Quote wrencat1873="wrencat1873"They still can on pay day loans, the Tory alternative to food banks: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 38076.html Force people to use food banks and then extort money from them through payday loan companies '" That isn't what he said at all though, is it. He's saying (clumsily to be fair) that some people struggle to manage their money (often true), and one of the things they sometimes do when struggling is look for a payday loan. He then says one of the things he wants to do if he's in Parliament is to "stop payday loan advertising because that just makes the whole problem worse." It's very clear - if you bother to take a moment to pay attention - he's against payday loans. Your blinkers skew your hearing it seems.

Quote wrencat1873="wrencat1873"They still can on pay day loans, the Tory alternative to food banks: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 38076.html Force people to use food banks and then extort money from them through payday loan companies '" That isn't what he said at all though, is it. He's saying (clumsily to be fair) that some people struggle to manage their money (often true), and one of the things they sometimes do when struggling is look for a payday loan. He then says one of the things he wants to do if he's in Parliament is to "stop payday loan advertising because that just makes the whole problem worse." It's very clear - if you bother to take a moment to pay attention - he's against payday loans. Your blinkers skew your hearing it seems.

That’s not massively dissimilar to my own experience. However, I think we both ‘beat’ the banking crisis and our experiences are of limited relevance to those that did not. I came out of university owing only about £6k, and the deposit for our first house was just £7k. Speaking to a younger colleague, who’d followed a similar path, a couple of years or so after the crash and that deposit wouldn’t have got me and my wife anywhere by that point. And we (me, my wife and you) went to University - plenty of people don’t, so while they don’t have the huge debt associated with a degree nowadays, they [utypically[/u don’t earn as much as graduates either.

I went into academic research for some years, and occasionally we’d receive advice from senior tenured staff about how we could advance our careers as they had done. Work hard, publish in high impact journals etc. They had the experience, but it was of something that had by that point largely disappeared - well-funded and rapidly expanding higher education and basic science. It was still possible to advance, but much less likely. The advice was still basically sound, but was undermined sometimes by a lack of recognition of the extent of the change - whether from missing that point, or wanting to be positive, or not wanting their own achievements to seem diminished. I think telling the next generation that ‘well, we managed it’ on housing probably elicits similar feelings to those I felt back then.

Sorry Cronus, it wasn't supposed to be a serious reply.
My attempt at humour seems to have flown straight past. Never mind.

I do understand that being in London I am talking about a situation which is worse to that which people see in the north.

you have a seriously deluded view on life

Your school closed for polling today, is it?

A well considered thoughtful post.

Landlords invest in property and as such they need a return that justifies that investment. Rents have escalated as demand has grown - simple supply/demand proposition and this will continue whilst ever getting on the property ladder is so tricky.

Builders invest in new builds - limited mortgage availability - so they sell large chunks to investors who have access to funds.

Tory policy in a nutshell.

If you've got cash on the hip, you can make a lot more out of the people who haven't.

Seems like a big turnout at the polling stations but, I can't decide which party will benefit.
Have the younger generation finally got off their backsides and voted or, is it a pensioners revolt ?

Our polling station was the busiest that I've seen it in over 30 years !

Its Capitalism - you take a risk in the hope of that risk being rewarded - if its not you lose up to the value of your commitment

Better to risk and lose than to have never risked at all.

Ours is deathly - perhaps Hilary hasn't managed to get the young out of bed?

True: but the problem comes when the returns that can be made from owning property (not just renting, but holding for capital accumulation) exceed the returns on productive investment (starting businesses, providing capital for existing businesses to expand etc) then it becomes a drag on the economy.

Especially when the high returns from owning property come from the scarcity factor, and the property-owning section of society has a vested interest in continuing that scarcity and not enabling market forces to work better.

The situation is getting progressively worse for each successive generation of young people that enters the labour market (and starts to vote). It won't go away, and unless the government starts to do something about it they will just be breeding a bigger and bigger block of voters who are susceptible to 'radical politics'. Then when an electoral backlash hits them, there will be lots of handwringing and people saying 'how did we miss this?' like the 'liberal establishment' missed the Brexit vote coming. The answer will be, in every time they ignored the situation for young people and just said if they weren't eating avocado toast they'd have a mortgage.