Live Peasant

In Salisbury, a development was going under the Charles Church brand as Sarum Meadows. 1-6 bed homes. The pipes and road work is in but no homes being built as yet. The site is now Persimmon, Sarum Views and only 1-4 beds being built. How common would it be for a site to change developer even within the same group? Also, the redesign must cost a packet. Given another Persimmon development down the road 2 bed starters likely to be 260k, 3 beds @ 300k 4 beds @ 350k. As noted on an MSE thread, there is an airfield, a TA rifle range, Salisbury soccer club and a business park all within 300 meters of the development so the noise is never ending.

Absolutely, my parents had a sale agreed last month but the 'buyers' pulled out less than two weeks later. 60k shortfall in the mortgage - Guess what, 60k is 15% of the asking price.

According to Blanchflower (treasury select committee hearing in March), the figures show that total hours worked are 'softening'.

Given that 21% of FTB mortgages issued in 2007 are interest only with no specified repayment vehicle (so probably maxed out LTV-wise), I think that the figures begin to look possible.

But, the show must go on....

As part of proving his show was live. Held the paper up long enough to make sure you read the headline.

Jules Holland just held it up on live tv - quality

And channel 4 has just discovered this exclusive what a joke...

Can't see any dig GOM but point taken.

Absolutely.

I think the problem is two fold. The first is that the stats don't represent the truth in that we look at averages whereas in reality the debt is skewed towards a significant minority of the population. The second problem is that on HPC.co.uk we sometimes get carried away with our own propaganda. We are almost willing 90% of the population to have unsustainable debt because it reinforces our views that armageddon is on the way. We want a crash so badly that we don't really get it when we find somebody living within their means.

There is a 10 year consumer recession on the way, of that I have no doubt. Personally, I don't give a shit if an overblown coffe shop chain goes under or Next or anybody else. The recession will be in those areas that are based on froth. Premiership tickets and replica kits, nail salons, BMW X5s and the tat that props up our spiv culture. The rest of us will carry on as before.

Henry Average household debt in the UK is ~ £9,052 (excluding mortgages). This figure increases to £21,051 if the average is based on the number of households who actually have some form of unsecured loan. Average household debt in the UK is ~ £56,708 (including mortgages). Average owed by every UK adult is ~ £29,747 (including mortgages). This just reinforces my point - The majority have little debt outside a mortgage and those mortgages are relatively small. Those who have splurged have done so big style - those 250k - 300k IO mortgages will come to reap the 5-10% of the mortgage universe and these are the same group who have 30k on credit cards. I have little personal debt, my old man has about 10k left on a mortgage with no other persoanl debt, my brother has a 180k mortgage on a flat in London. So the average says 60k of debt each but in reality only one of us is carrying the debt burden.

You Guys...are you not taking the doomsday scenarios a little too far? Things may well get a little tough for some as this thing shakes itself out, but for the majority who haven't got themselves into serious debt and massive mortgages, life will continue much as before. We talk on this site as if 90% of the country has a 6x salary mortgage with 200k mew but in reality it's very few. I rent, have a 6year old motor and have about £200 outstanding balance on a credit card which gets paid each month. My pleasures are Mountaineering and Windsurfing, hardly, the stuff of legend. I don't have an extravagent lifestyle and if the time comes to batten down the hatches slightly then so be it.

What's caused the increase?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jh...3/31/do3101.xml It occurred to me over the weekend, as the almost unbelievable shambles continued into a fourth day, that Heathrow's Terminal 5 is really a perfect metaphor for Brownism: enormous amounts of money having been lavished on an over-hyped project which fails spectacularly to provide a workable service. Gordon Brown was the Chancellor who repeatedly boasted that he had put an end to Boom and Bust When the television cameras were actually banned from T5 to prevent yet more mortifying live reports featuring interviews with livid passengers, that pretty much sealed it. Not only did the problem itself seem characteristically Brownite, but the solution to it - a would-be news blackout - was true to the formula as well. Rather like Gordon Brown's approach to the economic crisis - if you can't solve it, deny it - this was the public relations of utter desperation. But somehow the fury could not be contained: samizdat reports of elderly people being forced to sleep on plastic chairs, and snatched photographs of luggage irretrievably lost in unsorted mountains leaked out of the limbo of Heathrow's state of the art terminal into which thousands of blameless people were being sucked, only emerging hours later. And just as the reality of their fate could not be hidden, so the financial reality for the rest of Britain could not be blustered away by Mr Brown's "confident" rhetoric. Something has snapped. I feel it in the air just as surely as I did in 1979 when the population of Britain decided, quite suddenly, that it had had enough. There is now - as there was then - an almost palpable anger, a shift of concrete significance in some very fundamental assumptions about how the Government operates, and even what people want from government generally. Whatever happened to all those people who used to say that they would be Happy To Pay More Tax? Remember them? They were a notable feature of virtually every opinion poll for a good 10 years. Mr Brown has, I suspect, been relying heavily on the HTPMT brigade to sustain him through his years as PM just as he believed he could rely on them as Chancellor. Now, 67 per cent of people are telling the pollsters they believe they are paying too much tax. The rest of them are presumably lying, or else they are living on benefits. Earth to Gordon Brown: people are willing to be morally blackmailed into believing that they should give limitless amounts of their money to the state only when they have more of it than they need. So long as they are financially secure, and believe the good times will go on forever, they can be made to feel that they are personally responsible for all the social ills of the country and that the only way to seek redemption is by permitting the Government to redistribute an ever-larger proportion of what they earn. And didn't Mr Brown tell them in every Budget speech, that the good times would go on forever? He was the Chancellor who repeatedly boasted that he had put an end to Boom and Bust, who had (a favourite phrase) "entrenched stability" in the British economy once and for all. If things were going well for you now, they would go well always: surely the least you could do to show your gratitude, for the permanent prosperity which he had guaranteed you, was to let him take a lot of that eternal supply of wealth and give it to those he thought deserving. But the guilt trip stops when the security runs out. The fatuity of the essential Brown premise - that stability can ever be "entrenched" in a dynamic free market economy - has been blown to bits. No one will ever believe Mr Brown's assurances again, nor are they likely to believe that governments spending more money (and yet more money) is the answer to the problems of health and education, let alone of social dysfunction. That theory has been tested to destruction. Even ministers in this Government - and, dare I say it, Mr Brown himself - seem to have realised this. That is why they are engaged in a sudden, disconcerting conversion to the polar opposite view of public services: Alan Johnson's talk (and it may end up being no more than that) of allowing chronically ill patients to "purchase" their own healthcare on a voucher system is a startling admission of defeat from the people who were committed to the ideology of "the state knows what is best for you". But it is not just tax-and-spend economics that has exhausted its credibility: the "we are all guilty" theory of crime and anti-social behaviour is cracking as well. Those of you who saw the last episode of the BBC drama series Ashes to Ashes in which the old-fashioned folk hero copper Gene Hunt confronts a fictionalised Lord Scarman could not have failed to note the explicit political lesson. When "Lord Scarman" delivers himself of a classic Left-liberal diatribe against Hunt's policing tactics, describing the harassment of "racial and sexual minorities" as a disease threatening our society, Hunt replies: "In 20 years' time, when the streets are awash with filth, and you're too frightened to come out of your posh Belsize Park house after dark, don't come running to me." Whereupon, the entire police station applauds - even the time-travelling woman officer who is a visitor from our own decade. Popular culture tends to sense these mood changes long before politicians do. So where does this leave the Conservatives, currently sitting smugly on a decent lead in the polls but still tremulously holding back from any real philosophical break with a dying political consensus? In danger on two fronts: one is that the Brownies in their desperation will jump into the radical territory that should now be the natural ground of the Opposition, and the other is appearing to be as out of touch with popular anger and frustration as the Government, thereby leaving the country in despair of any real solutions. I was at a dinner last week with someone who had been closely involved with the Republican resurgence after eight years of a Democratic White House. Tactful as he was about the Conservative leadership, he felt he had to warn the party that an opposition could not win an election simply by "not blowing it". Risks had to be taken: a positive account of your plans had to be offered. And I would add - if there is a rising tide of public rage and exasperation, you should ride it to victory, and not be complicit with the deception that has provoked it.

You know what they say about Oxbridge grads - Like lighthouses in the desert - Very bright and f*ck all use.

A mods gone through the comments and removed some of the more colourful responses.

I thought you'd prefer a nicely presented unit with good potential for conversion to an IPv6 at a later date. After all, the market only ever goes up. That loopback address is so 1970s. By the way, the goat thing was the funniest post I've read in ages, up there with the donkeys.

Mine was in this morning. Couldn't believe it when I saw what had been added since

You don't want a 127.0.0.1. You want a nice 10.10.10.10 , can I interest you in a mask sir? Will 255.0.0.0 suffice? Oh I see, the goat has one already.

That is slightly random. What was the subject of your email?

Dammit - almost there. Give it another 3-4 weeks. Forced selling due to unemployment is the key now according to that lass. Blanchflower in the Parliamentary oversight commitee all but admitted that employment figures were softening.

In the reporter vt

This is it - proper bear food. Good old Ray Boulger squirming.... and some tw@t estate agent called Bonnet still trying to spin it +ve