The problem with Labour is that they want to spend their way out of the recession but that will just be increasing the deficit for future generations.

We need to stop foreign aid and paying Brussels until we are clear of debt - simples !

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Lets be careful out there !

the trouble with Labour they are still in 1926 and need to move on, the plan to draw in all the wealth and share it out equal, then once they have spent theirs , to repeat the exercise. just dont work.

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Its not always the biggest and the bestest, its them that make the least mistakes.

Pam points out that when the £10 Christmas bonus was introduced in 1972 it compared with the spending power of £98 today, that represents a currency devaluation to one tenth of the value 1972 Great British Pound (GBP) through the application of year-on-year Government sponsored inflation. So one GBP today has the purchasing power of 10 Pence in 1972.


This table lists the average mortgage rates from 1939 through to 2009:
http://www.bsa.org.uk/docs/statisticspd ... trates.pdf


The above table shows an October 1972 new mortgage rate of 8.5%, rising to 9.35% by March 1973, and to 11% by July 1973. The same table shows the average mortgage rate had been reduced to 3.2% by the second quarter of 2011. A young relative of mine has currently been offered a new mortgage with a variable interest currently at 2.5%.

I appreciate that asking prices for houses today has increased a lot since 1972, but a very large proportion of that apparent price increase is due primarily to Government sponsored inflation/currency devaluation. So the asking prices for homes today are not nearly as bad as they first appear.

If we also take current very low mortgage rates into account then house buyers today are not nearly as disadvantaged as they believe they are.

Now compare the standard and quality of homes offered for sale in 1972 with those on the market today, it is rather like comparing a go-cart with a Rolls Royce. A house purchased in 1972 would be a very much barer property that what is expected by today's house purchaser. Fitted kitchens; fitted bedrooms; en-suite bedrooms; central heating; maintenance-free windows, doors, general exteriors; fitted carpet/floor coverings; utility rooms; sophisticated lighting; high speed broadband connection; multiple car parking space; etc.etc. are all on the list of current buyer's expectations. So if we consider that the asking price of a home today may be a little higher than the equivalent inflation adjusted cost of a home in 1972; today’s buyer is getting a lot more quality than a 1972 buyer – and at a very much lower mortgage rate. So today's pensioners are not the wealthy property barons worthy of punishment that many young people today would believe they are.

Now if we consider the general quality of life a young person in 2012 expects as a right, and compare that with a 1972 home buyer, we again see very large differences. Today’s young people expect to have internet phones; Sky TV; a car with air-conditioning and all the toys - SATNAVs; an endless supply of designer clothes; several bottles of wine per week; foreign holidays; restaurant meals as routine, expensive coffee shops; games machines; unlimited expensive entertainments, at home and in public. And when things don't go as expected, the young today have been conditioned to rely upon the State/taxpayer to bail them out. All these expectations cost money, many of them on unnecessary monthly direct debit payments that the young are all too reluctant to sacrifice in order to save and buy a home of their own. Whereas a 1972 house buyer was more prepared to make deep personal sacrifices in order to make a home purchase affordable.

The young today have been raised to believe they have an automatic right to the good life without making any personal sacrifices. We have raised a largely 'me-me' instant gratification generation that is long on rights and short on responsibility.

The current economic situation is a reality check, a turning back of the clock, that is going to cause a lot of pain right across the whole of society. The young, who have been raised to expect instant gratification the moment they leave school with a bag-full of A* graded A Levels; with many of those grades in Mickey Mouse subjects that the older generation just can't equate with reality, have been set-up by the political elite to become the new angry storm-troopers. Unachievable expectations of the young are going to encourage many young people to turn against the older generation and make claims on the life-long earned assets of the responsible older generation – the signs are already there to see. This whole sorry situation has been deliberately engineered by the political elite as part of their plan to weaken society and prepare it for absorption into the Globalist New World Order, where only the political elite 'have all the answers'.

The older, prudent, wiser, and responsible generation has to be devalued, impoverished, made of no account, removed from influence, so that the New World Order program can be fully implemented. Those old-fashioned standards of integrity, decency, prudence, and even God-fearing Christianity, have to be removed. Before the darkness can fully prevail, the lights have to be extinguished.

A next political step in this program is very likely to be the lowering of the voting age to 16, where the angry unemployed and disadvantaged young can 'hopefully' outnumber the older wiser voter.

Some very good points Westonman and ones which I will respond to in detail as soon as my conjunctivitis clears up and I can look at the screen for more than 10 seconds.

Houses built today are of a much inferior quality than say Victorian housing stock. Whilst they may be better insulated as per building regulations they are by and large described as 'shoe boxes'. Very small rooms and 'pokey gardens'. My mum had a two bedroom house on the Estate at Glencoe Road and that fitted this description to a 'T'.

On the other side of the coin, insulations grants or low cost materials are available to the general population.

All that said your comments about fitted kitchens, bathrooms ect are relevant but it is true to say that inflation in the 70's which led to the first lot of huge value rises was a deliberate policy by the then governments of the day to inflate away the debts of the time. Many will recall the UK having to go cap in hand to the IMF in those years.

The simple point I was trying to get across is that the younger generation will never experience the same standard of living as we have for the last 20 years or so. My first mortgage was taken out in the early 80's and like a lot of people I traded up a few times, worked hard holiday abroad once in a while (mostly in the UK for a week a year) second hand car, but such sacrifices (although they never seemed like it back then as I think we all lived happier and more fulfilled lives) allowed me to pay my mortgage down in the mid noughties.

End of the day it is about being financially astute and clearly many were not, many people withdrew equity and used it to fund holidays, kitchens and cars ect and by doing so ended up carrying mortgages into retirement which is never a happy solution.

Yes the £10 bonus has been seriously eroded with inflation since it was first introduced, at the same time winter fuel allowances have been introduced as have free bus travel.

Without a doubt these things should be means tested. My mother (who no longer lives in London) gets all these runs her own car, owns her own house, has three pensions (one public, one private and the senior citizens) and goes on three cruises per year.....

Is it right she relives the taxpayer of what is not an insignificant sum of money when she clearly has her own means?

Totally agree.

The comment about standard of living is also very apt. Years ago a fridge was rare and a washing machine a luxury few could afford. Jump forward a few decades and the professionally unemployed demand the latest fashion and iPhone on top of beer and fag money plus all their bills paid.

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Lets be careful out there !

What I found out is that the Government decide what is an essential item or a luxury. it is the people who get the money that decide what it is spent on

Its little wonder the Country is being bought to its knees, with the punish the workers, and reward the lazy, its no coincidence the Country has been filled with the dregs of Europe, by Blair and Co, we all know Turkeys dont vote for Christmas, and folk who work hard and made or are making a future for them selves, dont want to see there efforts given away by idealist idiots in SW1, we need a real Government by real people, first and foremost, not the privileged, posing as work folk who have conned their way into the big house. overpaid and expenses we the people would die for, who spend most of their time telling me I have never been so well off, well news for them I was far better of when I was working and earning 10% of what I get now, the Socialist dream of state dependency just dont work, unless you was born outside, and come as economist migrants from a country that has no rule or order, and fight each other for the scraps. we have been reduced to the suckers of the land, who have given away their heritage, what chance now would we stand against another Hitler? maybe that would be a good thing as most would find another safe haven of idiots.

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Its not always the biggest and the bestest, its them that make the least mistakes.

It would have been easy for this Government to have rolled back some of the pensioner benefits like the free bus passes but thus far they have not.

The reason is very simple senior citizens are the most likely demographic to vote and far more so than the younger generations. Elected politicians do not want to jeopardise their seats on the gravy train upsetting a group of the electorate who have the power to remove them.

Westonman alluded to this in his post above.

As the younger generations become more interested in politics and as such become voting fodder (there is evidence to suggest things are moving in this direction) then expect the policy focus to shift.

Is it right that your mother should be penalised for having been prudent and worked and paid into her pension schemes? Is it right that those who have not paid into the State system, nor paid into private pension schemes should be rewarded at the expense of your mother's prudence and self-provision? Your mother, with her three pension incomes will also be paying income tax to further underwrite the life-style of the imprudent. I don't know your mother's full circumstances, but she could easily have wasted her resources over her working years and then qualified for State dependence because of her imprudence.

The political agenda is full of mentions of 'equality', unfortunately there is no mention of equality of self-provision and prudence.