Entertainment For Lively Minds
Small fit of pique
I hear a lot lately about how "Britain has lived beyond its means" and "dipped into housing equity to fund a consumer lifestyle". It almost sounds as if everyone has been remortgaging every 24 months so they could go out and buy flatscreen TVs, holidays in Florida and Ford Focus Zetecs.
Alternatively, some of us have dipped into housing equity to upgrade and maintain property (to the tune of nearly £30k in my case - so it goes with a flat in a 100+ year old tenement with no central heating or proper kitchen and a hole in the communal roof), or to keep managing through the downtimes in a service industry that couldn't provide a consistent living.
Being skint in 2011 may be my own fault for lacking foresight, not retraining earlier or persisting stubbornly with a dysfunctional area of work (mea culpa) but we haven't all spunked our notional property gains on gewgaws. Mind you, a significant number of people have - and if they hadn't the UK economy would have ground to a halt long before the 2008/09 recession.
#GrumpySaturday
- More from Glenbervie.
- Login or register to post comments
-
just remember that those who keep saying:
"Britain has lived beyond its means"
"dipped into housing equity to fund a consumer lifestyle"
etc
...were those who started the whole thing off 30 years ago - and would've done nothing differently in the meantime - despite their perennial scapegoatism.
Their mantra does get rather wearying after a while but - given the absence of any objective media commentary - you can only remind yourself of the truth: they started it in the first place, and wouldn't have changed a thing.
Furthermore, given their inherent priorities - they will only make matters worse for most of us.
short memories
Politicians rely on us having short memories, so that they can say what they like for short term gain confident that we will forget it or they can spin it away in the future. Tories criticised new Labour for not deregulating Banks enough, and goaded Gordon Brown for not spending when we had a budget surplus (as did his own party).
OK, I'm a lefty but I still find it hard that a bunch of people rich with (mainly) inherited wealth spend so much time and effort telling the poor that it is all their fault and they should not have believed the honeyed lies of politicians, bankers and marketing men.
In our case we have spent maybe 80 grand on our house in 8 years (15 on the roof, 30 on a kitchen extension and central heating etc.). We have horrible debts but it didnt go up my nose, or even into my liver. The house has not gone up enough to pay for that - but it is a nice house. Shame we are moving next year.
Britain has been sleepwalking.
It's allowed a landslide government to waste the opportunity to make radical change to the country for the better, and has now (re-)elected a bunch of silver spoon millionaires and their odious friends to line their own pockets while blaming their foolish predecessors for the fiscal tightening, never mind the fact that the previous bunch already had their hands on the thumbscrews, but didn't want to turn them quite so fast. If that's not pissing away the last 20 years, I don't know what is. This country has been so complacent and stupid it's beyond belief, but it has little to do with plasma screens and overseas holidays, those have just been the carrots to encourage complacency.
I could quite happily have strangled that
tory pillock on QT the other night when he trotted out the usual 'we're all in this together' bollocks. I actually thought the firefighter who challenged him might have