough.
Actual evidence beats "my mate down the pub says".
There is no rational definition of evidence, under which "my mate down the pub says" is not evidence even if it is weak, derivative, third hand evidence or whatever. Prior to Saviles death the only evidence that he was an abusive pervert was of that kind. So why do you suggest it fails to meet some standard for "actual evidence"?
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
What is that, number of mortgages, or value of mortgages? I'm assuming it's the former, which therefore probably isn't helpful in this discussion.
Its tremendously useful.
Why on earth do pensioners have 3x as many mortgages as 25-34 year olds? It makes no sense whatsoever. Its not because they need somewhere to live and are paying for their mortgage out of their wages.
The majority of mortgages are held by the over 55s. Why?
Barely a quarter of mortgages are held by the under 44s. Why?
Young people should be the ones with the mortgages. They're not. That's part of what's wrong with this country.
Ok, it's partially useful for that. What it's not useful for is assessing the debt burden by age group, which seemed to me to be the relevant factor in the conversation that preceded it. That is, if older people have large numbers of a mortgages but on average a few hundred pounds, of principle left, and younger people have fewer but on average many tens of thousands of pounds, then it gives a different illustration of the effects of rates changes etc.
A mortgage debt of £100 is very different from one of £100,000, and I don't think it's very useful to just count them as one and one without thinking of the value.
I see your point. Pure value isn't useful though, as you're just measuring location, location, location with that. LTV figures are what is required, but that's probably too complex to find.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
The text below that chart says:
In 2021, only 0.7% of homeowners were between the age of 16 and 24. This rose to 11.2% for those in the 25-34 age bracket, and 15.4% for those between 35 and 44 years of age. Less than a fifth were 55-64 years old.
The overwhelming majority were those aged 65 and over, occupying over one-third of the homeowner market.
So the heading appears to be misleading; it doesn;'t appear to have anything to do with mortgages. Makes more sense to me as described - 35% of homeowners are 65 or over.
Here's the link see if you think I have misunderstood.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
What is that, number of mortgages, or value of mortgages? I'm assuming it's the former, which therefore probably isn't helpful in this discussion.
Its tremendously useful.
Why on earth do pensioners have 3x as many mortgages as 25-34 year olds? It makes no sense whatsoever. Its not because they need somewhere to live and are paying for their mortgage out of their wages.
The majority of mortgages are held by the over 55s. Why?
Barely a quarter of mortgages are held by the under 44s. Why?
Young people should be the ones with the mortgages. They're not. That's part of what's wrong with this country.
PS Number of mortgages is the right figure to use since each mortgage = 1 house presumably. Value of mortgages just means re-weighting the figures to massively inflate what's happening in London.
House prices rose as interest rates fell. (Let's not bother about the mechanism, the two things happened at roughly the same time.)
That has left monthly payments roughly where they were, but has done horrible things to deposits. Unless you are dead fortunate or have a dead relative, it's hard to imagine getting to the vicinity of the housing ladder.
Rents are going up. They’re going up because supply is pretty fixed, or even contracting as BTLers exit the market, and because demand (or wage growth) is up.
House prices are falling, both in real and nominal terms. That doesn’t help wannabe buyers though because mortgages are higher than ever, and actually banks are tightening lending.
So the current state affairs is shit for renters and shit for mortgage holders.
It’s middling good for outright homeowners with savings and index-proofed pensions.
Is it not better to have a smaller debt at a higher rate of interest than a larger debt at a lower rate of interest?
The second is more volatile and overpayment when your income goes up doesn't help anywhere near as much.
That assumes that house affordability is constant, of course.
Rents are going up. They’re going up because supply is pretty fixed, or even contracting as BTLers exit the market, and because demand (or wage growth) is up.
House prices are falling, both in real and nominal terms. That doesn’t help wannabe buyers though because mortgages are higher than ever, and actually banks are tightening lending.
So the current state affairs is shit for renters and shit for mortgage holders.
It’s middling good for outright homeowners with savings and index-proofed pensions.
I don't believe rents are going up any faster in real terms than they have in previous years. In fact the opposite may be the case.
The problem is rents have always been going up because as house prices go up people base rents upon that.
House prices falling in both real and nominal terms is fantastic for those who work and are saving from wages for a deposit.
By the way, are we now calling for Rishi and Hunt to resign? They have after all 'crashed the economy' worse than the mini-budget now.
It’s OK, apparently, if you crash in slow motion.
Surely it's not a crash if you do it deliberately?
Just another squeeze on the mortgage paying wage earners of the country, while state pensioners get 10% rises.
Lots of pensioners are leveraged on property. The class politics of it aren’t as simple as you make out, and the people who stand to gain the most are the young.
Utterly false. If we were building more houses, there might be some truth to this.
But we ain’t.
That’s absurd. Even if we didn’t build a single new house, the distributional effects would still benefit those with the most future earning potential and the least debt, i.e. the young.
What makes you think that the young have the least debt? Most debt is mortgage.
And fewer young people have mortgages.
The text below that chart says:
In 2021, only 0.7% of homeowners were between the age of 16 and 24. This rose to 11.2% for those in the 25-34 age bracket, and 15.4% for those between 35 and 44 years of age. Less than a fifth were 55-64 years old.
The overwhelming majority were those aged 65 and over, occupying over one-third of the homeowner market.
So the heading appears to be misleading; it doesn;'t appear to have anything to do with mortgages. Makes more sense to me as described - 35% of homeowners are 65 or over.
Here's the link see if you think I have misunderstood.
Good to see Tom Watson's getting a little attention.
Starmer's a teensy weensy (*) hypocritical in going on about Johnson's list, when Starmer put Watson's name forward after it had initially been rejected by the committee.
(*) Actually, a lot.
I have some very solid anecdotal evidence from the time (1980s) to suggest Carl Beech was not entirely wrong. Beech took allegations that were already in the public domain and embellished them as his own experience which was patently untrue.
The evidence I have is about someone now dead so I can comfortably share my story, but I won't. One of Beech's greatest disservices from being exposed as a 24 carat bullshitter was that those who probably still had questions to answer (even if they were now dead) have been given a clean bill of health.
Watson, by taking Beech's bait was very unwise, not just for his harassment of the innocent but for his inadvertent exoneration of the guilty.
Jessops believes the Watson parry was a magnificent win for Sunak today so who am I to rain on his parade?
Your last line rather makes the rest of your rant a bit sus.
I've not said it was a magnificent 'win' for Sunak. I've not mentioned anything like that. All I said was that Starmer was being hypocritical with his criticism.
My story about McAlpine: back in 1997, I got an invite into parliament. Whilst there, the guy who invited me mentioned the rumours about McAlpine (because I was interested in engineering). The allegations about McAlpine were in the 'public domain'; that does not make them true. He had to live with rumours and tittle-tattle behind his back - until people were stupid enough to actually put it down in writing.
My anecdotes do not relate to McAlpine.
The sources of the stories I have been told about one of Beech's "victims" also passed on details of Janner, which turned out to be incontrovertibly true.
I'm sure you'll understand that "a bloke I know told me" is not sufficient proof.
I haven't mentioned the "victim's" name, I am merely pointing out that although Beech was a bullshitter those eager to apportion "innocence" to ALL his "victims" might be making a false extrapolation.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Or, as it seems some on here think: Innocent until proven Tory...
But that's just a misstatement of a rule of criminal law, not a general rule of logic. As someone else has pointed out, Savile was never convicted of anything, so that is him off the hook. And indeed in the year after his death suggestions that he was what he was, were met with exactly this sort of response about unproven backbiting now he is not here to defend himself etc.
Savile was never convicted of anything, but there was a large inquiry after he died that produced a lot of evidence of wrongdoing. That's a very different situation to the one we're talking about here.
Because of this, I'm fairly happy to call both of those paedophiles.
But you are not capable of forming your own judgment on any question which has not been investigated by The Authorities?
Fair enough.
Actual evidence beats "my mate down the pub says".
There is no rational definition of evidence, under which "my mate down the pub says" is not evidence even if it is weak, derivative, third hand evidence or whatever. Prior to Saviles death the only evidence that he was an abusive pervert was of that kind. So why do you suggest it fails to meet some standard for "actual evidence"?
Sorry but Saville was known to be dodgy as f*** but also not someone anyone would mess with
From the other pb in 2007 (I can’t find old reference)
“A friend of mine works with a chap who used to DJ at the Twisted Wheel club in the 60s and was Jimmy Savile's right hand man for a while. Ordinarily, he's a bit reticent about JS, but did say 'There's few people I'd take death threats from seriously, but Jimmy Savile is one of them'."
But the Rev (goatboy) had stories about Saville as did others.
Good to see Tom Watson's getting a little attention.
Starmer's a teensy weensy (*) hypocritical in going on about Johnson's list, when Starmer put Watson's name forward after it had initially been rejected by the committee.
(*) Actually, a lot.
I have some very solid anecdotal evidence from the time (1980s) to suggest Carl Beech was not entirely wrong. Beech took allegations that were already in the public domain and embellished them as his own experience which was patently untrue.
The evidence I have is about someone now dead so I can comfortably share my story, but I won't. One of Beech's greatest disservices from being exposed as a 24 carat bullshitter was that those who probably still had questions to answer (even if they were now dead) have been given a clean bill of health.
Watson, by taking Beech's bait was very unwise, not just for his harassment of the innocent but for his inadvertent exoneration of the guilty.
Jessops believes the Watson parry was a magnificent win for Sunak today so who am I to rain on his parade?
Your last line rather makes the rest of your rant a bit sus.
I've not said it was a magnificent 'win' for Sunak. I've not mentioned anything like that. All I said was that Starmer was being hypocritical with his criticism.
My story about McAlpine: back in 1997, I got an invite into parliament. Whilst there, the guy who invited me mentioned the rumours about McAlpine (because I was interested in engineering). The allegations about McAlpine were in the 'public domain'; that does not make them true. He had to live with rumours and tittle-tattle behind his back - until people were stupid enough to actually put it down in writing.
My anecdotes do not relate to McAlpine.
The sources of the stories I have been told about one of Beech's "victims" also passed on details of Janner, which turned out to be incontrovertibly true.
I'm sure you'll understand that "a bloke I know told me" is not sufficient proof.
I haven't mentioned the "victim's" name, I am merely pointing out that although Beech was a bullshitter those eager to apportion "innocence" to ALL his "victims" might be making a false extrapolation.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Or, as it seems some on here think: Innocent until proven Tory...
But that's just a misstatement of a rule of criminal law, not a general rule of logic. As someone else has pointed out, Savile was never convicted of anything, so that is him off the hook. And indeed in the year after his death suggestions that he was what he was, were met with exactly this sort of response about unproven backbiting now he is not here to defend himself etc.
Savile was never convicted of anything, but there was a large inquiry after he died that produced a lot of evidence of wrongdoing. That's a very different situation to the one we're talking about here.
Because of this, I'm fairly happy to call both of those paedophiles.
But you are not capable of forming your own judgment on any question which has not been investigated by The Authorities?
Fair enough.
Actual evidence beats "my mate down the pub says".
There is no rational definition of evidence, under which "my mate down the pub says" is not evidence even if it is weak, derivative, third hand evidence or whatever. Prior to Saviles death the only evidence that he was an abusive pervert was of that kind. So why do you suggest it fails to meet some standard for "actual evidence"?
No, there was actually first hand accounts. Which were ignored. This was actual evidence.
There is a reason that hearsay is given the level of respect that it gets, since the dawn of complex human societies.
Good to see Tom Watson's getting a little attention.
Starmer's a teensy weensy (*) hypocritical in going on about Johnson's list, when Starmer put Watson's name forward after it had initially been rejected by the committee.
(*) Actually, a lot.
I have some very solid anecdotal evidence from the time (1980s) to suggest Carl Beech was not entirely wrong. Beech took allegations that were already in the public domain and embellished them as his own experience which was patently untrue.
The evidence I have is about someone now dead so I can comfortably share my story, but I won't. One of Beech's greatest disservices from being exposed as a 24 carat bullshitter was that those who probably still had questions to answer (even if they were now dead) have been given a clean bill of health.
Watson, by taking Beech's bait was very unwise, not just for his harassment of the innocent but for his inadvertent exoneration of the guilty.
Jessops believes the Watson parry was a magnificent win for Sunak today so who am I to rain on his parade?
Your last line rather makes the rest of your rant a bit sus.
I've not said it was a magnificent 'win' for Sunak. I've not mentioned anything like that. All I said was that Starmer was being hypocritical with his criticism.
My story about McAlpine: back in 1997, I got an invite into parliament. Whilst there, the guy who invited me mentioned the rumours about McAlpine (because I was interested in engineering). The allegations about McAlpine were in the 'public domain'; that does not make them true. He had to live with rumours and tittle-tattle behind his back - until people were stupid enough to actually put it down in writing.
My anecdotes do not relate to McAlpine.
The sources of the stories I have been told about one of Beech's "victims" also passed on details of Janner, which turned out to be incontrovertibly true.
I'm sure you'll understand that "a bloke I know told me" is not sufficient proof.
I haven't mentioned the "victim's" name, I am merely pointing out that although Beech was a bullshitter those eager to apportion "innocence" to ALL his "victims" might be making a false extrapolation.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Or, as it seems some on here think: Innocent until proven Tory...
But that's just a misstatement of a rule of criminal law, not a general rule of logic. As someone else has pointed out, Savile was never convicted of anything, so that is him off the hook. And indeed in the year after his death suggestions that he was what he was, were met with exactly this sort of response about unproven backbiting now he is not here to defend himself etc.
Savile was never convicted of anything, but there was a large inquiry after he died that produced a lot of evidence of wrongdoing. That's a very different situation to the one we're talking about here.
Because of this, I'm fairly happy to call both of those paedophiles.
But you are not capable of forming your own judgment on any question which has not been investigated by The Authorities?
Fair enough.
Actual evidence beats "my mate down the pub says".
There is no rational definition of evidence, under which "my mate down the pub says" is not evidence even if it is weak, derivative, third hand evidence or whatever. Prior to Saviles death the only evidence that he was an abusive pervert was of that kind. So why do you suggest it fails to meet some standard for "actual evidence"?
20+ former children in care made allegations against Janner. Repeatedly for 30 years, with consistent stories, but were dismissed by Leics Police and Social Services. It was much more than "my mate down the pub says".
If he had been a Muslim taxi driver rather than a well connected Labour MP...
My new Party disagrees and has a policy of a fully public NHS
Is that Margaret Hodge quote genuine? For a Labour politician to say that would be surprising. For a Jewish politician to say it would be shocking
Doesn't look genuine. I put margaret hodge "If you suddenly find your neighbours have changed" into Google and there are virtually zero hits for it on Google, and all of those hits seem to be in the last few days by Corbynistas with no a single original source for any of them.
Where's the original source? Where's the citation? Where's a legitimate source? Seems like BS to me.
If the first three people to actually catch the newly pathogenic novel bat coronavirus were the three scientists working on pathologising a novel bat coronavirus in the special "pathogenic novel bat coronavirus lab" then, I submit, the evidence that it came from a fucking pangolin stew in a random market begins to look a tiny bit thin
“‘Oh, my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Pa. What do you think happened?’ “Like, ‘Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean?’ Or it’s the f…ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it?” - Jon Stewart.
I have tasted what Hershey make. It cannot be described as “chocolaty goodness”. Certainly not “goodness”. I’m not that convinced about “chocolaty”.
Very true, but he was talking to a mostly American audience, whose experience of ‘chocolate’ most likely emanates from that factory in Pennsylvania.
It is a sad country in many ways (and a wonderful one in others).
Life with shit chocolate and shit cheese. Unbearable.
Beer not too bad, mind. Had some very nice ones when over there a couple of times. But not enough to make me move.
Actually, I’d say American beer - in variety and innovation and ubiquity - is now the best in the world
You can walk into even the tiniest 7/11 in some backwoods non place and find a really decent selection of ice cold bottled craft beers, often excellent, sometimes superb
Perhaps we're all growing older or perhaps its a consequence of globalisation but tales of food in far away places don't have the exotic strangeness as they did in the early years of PB.
Good to see Tom Watson's getting a little attention.
Starmer's a teensy weensy (*) hypocritical in going on about Johnson's list, when Starmer put Watson's name forward after it had initially been rejected by the committee.
(*) Actually, a lot.
I have some very solid anecdotal evidence from the time (1980s) to suggest Carl Beech was not entirely wrong. Beech took allegations that were already in the public domain and embellished them as his own experience which was patently untrue.
The evidence I have is about someone now dead so I can comfortably share my story, but I won't. One of Beech's greatest disservices from being exposed as a 24 carat bullshitter was that those who probably still had questions to answer (even if they were now dead) have been given a clean bill of health.
Watson, by taking Beech's bait was very unwise, not just for his harassment of the innocent but for his inadvertent exoneration of the guilty.
Jessops believes the Watson parry was a magnificent win for Sunak today so who am I to rain on his parade?
Your last line rather makes the rest of your rant a bit sus.
I've not said it was a magnificent 'win' for Sunak. I've not mentioned anything like that. All I said was that Starmer was being hypocritical with his criticism.
My story about McAlpine: back in 1997, I got an invite into parliament. Whilst there, the guy who invited me mentioned the rumours about McAlpine (because I was interested in engineering). The allegations about McAlpine were in the 'public domain'; that does not make them true. He had to live with rumours and tittle-tattle behind his back - until people were stupid enough to actually put it down in writing.
My anecdotes do not relate to McAlpine.
The sources of the stories I have been told about one of Beech's "victims" also passed on details of Janner, which turned out to be incontrovertibly true.
I'm sure you'll understand that "a bloke I know told me" is not sufficient proof.
I haven't mentioned the "victim's" name, I am merely pointing out that although Beech was a bullshitter those eager to apportion "innocence" to ALL his "victims" might be making a false extrapolation.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Or, as it seems some on here think: Innocent until proven Tory...
But that's just a misstatement of a rule of criminal law, not a general rule of logic. As someone else has pointed out, Savile was never convicted of anything, so that is him off the hook. And indeed in the year after his death suggestions that he was what he was, were met with exactly this sort of response about unproven backbiting now he is not here to defend himself etc.
Savile was never convicted of anything, but there was a large inquiry after he died that produced a lot of evidence of wrongdoing. That's a very different situation to the one we're talking about here.
Because of this, I'm fairly happy to call both of those paedophiles.
But you are not capable of forming your own judgment on any question which has not been investigated by The Authorities?
Fair enough.
What a stupid comment. Of course I am. Whereas you, I assume, are ready to accuse someone of anything with *certainty* just because of vague rumours and tittle-tattle, especially if you don't like them politically?
I've got a spreadsheet tracking a theoretical 100% 25 yr mortgage on a theoretical average (Nationwide) property. (Since 1991) The peak in real terms was late 2007. Affordability now is very similar to early in 1991.
"In real terms". When was it in nominal numbers please? People aren't paid in real terms.
I don’t know much about Janner, but the story on Wikipedia is not terribly exculpatory.
But in turn, that gets me wondering whether Tom Harris is the evil person Josias Jessop makes him out to be.
A lot of people - in the police, in media, and in politics - weee hoodwinked by Carl Beech, who took care to interweave his malicious fantasies with actual truths.
Comments
When low interest rates arrived, not only did Mrs Stodge and I clear our mortgage but we borrowed back against the mortgage (at 0.49%) to completely renovate our property and then paid that off. There was created in the late 00s and 10s a class of wealthy home owners who cleared their mortgage debt and retained an asset increasing in value above inflation. You can understand why there is resistance to any changes to the status quo from which millions have done very well.
Speaking of debt, I see numbers indicating consumer and mortgage debt is already rising fast as the good times come to an end. We continue to spend but now paying for it via increased debt as the cash piles accumulated in Covid are spent away.
I remember the Barcelona Olympics.
I do not remember interest rates - I know about them as I learnt about them subsequently, but it was not something I knew from first hand experience.
Virtually nobody under 50 will have been paying a mortgage in 1992.
etc etc
The NHS has alway bought stuff from the private sector. The question is what?
*That would be a brave policy to push through.
I'm not sure how a situation that rewards debt is a good thing. It can only lead to trouble, as we are seeing.
It has a mixed effect on renters and will be helping many.
Falling property prices and forced sales are great news for renters looking to get on the market, especially for those whom the largest barrier to entry into the market is the deposit.
Saving for a deposit when house prices are surging can be like running on a treadmill, no matter how fast you save the deposit you need keeps going up too as the house prices are going up. And people who already own property are seeing their deposits (their equity in their property) going up faster too which means they can outbid you.
When the music stops and prices fall, then those who're relying on equity to get more equity step out of the market and stop competing against renters looking to buy. And cash in your bank account can suddenly be a higher percentage for a deposit than it would have been otherwise.
Those percentages really should be reversed in order, and I suspect they would have been in prior decades.
I think I need to add my usual thought about this and frankly pretty much everything nowadays, it genuinely amazes me at times that civilization continues to exist.
In the aftermath of 2016, the talent pool for public office shrank a lot, like a garden pond in summer. Some of that was old lags wandering off, some of it was because it was necessary to be loyal to the new paradigm to get on. No pointing fingers about why it happened, or whether it was the goodies or baddies who left the field, but the observation that there were fewer people on the field is simple counting.
And if there's less competition for roles, your appointees are going to be weaker. Again, that's just maths.
The great shakeup in and after 2016 might be worthwhile, but one of the inevitable transient effects of a shakeup is that governance is going to be wonky for a while.
Is that OK?
(It doesn't help that by the time of Bailey's appointment, the UK government was headed by a mendacious buffoon who subcontracted his thinking to a psychopath. That wasn't inevitable after 2016, though it was pretty damn likely.)
Why on earth do pensioners have 3x as many mortgages as 25-34 year olds? It makes no sense whatsoever. Its not because they need somewhere to live and are paying for their mortgage out of their wages.
The majority of mortgages are held by the over 55s. Why?
Barely a quarter of mortgages are held by the under 44s. Why?
Young people should be the ones with the mortgages. They're not. That's part of what's wrong with this country.
PS Number of mortgages is the right figure to use since each mortgage = 1 house presumably. Value of mortgages just means re-weighting the figures to massively inflate what's happening in London.
Fair enough.
They’re going up because supply is pretty fixed, or even contracting as BTLers exit the market, and because demand (or wage growth) is up.
House prices are falling, both in real and nominal terms.
That doesn’t help wannabe buyers though because mortgages are higher than ever, and actually banks are tightening lending.
So the current state affairs is shit for renters and shit for mortgage holders.
It’s middling good for outright homeowners with savings and index-proofed pensions.
Suffer in your jocks, @DavidL.
I doubt it though. Especially given the hefty chunk of 55-64s which presumably aren't that yet are much higher than lower age groups too.
I suspect its buy-to-let etc mortgages in which case if those are force-sold at a discount then it would do wonders for generational inequality and it won't mean anyone losing their own home.
The biggest problem was getting a mortgage though. Negative equity meant that valuations were priced low, and deposits often had to be 15% or more of the asking price. That was a bigger obstacle for us, and we lost a couple of houses because we couldn't bridge the gap between price and valuation, and had to start again.
A colleague of mine had 2 years in a hospital flat as he couldn't sell his flat in another city as it has £20 000 of negative equity. Negative equity is a miserable thing. Unable to sell, unable to move, even for young professionals.
The peak in real terms was late 2007. Affordability now is very similar to early in 1991.
Some poor tenant is paying the interest
And after the negative equity of the 90s people who didn't have a property so had no negative equity were able to save to afford a deposit because prices were reasonable.
Hurting mobility is a problem but it is not as big a problem as people spending decades renting and paying others mortgages and never being able to save a deposit for a home of their own as the prices keep rising and rising and rising as has happened in the past couple of decades.
I bet the youngsters have far more outstanding than someone who bought 20 years ago, particularly as a percentage of value.
In 2021, only 0.7% of homeowners were between the age of 16 and 24. This rose to 11.2% for those in the 25-34 age bracket, and 15.4% for those between 35 and 44 years of age. Less than a fifth were 55-64 years old.
The overwhelming majority were those aged 65 and over, occupying over one-third of the homeowner market.
So the heading appears to be misleading; it doesn;'t appear to have anything to do with mortgages. Makes more sense to me as described - 35% of homeowners are 65 or over.
Here's the link see if you think I have misunderstood.
https://www.uswitch.com/mortgages/mortgage-statistics/
PS thanks williamglenn for the link
That has left monthly payments roughly where they were, but has done horrible things to deposits. Unless you are dead fortunate or have a dead relative, it's hard to imagine getting to the vicinity of the housing ladder.
The second is more volatile and overpayment when your income goes up doesn't help anywhere near as much.
That assumes that house affordability is constant, of course.
The problem is rents have always been going up because as house prices go up people base rents upon that.
House prices falling in both real and nominal terms is fantastic for those who work and are saving from wages for a deposit.
From the other pb in 2007 (I can’t find old reference)
“A friend of mine works with a chap who
used to DJ at the Twisted Wheel club in the
60s and was Jimmy Savile's right hand man
for a while. Ordinarily, he's a bit reticent
about JS, but did say 'There's few people
I'd take death threats from seriously,
but Jimmy Savile is one of them'."
But the Rev (goatboy) had stories about Saville as did others.
There is a reason that hearsay is given the level of respect that it gets, since the dawn of complex human societies.
If he had been a Muslim taxi driver rather than a well connected Labour MP...
https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1668221551718662147?s=20
https://groceries.asda.com/product/speciality-world-craft-beer/blue-moon-belgian-white-american-craft-wheat-beer/1000044365954
https://groceries.asda.com/product/bottled-lagers/blue-moon-brewers-select-mango-wheat/1000364391702
Perhaps we're all growing older or perhaps its a consequence of globalisation but tales of food in far away places don't have the exotic strangeness as they did in the early years of PB.
And I've never called him 'evil'. Don't invent stuff - leave that to Beech.
In addition, what were the 'actual truths' you think were in Beech's claims?