Thursday 7 November 2013

Homey f-ers miserably fail to get their own story straight (part 94)

From this morning's City AM:

ONE of the perennial myths about this country is that we are somehow uniquely keen on home-ownership and are culturally averse to renting.

That’s nonsense: 70.7 per cent of those who live across the EU’s 27 member states are owner-occupiers, against just 64 per cent (and falling fast) in England and Wales.(1)


Housing Minister Grant Schnapps in this evening's Evening Standard:

When I was housing minister I got used to meeting couples who put up with cramped accommodation, or were living with parents well into their thirties. They shared the same aim — that first moment of putting the key into the door of a property they could call their own.

The dream of owning your own home is a truly British aspiration. But over the years it has become harder to do.(1) That’s especially true here in our capital.


So what is it, guys? Is the desire to own your own home "uniquely British" or not?

Make up your tiny addled deranged twatting stupid minds pls, and then I will take on the winner and point out that either way, this is completely irrelevant to any discussion about anything.

1) On the factual point, they are both correct. The whole point of Home-Owner-Ism is to reduce the number of home owners by whatever means (and to burden aspiring homeowners with the largest possible debts) and they are achieving this, it is not actually that difficult.

The period in which owner-occupation levels were steadily rising (in the UK) was exactly the period with relatively un-Home-Owner-Ist policies. You can hardly call those policies Georgist, but in relative terms and with the benefit of hindsight, they were.

1 comments:

Bayard said...

Or to put things in their correct order: "70.7 per cent of those who live across the EU’s 27 member states are owner-occupiers, against just 64 per cent (and falling fast) in England and Wales. That’s nonsense".

Of course it is. Culturally, we have almost nothing in common with any of our EU partners except perhaps Germany and Denmark, so that statistic proves nothing. Also this particular worse-than-damn-liar is talking about what we aspire to do, not what we achieve. So what if only 64% are owner-occupiers? It's the number who want to be owner-occupiers that counts.

"The dream of owning your own home is a truly British aspiration."

I dare say that, a few years ago, it was a truly Irish aspiration, too. Amazing how this pillar of the British character disappears once house prices start to fall.