awkwardturtle

Well obviously the minister for transport can't be held responsible for transport related matters. I suspect that if the post were held by an MP flying a different coloured flag the competency of civil servants would suddenly become vanishingly insignificant to you. Grayling is hopelessly inept, with an unfortunate knack of failing upwards.

Are halifax figures inflation adjusted? Is this actually a real terms drop?

Ask yourself the question, would you rather pay higher taxes for a vice, or receive no subsidy for health care related to said vice? I imagine emphysema isn’t cheap.

Agreed, hence all the props. At some point it's a false economy though, the higher house prices are the less productive we are as a nation. Better that HMRC pulls in taxes from thriving businesses and the rising wages of individuals than from house market manipulation.

This is hopefully just semantics, I probably should've used resident rather than citizen. My suggestion (although unclear) was that foreign investors should be discouraged. I have no problem with forgien born residents buying houses here. In other words I disagree with the Thailand model. I don't see why Londoners (I'm not one) looking for a place to live, should have to compete on a global market with Chinese investment firms when new high rises go up in the city. Incidentally, prices pushed up in London obviously ripple out which is where my bitterness arises from.

It has to be said that this self perpetuating logic is what keeps prices high. "Can't go wrong with bricks n mortar" you could say the same of any valuable globally traded commodity though - until confidence falls. Make it prohibitively expensive for foreign buyers to buy property here. Any that do, should get taxed heavily which benefits the natives. A trade war on property if you will. Why should citizens have to compete on a global market for a domestic (in every sense of the word) asset.

As if there weren't enough comparison websites, I just spotted a national TV ad for the estate agent equivalent of gocompare. Admittedly it was moderately less offensive but still, what's the point? It seems to rate agents by using average listed time and valuation accuracy. I tried it and of course, you have to enter more personal details before they'll reveal the names of the agents. They say it's because they're "not allowed to show the names and fees publicly" which is clearly, manure. I really do wonder what their business model is here. Do they expect people to pay for a little bit of data aggregation offering 'insight' into a local market, which people are more than likely going to be very familiar with already. Is this symptomatic of an over inflated market which is now spawning valueless satellite businesses?

For as long as debt is too high? What worries me is that they've found a button that 'works' (qe). The absence of a crash in Japan makes me think this is the perpetual state of things. They keep injecting that canary with epinephrine, meanwhile we're all still entering the mine to work.

It's not tricky to look this stuff up instead of wildly guessing. "There were 32.34 million people in work, 197,000 more than for October to December 2017 and 396,000 more than for a year earlier." Which takes the figure to 4.6% of working population.

There are roughly 1.5 million people employed by the NHS across the UK. Thats 2.2% of the UK's 66.5M people.

This. His last budget was as full as a toys r us car park. He's holding on to all the goodies for another 3/4 years.

Looks like changes to welsh SDLT may have brought purchases over 180K forward, perhaps contributing to that rise? It certainly will have propped up already weak volumes.

...and the billion quid to the DUP to keep themselves in power in the first place.

By this logic you should be celebrating all of the benefits claimants at the lower end, who maximise their help from the state by gaming the system. You know, the kind of people channel 5 likes to put on their poverty porn programming schedule. I suspect you don't have quite the same level of empathy for them as you expect others to have for you. I also suspect, that you will spectacularly fail to associate your underpayments with an underfunded public service. The next time you have to wait in hospital for an extended length of time because it is understaffed to discharge you promptly. The next time the police are unable to help you recover stolen possessions due to lack of resources. When you're asked to contribute to school trips because the school doesn't have the budget to cover it. When the state pension age rises again. I guarantee you won't think of the contribution you should've made when you're complaining about it down the pub, it'll be someone else's fault. It'll be government mismanagement, or 'benefits scroungers', it won't be you, 'cause you're entitled to that money, right? The world has wronged you and you deserve recompense.

On Android here, I've been getting an invalid cert error intermittently for the past few days. It complains it's not a trusted root, no problems with other sites. It clears without me doing anything, no restart, no cache clean it just goes away after an hour or so.