BUBBLE ABOUT TO BURST?

International Monetary Fund chairperson Christine Lagarde is highlighting that something needs to be done about Britain's housing bubble. The IMF are suggesting either a rise in interest rates, more house building, or a combination of both.

It's Friday. It's financial. It's Friday Financial with JULIAN SAYER.

Mortgage misery on the way for millions.

This week I want to give a quick recap on what's been happening since I started writing this blog back in February, both on the subjects I have covered, and geographically around the world.

First domestically. A few weeks ago I covered the problems building up in the housing market, and it looks as though it will become even worse than I had feared. The Bank of England even admits a housing bubble is forming, the bubble is out of control and when it bursts it will cause misery for all involved. This is the concern for millions, and if it does it will so damage the UK and its economy over the rest of this decade. This paragraph was taken from the article below which is well worth a read:

"The independent think tank raised the alarm about the most vulnerable 770,000 households already with mortgages, saying they were “doubly exposed”. Typically, they might have very low equity in their home (less than five per cent), might be self-employed or have an interest-only mortgage, making them less attractive to lenders. Secondly, it would take only a relatively modest rise in rates by 2018 for a third of their income to be eaten up by mortgage repayments."

http://www.independent.co.uk/money/mortgages/millions-face-becoming-mortgage-prisoners-as-rise-in-interest-rates-could-trap-to-23m-homeowners-9399137.html

How is this Governments gamble to ride the housing market to stimulate growth for the UK economy going to end? They will have to be very careful, it's already overheating and they have an extremely difficult balancing act ahead, but these housing bubbles don't tend to end well! As a whole the UK economy is growing, but it lacks of any real strength, which means it is very susceptible to outside shocks, and everywhere you look around the world, business is struggling and central banks are panicking.

PUTTING THEMSELVES FIRST

Why Putting Hartlepool First are no different. More greedy politicians. More snouts in the trough. Zero integrity.

ByHARRY BLACKWOOD

I was born in Hartlepool fifty eight years ago and have never lived more than five miles away from the magnificent Christ Church which stands proudly in the centre of my home town.

I mention this, not only because I'm a proud Hartlepool bloke, but also to counter a stupid comment from a woman the other day on The Hartlepool Mail website who suggested I should keep my nose out of Hartlepool political affairs because I don't live in the town.

The intensely misguided Stella Leighton (if that's her real name) is technically correct but when I was editor of the Hartlepool Mail I could run from the front door of my current home to my office (within spitting distance of the aforementioned Christ Church in under half an hour. It's five miles. Reckon ten minutes on the bike would sort it now.

My affiliation with Hartlepool (I worked and lived in the town for more than forty years plus my connection and editorship of the local newspaper, combined with a lifetime's interest in politics puts me in a unique position to pass comment on all aspects of Hartlepool life.

As the local council elections are just days away I'm going to stick with politics.

TEN REASONS NOT TO VOTE UKIP: REASON NUMBER 4

UKIP's David Silvester has been widely condemned for calling the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act “contrary to the gospel”. 

YOU BELIEVE IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO CATCH 'GAY'

I used to live my life thinking live and let live. That was before we started getting lots of rain and gay people started getting married. Obviously the two things couldn't possibly be connected. Could they?

Well, obviously not. Well not if you're rational and level-headed. But what if you're a UKIP supporter?

Since the passage of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, the nation has been beset by serious storms and floods. One recent one caused the worst flooding for 60 years. The Christmas floods were the worst for 127 years. Is this just global warming or is there something more serious at work?”

David Silvester (suspended UKIP councillor) – who called homosexuality a “spiritual disease”, thinks that God is punishing us for allowing people of the same sex equal rights.   This one also works if you are a religious person who doesn’t want their religion hijacked by extremists.

TEN REASONS NOT TO VOTE UKIP: REASON NUMBER 3

James Elgar, 19, now denies being racist and sexist and 'did not recognise' some tweets. What a surprise. Neither is the bigot impressed with northern Britain either.

YOU DESPISE IGNORANT RACISTS, BIGOTS AND NAZIS.

UKIP have a cunning plan to defeat those people who look at all ten instances of racism that their pig ignorant supporters spout. They think if they keep repeating "we are not racists" enough times the public will believe them. It's not going to work. We all know they're blood racists.

Take this for starters: “How we can possibly be giving £1bn a month, when we’re in this sort of debt, to Bongo Bongo Land is completely beyond me.”  This was sexist and racist Godfrey Bloom, showing that when you can’t even be bothered to do your research, some people will be happy with a reference to some “foreign land” or "bongo bongo land".

Our forefathers fought and died in some “foreign land” to stop these racists taking over.  Don’t disgrace their memory by voting for UKIP.

So what if you are Asian, love or care about someone who is Asian?

Here's a nice bit of hysteria from a leading light in UKIP: “They groom and rape underage white girls, stab and rob innocent old white people, bomb innocent white people” beggars belief I know but this was posted on Facebook by James Elgar, a UKIP candidate.

It's worth noting that Mr. Elgar is banned from Woking football ground at the moment.  Sounds like a riot…

In his defence, his father said he isn't sexist because his best friend is a girl. His dad also told the Daily Mirror, that he isn't racist, because, and I kid you not, “Last night he came home at 10:30 with a curry”. Now, I've got a. Dry fertile creative mind but even I couldn't make that up.

Only a matter of time before they play the "he has a black doctor" card.

Now let's suppose you oppose apartheid. What's that you say? Everybody is against apartheid? Not so.

David Williams Griffiths, a member of the West London Branch of UKIP, said after the death of Nelson Mandela, that some people were ‘intended by nature’ to be slaves and were ‘marked out for subjection’ from birth”.  Remember South African apartheid?  Remember the Nazis in 1933?  Are you seriously going to vote for this?

But as is often the case with these little blogs I've saved the best until last.

So cop this: Paul Wiffen, formerly campaigning for Ilford South and the Former Chairman of the London Region of UKIP said: "You Left-wing scum are all the same, wanting to hand our birthright to Romanian gypsies who beat their wives and children into begging and stealing money they can gamble with. Muslim nutters who want to kill us and put us all under medieval Sharia law, the same Africans who sold their Afro-Caribbean brothers into a slavery that Britain was the first to abolish.”

Hell's teeth and Jesus H Christ on a stick. You don’t have to be one of those Left-Wing scummy types to deplore racism. You just have to be a decent human being. 

Don't vote is my advice. If you must vote then spoil your voting card with a huge X. Please don't vote for these racist Nazis.

And whatever you think, please don't think that voting UKIP is in any way a protest against the main parties.

Doing that is like shitting in your hotel bed to protest about poor service at the hotel bar and then realising you have to sleep in the bed.

More later . . .

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IT'S LIKE ANIMAL FARM

JAMES CAMPBELL reveals his on-line

experiences of Putting Hartlepool First, a group that says it is aiming at a new way of doing politics in Hartlepool. It's good intentions don't appear to be put into practice.

Since around Mid-March I've been occupied mainly with a Hartlepool political group called Putting Hartlepool First (PHF).

I call them a political group because they do seem to be a little confused about what they are themselves despite having been around in some form or other since 2012.

What initially attracted my attention was that they described themselves as a group of independents who're opposed to the way the town is being run but recognise that the way the party political system was used in the town restricted the ability of a true independent from being able to influence change.  They even say that they have no whip to enforce policy or a party line and members are able to vote however their conscience tells them to. I liked this train of thought because one of my core beliefs is that elected representatives acting in the interests of their party often runs contra to the interests of the people they represent.

My first contact with PHF was via their Facebook page and resulted in a series of frustrating debates where posts and questions that challenged the views of PHF were regularly deleted and on some occasions people who had done nothing more than ask a question were blocked from the site too.

The full details of this is here: http://wp.me/p2BV0e-8q

My last Facebook interaction with PHF was to post that blog on their page where it was deleted within 8 minutes and I was blocked within 10 minutes.

THE PETRIE DISH EFFECT

ANDY FLEMING details how we need to completely replace our current economic paradigm if we are to have a future on the Earth.

It’s so easy to be negative about the current global economic system. And of course there is every reason. Most readers will be aware that the economies of virtually all major developed nations including China are well, stuffed.

When it comes to a solution however, yesterday’s Labour Party European Election broadcast brought home our dilemma. In its theatre and comedy it was excellent, vividly portraying the economic abyss we have descended into as a nation. Character assassinations of Cameron and Clegg flowed freely, highlighting their promotion of the philosophies of greed, inequity, deceit, self-advancement and privilege.

There was of course no reference to Labour’s immense culpability in our economic plight. Neither was there one positive economic policy proposal of how the people’s party was going to fix things. Apart, that is, from the usual rhetoric of economically castrating the bankers, with whom until late 2008 they were so intimate.

They offered no practical policies because here’s the thing; there aren’t any. That’s because the whole current global economic paradigm based on greed, central banks, drugs, money laundering, the military industrial complex and war is quite simply not fit for the new millennium. Tinkering around at the edges with an economic system originating in the sixteenth century simply won’t work, and here’s my rational for saying this, based surprisingly not in politics but in science.

TEN REASONS NOT TO VOTE UKIP: REASON NUMBER 2

Paul Nuttall, Deputy Leader of UKIP who openly admits he usually can't be bothered to turn up to vote at the European Parliament, whilst defrauding the taxpayer of £80,000 per annum in salary plus mega expenses. They're all in it together, except with UKIP you also get a right wing blend of sexism, racism and homophobia.

YOU DON'T LIKE GREEDY, LAZY, MONEY GRABBING POLITICIANS

ByHARRY BLACKWOOD

OK. So, you've told all your pals that MPs of all parties are money-grabbing, corrupt, greedy, incompetent bastards who are not worth voting for. Congratulations for stating the bleeding obvious.

But then you go and spoil your impressive performance by saying you're thinking of voting UKIP. Hold it there buddy, I need a serious word with you.

When it comes to being corrupt, greedy, incompetent and filling their bank accounts with your hard-earned dosh, UKIP take the biscuit. In fact they take the whole packet of biscuits.

Thinking of voting UKIP to protest about the way our MPs do their job?  Think MPs should work harder.  UKIP MEPs don’t.  In fact, they pride themselves on not bothering to vote at the European Parliament, although they do turn up occasionally to collect the £80,000 we pay each of them and to bang in some quite outrageous expense claims.

Their Deputy Leader Paul Nuttall says of his own voting record, “I’ll hold my hands up. My attendance record is flaky to say the least. But so what? I treat Brussels with the contempt it deserves.” 

Nice. These people are laughing at the tax-payer, taking money to do nothing, and having a jolly old time “playing at politics” with your tax payers’ money and never actually bothering to go to work.

If you think that Nigel Farage is a good honest bloke, down to earth, represents the common man, and is the sort of bloke you could have a drink with, think again. 

I’m sure you could have a drink with him.  If you could afford it.  Not only has Nigel Farage claimed over £2 million in expenses, but he is the son of a millionaire stock-broker. 

Nigel himself, this man of the people, is a millionaire stock-broker himself, (you know, just like the people who gambled away your pension fund).

Good old Nigel who you could have a drink with down the pub, probably wouldn't want to sit next to an oik like you anyway, because you, unlike him, would not have been able to afford to go to the £10k a year top public school that Nigel was educated in.  Meaning that Nigel's childhood education, is probably worth more than the value of your house will be, after these people destroy our economy.

And remember this is the same Mr. Farage who wants to increase your taxes if he gets elected. The same Mr. Farage who employs his wife AND his alleged bit on the side out of our taxes.

If you believe that the AV referendum was a waste of time and tax-payers money. Well done.

Nigel Farage didn’t.  He was all for it, declaring that the current First Past the Post system is “a nightmare for UKIP”.

Maybe you believe that UKIP can do a better job of running the country than the other main parties.

Well, that’s up for debate, it's hard to find anyone who thinks that any of the big three parties have done a good job, but at least they are organised.  UKIP “forgot” to put their party name on the candidates’ ballot paper for the Local and Mayoral elections in London 2012.  These people want to run your country, by the way.

They have incompetence in their DNA. Along with racism, homophobia and a firmly held belief that gay marriage causes flooding.

You may like to have a rethink . . .

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