Thursday, December 04, 2008

Mortgage help for 0.17% of the population

Well it isn't much but I suppose it is better than nothing. About 9,000 families may have their homes saved by Gordon Browns much trumpeted initiative to underwrite the rolled up interest on mortgages where homeowners defer payments and then still eventually default.

This is all well and good but what about all the people who do keep their mortgages up to date? Like so many Gordon Brwon initiatives this one has the potential to backfire horribly as a) people work out that so few will be helped (in the face of 75,000 repossessions, helping the richest 9,000 seems perverse in the extreme) and b) that the net effect of this move is to reward people who have over extended themselves with taxes taken from people who haven't.

As someone called Jon C observed on Politicalbetting this morning:

"In debt? Lied about your income to get a stupidly unaffordable mortgage? Withdrawn some equity to spend spend spend? Never mind! Let the government/taxpayer pick up the bill for you!

I have always lived within my means. I have payment protection insurance (which I will be cancelling). I have not over-borrowed. I have not extended my mortgage to spend it all on holidays, cars and plasma screen TVs. Well I should have done - that is the message from this appalling, amoral, disgusting, reckless, useless government.

I am indescribably livid that taxpayers money is to be used as the latest in a long line of doomed schemes to prop up the housing market and further delay the time when the market’s true value of housing will be revealed. A kick in the teeth for honest people who don’t live on credit.

What about people sensibly renting, not having lied about their income or over-extending themselves on credit, waiting patiently for an affordable house, will they get their rent paid if they lose their job, or as they have to wait YET LONGER for house prices to return to normailty?"


Could this could turn out to be another 10p tax rate fiasco?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Unlikely to be the fiasco you hope Marcus. For the simple reason that Gordon Brown is a closet 5 year planner - and not a very good one at that. So of course proping up the proletariat is a means to an end viz. To get elected!

I'd vote for a bloke who said you won't have to pay for the things you buy, some other schmuck will!

Interestinly the definition of people living in poverty seems to include those who are deprived simply because they don't have a TV, DVD player or microwave.

Tell that to the people in Zimbabwe or Sudan....

Anonymous said...

On a different subject entirely and one on which I think you should post:

Has anybody noticed the irony of the Scots bleating about independance when the PM, the Chancellor, the Speaker, the Secretary of State for Defence (or has he moved?) are all bally Scots?

How come the Government is stocked with Jocks? Why should the skirt wearing, accented lot, who constantly support any world sporting team England get to rule themselves AND us?

It's not right, it's not cricket and they definitely aren't English.

Anonymous said...

Although you would na believe it - with my name - I agree!!