Britain - The Official Thread

[TheCracker]

We secured a new fixed rate (5yr) just last year, thankfully. We are interest-only too so the actual rate we pay is under £200 a month, which you couldn't get a 1-bed council flat for. We've been over-paying massively on it for years so we can pay it off in the next 5 years or so. But if push came to shove, we could stop the overpayments and the actual necassary payment would be easily affordable on just one wage.

 

[Touring Mars]

We secured a new fixed rate (5yr) just last year, thankfully. We are interest-only too so the actual rate we pay is under £200 a month, which you couldn't get a 1-bed council flat for. We've been over-paying massively on it for years so we can pay it off in the next 5 years or so. But if push came to shove, we could stop the overpayments and the actual necassary payment would be easily affordable on just one wage.

Not that I recommend this, but you can infact pay your mortgage using your overpayment balance if needed.

I was doing this for 6 months without realising it thanks to an error by the bank.

 

[TheCracker]

Not that I recommend this, but you can infact pay your mortgage using your overpayment balance if needed.

I was doing this for 6 months without realising it thanks to an error by the bank.

Yeah it was/is a purposeful overpayment for that very reason. It's really a remnent of our original mortgage from our first house from 20 years or so ago, when my wife had quit her job to go back to uni. We wanted the payments to be as low as possible at that time, whilst still getting on the property ladder, knowing (or hoping) that at some point in the future we could make up the difference by the time the mortgage term was up by overpaying when we could afford to. Risky, i know, but that's property ownership for you.

 

[Daz555]

We secured a new fixed rate (5yr) just last year, thankfully. We are interest-only too so the actual rate we pay is under £200 a month, which you couldn't get a 1-bed council flat for. We've been over-paying massively on it for years so we can pay it off in the next 5 years or so. But if push came to shove, we could stop the overpayments and the actual necassary payment would be easily affordable on just one wage.

I'm a little confused. You say you are interest-only on your mortgage but then you are overpaying and will pay it off in 5 years?

Thankfully, for now I'm shielded from the interest rate hikes. When I bought my first house in 1999 the interest rate was about 5% and I decided during the years of ever reducing rates to keep my repayments at the same level as when they were 5% (overpaying). Even when I moved house in 2008 and took out a new 25 year loan (around 2% at the time) I calculated the same 5% and set a fixed sum each month for my repayments. It would have all been paid off early by now, but we re-mortgaged again to build a house extension.

My mortage is under 200 grand these days but I do fear for those who bought houses in recent years with the insane house prices. I really hope we don't see mass repossessions and people stuck in houses they can barely afford to live in due to negative equity.

 

[TheCracker]

I'm a little confused. You say you are interest-only on your mortgage but then you are overpaying and will pay it off in 5 years?

Its a flexible mortgage. The fixed monthly payment pays off the interest on the capital borrowed, but the overpayments come off the balance. We've been overpaying, as in paying of chunks of the balance, for a while now and have projected that in about 5 years time, when the 25 year period is up, we should have pretty much cleared the overall balance. It's a bit like an endowment, but instead of paying a proportion from the start of the mortgage into an endowment policy, we've just been paying chunks as and when we can off the overall balance. There probably will be a shortfall at the end of the term, but as the value of the property will be substantially (again, hopefully!) more than the value it was mortgaged for, it won't really matter and it's likely that we will move again before then anyway.

 

[sirjim73]

I feel for those who bought houses in the last 14 years, who are now being sucked into difficulties not of their own causing.

There's an argument which I strongly believe, that the issue isnt actually that rates are "high" now. It is in my opinion more that they were kept at ridiculous unsustainable levels for 14 YEARS along with endless "quantitative easing" (creating more and more and more debt). And this has applied throughout the world.

We are now seeing a 14 year bubble burst (and it won't only be in house prices, but also all the other bubbles that have been created in classic cars, wine, antiques and god knows what else that people have bought while savings earned virtually 0.01% interest for 14 years). However, it's the housing bubble that matters to people who are going to be strung out to dry.

This 14 year bubble is also why the recession/depression is going to be longer and harder.

One of my concern though is that we do NOT go down the road of even more QE (which wouldnt work anyway as the issue is mainly supply side costs).

Governments and central banks in many countries have kicked the ball down the road over and over again.

If someone (anyone!) had had the guts to try to deal with some of the pain earlier it would have been less dramatic potentially.

As another aside, the last 14 years of "growth" I have long argued to be fake as it was entirely dependent on the ridiculous interest rates and QE.

If the position prior to the 2008 crash was overstated by what 10%, we are now going to ultimately see the world economy go back, in real terms, to where it was in about 2005.

Troubling times.

 

[Moglet]

I just made the mistake of reading the comments on the Lidl christmas ad. Thick white people being angry at black people being in Christmas ads has become Britain's strongest Christmas tradition. Bloody snowflakes...

My parents actually reacted like this last Christmas and it was totally bizarre to me. Their words were along the lines of "why do all adverts have to have black families or a black and white couple in them nowadays?". I couldn't convince them that the only reason they're noticing it now is because they are so used to everything only featuring white families, however they did seem to stop and think a little when I asked them how it felt to not be represented in an advert with a black family in it.

 

[UKMikey]

My five year fixed rate on the interest only mortgage on my BTL flat is up in a few months. Guess I'll be paying through the nose even if I can secure a new deal unless I raise the rent astronomically which I don't want to do.

 

[AEKara38]

I had a 95% endowment mortgage in 1990 when the BofE interest rate was 15%. I seem to remember my payments were nearly half my wage. As it was an endowment mortgage I wasn't actually paying anything off and had to remortgage in 1996. Thankfully I paid my last mortgage off in July 2021 but I do feel for those who have bought in when the interest rates were at their lowest and only now are experiencing what a rise can do to your monthly outgoings.

 

[Keef]

I think judging America's economic outlook based on what party is in power is difficult to do because the country has earned itself a spot near the top and that's not likely to change anytime soon. If it does, it'll likely be a very slow change over time. But Brexit wasn't like that. From the outside, it appears to have been an immediate, terrible change, and the people who are primarily responsible are well known and presumably proud of the problems they've caused.



Given that 95% of things that happened were bad, what sort of movement is there to reverse the change? I keep hearing that it can't be reversed. That's not a good enough answer. All evidence points to ruination so how the hell are the party who decided this still in power? Who on earth is voting for their own country's destruction? Overall the demographics vs party voting statistics seem similar to the US, but somehow the conservative party has a considerably stronger hold than in the US where it tends to waver. Are there really that many more miserable old people in the UK than young people?

 

[RedRockValley]

Given that 95% of things that happened were bad, what sort of movement is there to reverse the change? I keep hearing that it can't be reversed.

Current Labour Party (the main opposition to the Conservatives) leader Keir Starmer originally promised to re-join the EEA, the EU's single market, which would also grant us "freedom of movement" among EU/EEA countries.


He has since gone back on that pledge however, and now takes a more hardline "Brexit means Brexit" stance. People theorise this is simply him trying to gain votes from people "on-the-fence" or more patriotic older voters, and that he will find a way to sneak us back into the EEA without the media finding a way to kick the British Public™ up into a fuss... Or that he's taken a more hardline centrist stance to appease those who worship Tony Blair, and that we'll just have to deal with it.


I, for one, hope that it is just him playing dirty in order to get into power, given how much of a grip right-wing British tabloids have over this country. While I believe that fully rejoining the EU is a can of worms that we shouldn't re-open for a long while, rejoining the EEA is a no brainer - freedom of movement would return, the Northern Ireland border crisis is instantly resolved and we have way more access to trade.


So while I think we won't be able to fully reverse this with the benefits we originally negotiated when joining the EU all those decades ago, simply rejoining the EEA would solve a lot of problems while having no real downside.


EDIT: Okay, Freedom of Movement was actually a major bugbear for many Leave voters during the Brexit campaign, as they were dissatisfied (or often misled) about people from countries like Poland moving in and working cheap jobs. I personally disagree and enjoy the idea of FoM, as the idea of being able to work in any EU/EEA country I want without much red tape is appealing to me, among other things. Apologies, I don't post about politics often, moreso a lurker.

EDIT 2: Grammar error

 

[Keef]

Apologies, I don't post about politics often, moreso a lurker.

No reason to apologize, it's completely understandable that you don't fully understand how those people can be so patriotic and pro-Britain while simultaneously voting to eliminate themselves from free trade and travel opportunities. It's nonsensical. It's quite obvious that Britain's economy is not self-sustaining, and that attempts at self-sustaining economies throughout history have always ended in failure, so why they'd think to try it again simply cannot be justified.

 

[RedRockValley]

No reason to apologize, it's completely understandable that you don't fully understand how those people can be so patriotic and pro-Britain while simultaneously voting to eliminate themselves from free trade and travel opportunities. It's nonsensical. It's quite obvious that Britain's economy is not self-sustaining, and that attempts at self-sustaining economies throughout history have always ended in failure, so why they'd think to try it again simply cannot be justified.

It really is mind-boggling and very often depressing.

Again, I really hope Keir is just trying his best to come off as boring as possible, so he can get elected and slowly move us out of this nightmare that we started in 2016. He's not really got any controversies whatsoever, and the ones that the media have tried to spin have pretty much failed.

I think the general public really are starting to wake up to this country's position though. Ever since the entrancing spell Boris managed to cast over a lot of people went away, and then Liz Truss royally screwed up the pound and affected a lot of mortgages/pensions in the process, people are finally going "hang on, 12 years of these guys really haven't been good for us".

The classic British attitude of "screw you, got mine, not my problem" is finally starting to fall, I think. It's a shame that it took mortgages and pensions being affected for it to make us fully wake up to our situation, but it is what it is.

 

[Famine]

The classic British attitude of "screw you, got mine, not my problem"

English. And M4 corridor and the south-east at that.

Again, I really hope Keir is just trying his best to come off as boring as possible

He's been that dull as long as I can remember. The problem is he's perceived as weak, malleable, and slow; I couldn't tell you what he stands for, because he doesn't appear to stand for anything. On any issue he seems to wait to see what prevailing public opinion is, then sort of come down on that side unless public opinion changes.

If you're actively anti-Brexit, you cannot vote for either the government or the opposition because both are committed to it. The Liberal Democrats have a pledge to reverse it, but they're polling 11% despite the fact the two main parties are obviously useless, 48% of people didn't want Brexit and 60% of people think it was a mistake.

 

[RedRockValley]

English. And M4 corridor and the south-east at that.

He's been that dull as long as I can remember. The problem is he's perceived as weak, malleable, and slow; I couldn't tell you what he stands for, because he doesn't appear to stand for anything. On any issue he seems to wait to see what prevailing public opinion is, then sort of come down on that side unless public opinion changes.

If you're actively anti-Brexit, you cannot vote for either the government or the opposition because both are committed to it. The Liberal Democrats have a pledge to reverse it, but they're polling 11% despite the fact the two main parties are obviously useless, 48% of people didn't want Brexit and 60% of people think it was a mistake.

In all fairness, he has proposed nationalising rail and energy - not that doing that alone will suddenly fix our problems, but it's a huge step towards it... Alongside strengthening worker's rights and a major overhaul of the tax system they're currently planning out, it's not too shabby. I also very much so agree with his plans to finally wind down the fossil fuel industry and fully kickstart a Britain powered by renewables.


You're right that he does kowtow to the public opinion a little too much, which isn't always a good thing as the public have had years of misinformation projected onto them by tabloids... If he gets into power (which most likely will happen), I hope he tries to be a little more inspiring and not serve as some sort of political robot. With his current track record though, it's very easy to be pessimistic.


While it's bad we're basically only left with 2 choices nowadays, FPTP isn't exactly the only reason why the LibDems poll so badly (see betraying students by introducing tuition fees). Regardless of that though, we do desperately need Proportional Representation instead so we stop ourselves falling further into the same 2 party trap America is stuck with.

 

[Sprite]

he has proposed nationalising rail and energy - not that doing that alone will suddenly fix our problems, but it's a huge step towards it...

I don’t see this happening.

1. It will cost tax payers way too much money to reign in all the red tape, and sub sections of each industry to make a cohesive whole again.

2. The current investments being undertaken with a view of future energy generation is huge. I don’t think the interference from government will help and will more than likely stagnate this or put a kibosh on it for good.

3. We’ve already seen government ownership of a what was once a large private company go back to private hands because of cost and no willingness to actually do some good. I’m taking about Bulb Energy being taken over by the government and now going over to Octopus Energy.

4. Local councils have tried to set up their own energy firms to try and bring costs down but they quickly got swallowed up into other companies and eventually became part of the larger firms.

5. OFGEM made a complete cockup of Price Capping and regulation which started us on this path to companies going bust. All because an energy license is easy to get hold of. I’m looking at the guy from Wales who started his energy company on his own as a one man band from his own home in Cardiff. Started taking customers on but couldn’t handle it and eventually caused a huge amount of trouble for customers and companies trying to sort his mess. All because the government appointed ombudsman gives out energy licenses like sweets at Halloween.

Rail maybe slightly different but I’m sure they suffer from over-bloating of red tape and costs and a fractured infrastructure like the energy sector and the cost to tax payers will be too high, plus the back handers to MPs will be lessened and they won’t want that.

The only way I see this happening and it’s a big if, is a party taking its time and addressing each part slowly and methodically to lessen costs and chaos. But we know that won’t happen.

 

[AEKara38]

Maggie did a great job when she sold off Britain. Made sure her changes were irreversible

 

[UKMikey]

Maggie did a great job when she sold off Britain. Made sure her changes were irreversible

Someone should have told Sid.

 

[merseyxshore]

Sounds like a case of "watches The Thick Of It once..."

 

[Touring Mars]

 

[Sprite]

At least we have some rain today!! Spanning coast to coast and Scotland to the South.

Apparently despite the rather wet few weeks we’ve had, levels in reservoirs are not back to decent levels yet.

 

[Roo]

At least we have some rain today!! Spanning coast to coast and Scotland to the South.

Apparently despite the rather wet few weeks we’ve had, levels in reservoirs are not back to decent levels yet.

View attachment 1210071

In fairness we - at least in the south - had a couple of months without a drop of rain on top of the record temperatures, so a fortnight of wet weather isn't going to be enough to top up heavily depleted reservoirs.

 

[Sprite]

In fairness we - at least in the south - had a couple of months without a drop of rain on top of the record temperatures, so a fortnight of wet weather isn't going to be enough to top up heavily depleted reservoirs.

Yeh, same up here. Everything was hammered. I’ll take a look today as I go over the Pennines but my local butcher did the run last week and he said it was still way down.

I think we’re going to need wet weather for most of the winter to get back to decent levels for next year. It’s quite worrying, if we don’t then we start the year at a disadvantage.

 

[merseyxshore]

Just another day on Normal Island.

 

[Sprite]

Yeh, same up here. Everything was hammered. I’ll take a look today as I go over the Pennines but my local butcher did the run last week and he said it was still way down.

Well, Scammonden looked low but now too shabby. My friend who was driving us said it’s much better than it has been for a while as we passed it. So hopefully all our other reservoirs look similar.

 

[robisme]

 

[HenrySwanson]

Enoch Powell has been popping up in various tweets after the latest census results, mostly in reference to the fact that the white percentage of the population has decreased (and, as erroneously stated by Farage that London and other major cities are now "minority white") and I think the best way to teach about how he was wrong (mostly) in his "Rivers of Blood" speech is to show this video in high school history:



I'd also encourage people to watch Rageh Omaar's documentary on whether he was "right" from over a decade ago, or at least read his thoughts here

Something that also needs to be challenged is this idea that he was vastly intellectually superior to his peers, and possibly that his views should be held in higher esteem because of it. There's a great article about this:

They say Enoch Powell had a fine mind. Hmm

Enoch Powell has been in many minds this month. It’s the 50th anniversary of his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and I took part in a BBC radio programme discussing this — and hearing the speech itself read superbly by the actor, Ian McDiarmid. The small campaign against the very broadcasting of...

www.spectator.co.uk

Yet there’s been a widespread popular view that, agree or disagree with him, the man had a fine mind, a fastidious regard for facts, and courage.

I have doubted all three ever since a personal conversation with him at an awkward time for both of us.

 

[shadow0460]

This thread is for discussion on any topic relating to Britain and it's foreign policies. Use this to criticize or support British leadership, British policy and British action.

Rule #1 - You WILL NOT violate the AUP. No swearing, no personal attacks, no broad sweeping generalizations about Americans, Arabs, Muslims, Christians or any group. It will not be tolerated and offenders may be warned by a mod. Repeat offenders may be subject to administrative discipline up to and including banning. (This is of course at the discretion of the Mods or Admins and I have no say in it. Same goes for Rule #2

Rule #2 - You WILL NOT post anything that even remotely suggests that people -especially civilians, regardless of nationality, race or religion should be injured or killed. Your post may be modified by a mod or admin to remove the offending remark and you may be warned, plain and simple.

If things get out of hand in this thread, it will be locked for at least 1 day, maybe more depending on the offence and the offending posts reported and left to be dealt with by a Mod.

Highly recommended: Make whatever point you wish, but be prepared to support your argument with facts. Opinion is not fact therefore needs to be backed up with facts.

Highly recommended: Be polite. Political discussion is often highly charged and personal attacks are always a danger. It is not against the AUP to be rude to someone or even critisize them, but if you cross that line you should be ready for the consequences which could be a warning or worse.

Discuss!!

Ross

I didn't read much of the thread, but I gotta say this: ya'll have some impressive military technology and I'm glad we have you as an ally.
Occasionally we get one or two British folks who move to Oklahoma, they are always nothing short of uber respectful, friendly, and have no trouble speaking their minds. We get some Aussies here, too. They're usually younger and where British folks conduct themselves in a professional manner, the Aussies are all popular sanguine, willing to laugh with us, and have a very warm personality.
I spent two weeks in Australia, and I felt like family there. I've never been to the UK, but I'd love to visit someday.

 

[UKMikey]

I'd also encourage people to watch Rageh Omaar's documentary on whether he was "right" from over a decade ago, or at least read his thoughts here

Certainly, it is a challenge for today's politicians.

There is no point them sitting around saying Enoch Powell was a small-minded racist bigot.

If there are people who still evoke his name and ideas, we have to tackle the problem and ask why.

As a first-generation immigrant I don't feel like pulling up the drawbridge. People came over here to fill an economic gap using the free movement they enjoyed under the EU. The Poles have largely returned to Poland where the standard of living is now higher. Immigration is everywhere and even British people work overseas.

If the country's going to the dogs, immigration isn't the root cause and if people are too ignorant to understand that it's an economic problem, not a cultural one then yes, we should address the problem of there being a lack of supply rather than blaming our problems on convenient foreign scapegoats. That's what helped to get us into the current Brexit mess which is "the problem" as far as I can see.

Enoch was right... far right.

 

[UKMikey]

Meanwhile, in 2022... select committees appear to be far removed from the grandstanding theatre of Commons debates that we see on the nightly news if this grilling of home secretary Suella Braverman by her fellow Tory MP Tim Loughton is anything to go by.

He's asking her to outline the safe and legal routes by which asylum seekers can enter the UK legally from other countries (as her parents did in the 1960s). From the sound of Cruella's flustered and evasive lack of a concrete reply, there no longer seem to be any.