cartimandua51

I must admit I've done it with Mormons; who, being white male proselytising Americans as a rule, are fair game, but all the JVs I used to get were very polite, very black ladies usually accompanied by an immaculately turned out five-year old little girl of enchanting innocence and I'm afraid I just couldn't do it!

Steve - how often do you invite Jehovah's Witnesses into your house for a nice, rational discussion? If never, WHY don't you just put Injin on Ignore? If he /she says anything interesting it will get quoted by some other sucker who hasn't yet learnt....

People can only plan on what they know (or think they know, but let's not get all philosophical about theory of knowledge here). The boomer generation of women were told they would retire at 60 and paid into pensions accordingly. The Gov't know about the demographics by 1970 - the one overwhelming thing about demograhics is that the numbers of people already born doesn't change!); if they had said then that, sorry, we're going to have to raise the retirement age to 65 then women would have worked longer and/or paid more into their pensions. You do, however, have to remember the different social mores - the sexual revolution might have started in 1963, but it wasn't until about, say, 1980 that girls starting work seriously expected to be working for nearly all their lives. The "married woman's stamp" in Nat. Ins. wasn't ended till 1977 and then only for new entrants - some women are still paying it and get no pension in their own right. Right up until the 1988 Taxes Act husband and wife were considered one person and that person was the husband; so any tax overpaid by the wife was refunded to the husband! Not a set a mores calculated to inspire independent retirement planning and investment. Also up until at least the late 1970s it was very difficult for a woman to get a morgage without a male guarantor. People tend to forget just how much things have changed for women over the last 30 odd years; less of the slagging off granny, please! She had a whole different set of problems to contend with.

Reflecting, I suppose, the fact that the really useful stuff such as vaccinations aginst childhood illness is (relatively) dirt cheap, while intensive personal care is VERY expensive.

Would it not be more accurate to say they have been concentrated into the hands of two minorities - money (joyously) into the hands of the elite, and leisure (miserably, in many / most cases) into the hands of the previous manual working classes who are now unemployable? The mistake of the 70s was to think that everyone would work a 3 or 4 day week and spend the rest involved in life-enhancing Art and Cultural activities - hideously naive in hindsight, but I can remember the articles in the Guardian and its ilk well.

Well, the record is Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 aged 122. Born 1875 before any of the modern medical advances. if you take that as the maximum, then no, we aren't (as far as we yet know!) However, I've done a lot of family history research involving trawling the deaths indexes and as far as my researches went (mostly, 1810 up to the 1920s) very, very few reached 100. You could look through pages and pages of the indexes (about 200 names to a page) without seeing a single centenarian, and very few over 80. What there are, are dozens and dozens of childhood deaths. My own gg grandfather is a case in point - 13 children, only three of whom outlived him, and only one by more than a year. So a bit of truth both ways - far more people are living to the "normal" maximum of about 80; a few more to the extremes, but the average has been massively uplifted by the fact that 50% of children no longer die before the age of 5. I did read somewhere (don't ask me to quote a source, it's lost in the mists of memory) that if all medical care was withdrawn after the age of 5, average lifespans would only drop by about three months!

ScaredEitherWay, on 01 June 2010 - 09:11 PM, said: That living room is better than I have ever seen/been in in real life ... I doubt I'll ever have one like it. Bashir Aden, husband of Nasra Warsame, is shown sitting in his wife's rented home, where she lives with seven of their children I've just read the article again, and what strikes me is that there isn't a WORD quoted from the bloke. This is the Daily Mail; the furniture in that living room would have cost, what? £1000 / £1500 max? I wouldn't be at all surprised if the DM had offered, purely out of the goodness of their corporate heart, of course, to remove whatever tacky ex-Salvation Army furniture was there in exchange for his consent to sit there on his nice free furniture looking happy. Result - a blood pressure rise of the sort so beloved by DM readers, and happy circulation figures continue. Cheap at the price.

Merely that the post to which I was replying said As soon as somebody enters the benefits systems the benefits should be based for life on the number of kids at that point. With all taxation / benefit systems the devil is in the detail.

Er, this would imply that a young couple who were on benefits for (say) six months during a recession, went back to work and after 10 years working had a couple of kids then lost his/ their jobs would not be eligible for any help for the children???

Ooh, I remember that, too! and the rather dubious "Holiday Lets" for three months at a time when the LL refused to rent to you unless you signed a declaration that your main home was elsewhere..... where there's a regulation, there's a loophole....

I've heard some of the more cynical social workers express the belief that between about 5 and 15% of adults (excluding the very old or very sick) are basically incompetent at anything more complex than digging fields. In many societies they are looked after by family, or die from neglect. Our society has little call for field diggers, (even fruit picking only employs a small fraction of the workforce required 200 years ago) and is fragmented to the extent that family can't or won't provide them with basic shelter so the State has to chosse between letting them fend for themselves or taking the social consequences. I'm not sure about common decency when applied to what the Victorians called the Undeserving Poor; I do agree with those who prefer to think of it as protection money. I don't think that people are willing to see dead babies in the gutters as happened in the 17th century; or child beggars of The Little Matchgirl variety. If the adults are feckless, the children will be the first to suffer ( and whipping them off the streets and into orphanages has been tried before without notably good results.) Adoption? most would-be adoptees want a baby or small child; not a semi-feral 9 year-old. While you can tinker at the edges (and housing benefit is an obvious place to start - if someone hasn't worked in 5 years they don't need to live in Central London!!) I think we are stuck with benefits payments as the lesser evil for general social balance.

Go down to W H Smiths and buy a magazine called "self-build" or near offer. Will be in lifestyle or DIY area probably. More information than you know what to do with.

As a newbie, you might have missed the links to the secret diary of an estate agent which gives it to you from his point of view- like any blog, some entries are better than others (and some of the current ones are in the doldrums, like the market) but some of the archive stuff is priceless. http://www.agentsdiary.blogspot.com/ Enjoy! (No, I'm in no way connected, but I follow it with amusement)

Looking back to the practices of the 1970s / early eighties, the people who would suffer most would be families, and youngish couples. The major fear of LLs back before ASTs was the fact that it took well over a year to evict a tenant, even if they weren't paying any rent. This was especially the case where there were children, so LLs discriminated heavily against anyone who already had, or looked of an age to have children. For students & young singles it wasn't so bad - the accommodation might be substandard, but you could get it; if you were employed, your employer might sign a "company let" which gave the LL security, but otherwise... The other thing which would immediately reappear would be the "Resident Landlord" phenomenon - no (peacetime) legislation has ever forced a LL to share his main home with anyone they didn't want to. Watch out for couples suddenly deciding to "separate" and reserving a bedroom in their BTL for themselves. You might argue that tenants wouldn't take the property under those conditions, but if even, say, 5% of BTL properties were taken off the market that would lead to massive shortfalls in some areas. I remember lots of family-to-a-room situations in some places I or my friends lived in in the 70s. Any change of this variety needs pre-planning! You cant rely on it triggering a HPC - many BTL LLs have been doing this since the early 90s and not all of them have MEWed the equity, so they might prefer to leave properties empty (happened a LOT in the 60s & 70s) until the market eventually recovers - or the Law changes back again.

Does it matter? I've seen a fair number of charts comparing the long-term returns on investing in shares, property or cash deposits (usually showing shares as the best return; though of course it depends which particular 20 or 30 year period you chose). the key thing is that people have access to cash if they choose to realise their investments, so they don't need State support.

Are you old enough to remember what private renting was like back in the 70s & early 80s? I am, and a lot of it wasn't pretty. One thing the introduction of ASTs did was to cause a massive expansion in supply of reasonable quality rented housing. Some people would benefit; just as some people who have been in their properties since before 1988 benefit from having regulated tenancies, but the longer- term effect would be a considerable reduction in supply for the young and/or vulnerable. BTLs would tend to divide into the big corporations who cherry-pick company-guaranteed lets and the bottom-feeders who are the inheritors of the Rachmans and he-of-Dutch-extraction who had better not be named. The Law, whatever the theoretical criminal sanctions, is about as much use as a chocolate frying pan if you are beaten up on your street when your Landlord can produce a dozen impeccable witnesses to prove he was 200 miles away. At least most of the small-scale BTL LLs today are largely inept rather than actively vicious. Of course there should be more social housing for families; but sticking controls on the private sector before these exist will cause more problems than it solves.

"we don't want to harm families that are heading towards retirement who have actually saved." I may be seeing too much into these words, but I wonder if the subtext might be that they are about to means test state pensions, so having retirees with savings would be a good thing for the government?

Well, perhaps not in Anglo-Saxon times - they didn't go a lot on big cities. But certainly from about 1400 London was notorious for sucking in desperate indigents and hopefuls from the countryside; most of them died from the horrendous conditions, but a few made it. Dick Whittington (minus cat, probably!) had a kernel of truth to it.

You need to see the CAB and/or a solicitor asap for damage limitation. Don't put anything in writing without having it looked at first. In the meantime, post your letter on Landlordzone - as their name implies, there are a lot of experienced landlords & solicitors there.

The answer to (1) is on the Bank of England's own website : 'Does the Bank of England have shareholders? If the Bank does have shareholders who are they?' The Bank of England is the central bank of the whole of the UK and was established as a corporate body by Royal Charter under the Bank of England Act 1694. The Bank was nationalised on 1 March 1946, and gained operational independence to set interest rates in 1997. The Bank is a public sector institution wholly-owned by the government - the entire capital of the Bank is, in fact, held by the Treasury solicitor on behalf of HM Treasury. When any post contains the words "Zionist" or "New World Order" ( or, for that matter, "little green men from Mars") be wary. Treat it like Jehovah's Witnesses on your doorstep.

The crucial date here is 28 February 1997. You say 13 years - was it before or after this date? If after - your LL can't enforce this condition, and you should (politely) tell him or the LA so. If before, it's a bit more complicated - you could try the gov't guide http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/pdf/138289.pdf; but I'd get down to the CAB. Your LL isn't French is he? French LLs can't evict in winter; perhaps he's getting confused!

How about trying to tackle the benefits culture at an early age. We've all seen programmes on TV where children are helping support their family, why not here? Instead of pushing up the school leaving age, make it dependant on passing an exam on basic literacy, numeracy, IT skills with a minimum age reduced to (say) 13. Result - school-hating kids have a strong motivation to learn. How many chav 17 year olds have to be persuaded / goaded into passing their driving test??? Remove most of the restrictions on employing under-18s ( subject to some controls to stop the Karen Matthews of this world putting their daughters on the streets at 10 ) and, crucially, kids income does not count as family income for benefits purposes. Result would be a lot of kids earning cash in all sorts of ways (kids can be amazingly enterprising) and, most importantly, getting into the habit of working. They would not be entitled to benefits in their own right until, say 18 or 21. Side benefit would be that those kids who DO want to learn aren't disrupted by the refuseniks. You'd need a back-up adult eduction system (such as thrived up til WW2) so that those early leavers who later decided to imrove their education could do so, but this would be cheaper than keeping unwilling teenagers in scool.

Nothing much! Can't be arsed to do the the exact arithmetic, but getting back 127.50 for every 100 put in, at the end of 5 years is (I think!) about 4.6% p.a. You didn't think it was 27% p.a. for each of the next 5 years??

Yes, in the sense that it will apply to sales after it's announced; No, if you mean there might be some sort of apportionment over time . The sum will be (basically!) sale price minus purchase price minus annual allowance = taxable gain; Not clear yet whether this will be added to your income & therefore taxed at your marginal rate (good for pensioners on basic rate, bad for the high-earners), or taxed at a flat 40% or whatever. Both systems have been in use in the last 20 years.

1. Occupied exclusively by full-time students = council tax exempt. Simples 2. Gas & electricity on prepayment meter OR, if students occupying as a group, bills in their name 3. Agree with you on that!