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Post by borchester on Feb 22, 2024 14:49:54 GMT
When I was a lad the oldies would retire, spend a year or two in front of the fire prior to doing the decent thing and turning their toes up to make room for the next generation.
It is not like that now.
11% of the UK population are pensioners and the numbers are set to increase. Pensions aren’t much, so a bit of simple arithmetic will show that this means that technically GDP will have fallen. But then again, so what ?
The cottontops have paid off their mortgages, the kids are off their hands and they have all the time in the world to sniff around for the bargains that the rest of the population is too busy working to pick up.
So we may be broke, but we are a lot better off than before.
Thoughts ?
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Post by Bentley on Feb 22, 2024 15:01:43 GMT
Indeed the state pension isn’t much.
However, as you say, some pensioners have worked hard , paid off mortgages , paid into private pensions and some lucky ones have had a few Bob in inheritance.
That wasn’t so much the case a decade or two .
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Feb 22, 2024 16:09:48 GMT
Money is becoming more and more divorced from what bang you get for your bucks. I was in Morrisons the other day an they were selling a kettle for £4. If you go back to the 1980s a kettle in today's money would cost well over ten times as much. So the things you actually need are very cheap, but can be expensive. I could pay £100 for a kettle, but how much better would that actually serve me since they both boil water. Here's another one. Take a 50p cotton t-shirt, print Manchester United on it and then it is worth £50. That's 50p for production and materials and £49.50 for the advert. The advert will do something like increase your sex appeal.
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Post by Pacifico on Feb 22, 2024 17:46:45 GMT
I think society is diverging between those that own houses and those that do not - it seems to be that for youngsters today that without inherited wealth buying your own property is becoming a more distant dream by the day.
Obviously we need to build more housing stock but we also have to manage demand - unfortunately no political party seems to be that interested.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2024 18:45:59 GMT
I think society is diverging between those that own houses and those that do not - it seems to be that for youngsters today that without inherited wealth buying your own property is becoming a more distant dream by the day. Obviously we need to build more housing stock but we also have to manage demand - unfortunately no political party seems to be that interested. Too many of the political classes in both main parties do too well out of the current housing crisis personally to be all that motivated to do much about it. Likewise they are not the ones by and large suffering from the effects of excess cheap migrant labour but are more likely to again be the beneficiaries. The Tories speak most effectively for the wealthy, the boss classes, the self-employed strivers and affluent pensioners. Labour speaks most effectively for affluent middle class home owning metropolitan liberals, woke on identity politics issues but wedded to the same thatcherite economic consensus as the Tories, their only ambition for change being a desire to make it a bit nicer, as long as it does not economically disadvantage affluent middle class metropolitan liberals. No one in the mainstream parties apart from a few marginalised and distrusted outsiders speaks for the struggling millions. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Mar 3, 2024 21:05:55 GMT
I think society is diverging between those that own houses and those that do not - it seems to be that for youngsters today that without inherited wealth buying your own property is becoming a more distant dream by the day. Obviously we need to build more housing stock but we also have to manage demand - unfortunately no political party seems to be that interested. Too many of the political classes in both main parties do too well out of the current housing crisis personally to be all that motivated to do much about it. Likewise they are not the ones by and large suffering from the effects of excess cheap migrant labour but are more likely to again be the beneficiaries. The Tories speak most effectively for the wealthy, the boss classes, the self-employed strivers and affluent pensioners. Labour speaks most effectively for affluent middle class home owning metropolitan liberals, woke on identity politics issues but wedded to the same thatcherite economic consensus as the Tories, their only ambition for change being a desire to make it a bit nicer, as long as it does not economically disadvantage affluent middle class metropolitan liberals. No one in the mainstream parties apart from a few marginalised and distrusted outsiders speaks for the struggling millions. In the old days the Tories were the landowning aristocracy, so their power base was the country, where country folk who worked the land used to get on with he nobility since they were looked after and life was simple. It was the Whigs who represented the middle class. They were scientific entrepreneurs who lived in the cities. Back in time the towns and cities were regarded as centres of civilisation and advancement. The country was regarded as wild and dangerous (home of the beast), as in the complete opposite of today.
Labour are ultimately the product of Marx, but a strange thing was going on in that there were those in the city who came from wealthy families who were backing and disseminating socialist ideas, and they were indeed the ones behind the suffragettes. Now this is really odd because you ultimately have different factions of the aristocracy running the polarity of contemporary politics, with the middle class capitalist reps being wiped out a long time ago. Even odder than this was that this socialist network which was strongly represented in London was also into the occult, and in particular Russian occultism. You see this in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood who were all connected to these circles, and at the time they were chiefly operating in the arts, pushing socialist ideas like with Charles Dickens.
Anyway, where we got ahead in all of this was really with the inventor class who made production more efficient. Before that the aristocracy had complete control through a monopoly control of the land. I'm convinced you know that Britain is actually reversing down its own evolutionary path. At some point most will not be able to read or write. They will sign contracts with an X.
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