On a Telegraph 'blog, of all places. The whole thing is well worth a read, but here's a taster:
... we know that there are vast swathes of Middle Britain where the state of the housing market is regarded as an indicator of financial, social and moral well-being, if not as a direct correlative to the size of the male Middle British appendage. See daytime television for confirmation of this. Actually, for Pete’s sake, don’t.
And don’t you just want to plank anyone who talks about “properties”? It’s a house, you plonker, it’s a BLOODY HOUSE! It’s for LIVING IN! We’re not playing Monopoly here!"
Saturday, 31 October 2009
Full frontal attack on Home-Owner-Ism
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7 comments:
Good spot. I don't know what I found more enjoyable, the sheer venom in the article (especially "I’ve always been rather derisive of the term “hard-working families”. It seems to straddle the fine line between bullsh*t and nonsense.") or the fact that most of the comments agree with him.
If this is cropping up in the Telegraph, there's reason to be positive.
I note that one of the commenters states, as a fact, that we have a rising population. What happened to the "demographic time-bomb" caused by an "ageing population" caused by the fact that the birthrate was below the replacement rate? Or is that scare outdated, to be replaced by MMGW, smoking, drinking etc etc?
Paul, I nicked it from HPC. Which, as you say, makes it even more reason to be positive.
B, that's more madness, we've always got to be scared of something either falling population or increasing population or too much immigration or not enough immigration*, just to keep us scared (see also MMGW, smoking, drinking, identity theft etc).
* IMHO we have too much of the bad kind of immigration and roughly the right amount of the good kind.
I'd trade the services and proximity for the calm of a rural location.
I love the hypocrisy of a Labour activist claimng to loathe Brown's 'orrible “hard-working families” phrase. Perhaps he's "moving on" from Gordon.
Mark, do you have a handle on the effect of the "Buy to let"
craze on house prices? Logically, there ought to be none since the number of potential homes is unaffected. I suspect, however, that "demand for housing" is less a demand for homes, more a demand for an entree into the Great Bubble and that BTL activity actually pushed house prices up. But I could be wrong....
JH, except people are being priced out of calm, rural locations as much as out of the suburbs.
D, that surprised me, he admits to still being an "active member of the Labour Party".
B, developers managed to offload new build flats for ridiculous prices until 2007, and they have fallen in value most; and if new build flats are more expensive then other properties go up as well by [a certain amount] but overall I doubt the effect of BTL craze was that big.
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