She's no Queen of Hearts

oooh you're a bit angry aren't you ?

BT were a joke before they were privatised, just stop and think about the last time you paid for calls on your landline, if you pay for calls on your landline at all do you pay more for them in the morning than in the afternoon, do you still rent your telephone handset and is it still the colour they gave you rather than the one you really wanted, if some new technology comes along, lets say someone re-invents the fax machine, do you have to ring your current provider and ask them to come and install your new fax machine for you because it has to be hard wired into the connection box which is in your hallway because thats where BT told you it had to go, thats assuming that they have capacity on the line for another telephonic gadget in your house, round where I lived you were lucky not to be sharing a line and number with a neighbour.

No, I didn't think so, that particular monopoly was tired, lazy, bureaucratic and obstinate, and deserved the massive investment and kick up the backside that privatisation gave it.

You and others are confusing BT with British Telecom or even Post Office.

BTW it can still take BT six weeks to install a new line

GPO please...

I did post a reply to this but it has mysteriously disappeared........

Typical Lefities. Talk a good story but when they can't answer the argument they resort to the policies of Stalin...........

Laughable.

"Policies of Stalin"?

You're going beyond parody now

Good old right-wing paranoia, alive and well.
Shall we seal the borders?

Yep, I feel sorry for them really. Who will they direct their bitterness and bile at now ? Who are they going to blame for their own inadequacies and inability to achieve in life ?

People paid for "stuff" from money they had saved or sometimes through HP. The only real debt a household may have was a mortgage for those who decided to buy rather than rent. But at that time rents accounted for only around 20% of household income, so really were affordable.

Don't worry, so long as there are tories left, we won't be lacking any suitable targets

Then you'll always be fighting a war you can't win. We live in an aspirational consumer society, any party which wants to govern these days has to be 'conservative' to an extent. Idealism is fine but practical reality will always win in the end. Even if the Tories were ousted tomorrow their replacements would still need to face the realities of the economy and continue with cuts and public expenditure reforms. The world changes, for better or worse, sometimes you just have to accept it and adapt accordingly.

lets have some actual figures, what was the rent compared to the mortgage?
in 1996ish i was paying around £220 per month on a mortgage with interest rates at 7% which was around 25% of my income. but i didn't get 33%-50% discount on the purchase.
so, you're a wage slave if you have a mortgage to pay but not a wage slave if you have rent to pay.

If you need to work to pay either, you're pretty much a wage slave. After all no landlord has ever evicted a tenant for not paying rent, have they?

The difference being; until relatively recently rents, especially council house rents, were considerably lower than mortgage repayments. Councils, as landlords, were also more sympathetic to their tenants than private landlords. My early mortgage repayments were considerably more than friends who lived in council houses paid in rent. To achieve the mortgage we not only had to show we could afford the 20% deposit and the repayments, we also had to show two years of regular savings with the building society. A condition that few first-time buyers could meet today.

But housing cost (rent or mortgage)is only one aspect of wage slavery. Since the 1980s there has been a massive increase in non-mortgage personal debt. Debts that are used to buy cars and other consumer goods. When I applied for a bank loan in 1982 to buy a new (to me) car, I had to stump up 20% deposit in cash before the bank would entertain me. Now if a deposit is required, the lender will accept payment by credit card for both deposit and repayments. It's barmy.

Did anyone see The Big Question today. One was 'is it ok to celebrate someones death' and Nadine Dorries had said that the protesters should think of Thatchers kids and how they are feeling, one of the guests was Benjamin Zephaniah and he said 'why, Carol Thatcher thinks people like me are gollis and her son is an arms dealer'. The conversation after that was something like

Dorries: 'I thought better of you Benjamin'

BZ: 'why, are you saying she never said it'

ND: 'I thought you were better than that'

BZ: 'are you saying she never said it'

ND: 'I just thought better of you'

BZ: 'did she say it, did she say it'

ND: 'well, yes she did'

I magine if you or I said it, we would (quite rightly) be prosecuted.