I live in the East Midlands in the UK. You can grab a reasonable first house here for less than £150k quite easily. So you'll need a 5% deposit, £7,500 for one of those. One person on an average salary for the area would be able to afford a mortgage for a house like this on their own. But Nick has a girlfriend, who can hopefully work, so should be able to afford it easily.
But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.
I recognise that people have all sorts of different circumstances, so this is not meant to minimise the difficulty of affording property, but I'm just not recognising this claim from the outset that you need a £100k deposit or high paid job to get on the property ladder. It's hard, but it's doable for most.
And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.
Start pressing buttons and you'll see even more weird claims that most sane Brits won't recognise. This is a weird website that probably shouldn't be given much time.
Many people want to live in close proximity to their family. There are good reasons for this (you have a support network).
I want to move back closer to my family as they are getting older. I would like to move back so I can spend more time with my father as he is retiring this year. To afford a flat in Dorset it is 30,000 deposit. A deposits on a house would be about somewhere between £30,000-£100,000.
These aren't mansions BTW. These are normal 2-3 bed houses.
> But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.
My two bed flat (that I got cheap) is £110,000 and I am in the North-West. I've not seen any houses up here that were worth buying less than £200,000.
You typically need a 15% deposit on a flat. I managed to go with some rando building society and get 10%.
Any houses that are £150,000 are always in horrible parts of town or they are complete dumps and need complete renovation.
If you are on a minimum wage (I spent 8 years on it) it is difficult to save money and when something like the boiler goes you are screwed.
> But half of people earn less than the mean salary though.
That's incorrect. Half of people earn less than the median salary. Depending on where you live, it could be that a lot more than half earn less than the mean salary.
>And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.
LISAs are a trap if you want to buy in the South. You can only use it if the value of the property is £450k or less. The limit hasn't been raised since 2017 despite crazy house price inflation. So many people got completely fucked by this; they have their money locked up in the LISA, can't buy a house near London with it, and can't transfer it to something else without a huge penalty.
More broadly, "the govt pays the rest" is part of the problem. All this help-to-buy stuff amounts to demand subsidies that just push prices higher and higher.
> LISAs are a trap if you want to buy in the South. You can only use it if the value of the property is £450k or less
In London it limits you. Outside of London, including most of the South, where the vast majority of British people live, most first houses cost less than £450k.
The limit should have been raised though yes. Or perhaps it should be set by region, I don't know. Hopefully it will be updated at some point.
This is true. You don’t need a £100K deposit unless you want to live in a £1M house, which is not necessary in the UK. If you want to buy a big apartment in central London or a four bed house near London, sure. But most people would consider that a luxury and not a necessity to raise a family.
My father just sold his house down south. It was a 4 bedroom house. I think he got somewhere between £500-700k for it. £1M for a house isn't that crazy in the South-West.
Sounds more like you live in a better area then he does. And by better I mean with less issues, not richer necessarily.
While I admit that I don't live in the UK, I suspect it's similar to my experience from over the sea in Hamburg. I've recently moved there into a district with >50% migrants for roughly 3 yrs - not really expecting anything as I was still positive about everything.
Finding apartment listings in the online portals explicitly saying they will only allow Muslims was surprising to me, but I ignored it thinking, whatever.
Well, after moving into another apartment in the same area was an eye opener for me.
Really, I'm frankly surprised there are people still in denial how bad it's gotten. Well, not really surprised. I mean I was one of them in 2021.
I know right. Folks don't understand that people who come to our countries are also workers whose countries have been destroyed by OUR elites. A bit of solidarity would be healthy, useful and anchored in reality.
Whenever anyone on earth does something bad, it's basically Nick's fault. Nobody except Nick has agency or responsibility. They're all victims, except Nick.
I don't Agree. I got a few giggles out of it. Especially the emails from "Linda", as I literally get those types of emails.
I think generally it was reasonably well done as a novelty joke website that is obviously trying to make a political point. That in itself makes it reasonably interesting IMO.
There is an option to that question where it has a relatively positive outcome and you have lunch with her and presumable are on better terms afterwards. Which tells me that the author isn't dog whistling at all and it is more a lampooning the weird cringe stuff that you are expected to take part in one of these large corps.
In fact something like this sounds like it comes straight out of office space.
I volunteered at a school. Rather than celebrating Christmas or Halloween, they had to celebrate Diwali because Christmas/Halloween might be too offensive or not inclusive enough. The country has gone mad.
3. Why should anyone care? Did anyone stop you from celebrating Christmas with your friends and family?
P.s. according to your post history you have based anti capitalist positioning on the pointlessness of most white collar labor, what happened to make you participate on the wrong side in a meaningless culture war that's just a distraction from the reduction in material conditions of the working class?
Well of course you don’t believe me, it goes against your narrative. But I’m sure someone living in Taiwan knows better than someone British currently in the UK.
Also that is quite an overreach on basic observations that are generally agreed upon and weren't anti-capitalist.
I don't believe you because I live in the UK and the idea that people don't celebrate Christmas is beyond moronic. The shops start doing Christmas stuff the day after Halloween. It's unending Christmas songs for two months.
Most neoliberals (your entire political class) would vehemently disagree with the idea that the labor market is as high as 30% inefficiency, least of all in white collar jobs. That's not how they believe capitalism works. In their fantasy, pointless jobs can't exist, or at least not at such a high volume, since the invisible hand of the market would eliminate them.
You are of course right and they are wrong but my point is not many would agree with us.
In the west there are not enough young people to support the elderly, and immigration of young people can help to address this problem to the benefit of everyone.
I see this argument fairly often, but rarely do I see the premises questioned. Why do the elderly need to be supported? Wealth is concentrated in their hands (especially in the UK), while younger generations are struggling to be able to afford housing let alone build wealth. Perhaps society should focus less on supporting the generations who have already accumulated wealth and instead focus on supporting the generations who are starting families.
They need someone to literally care for them. In Germany for example, there are far too few people working in elderly care, and it’s a huge problem if we don’t want them to die of starvation, malnutrition or falling down the stairs with nobody to find them there.
Even wealth can’t magically summon the humans necessary to do that kind of work, robots are no solution for the foreseeable future and I don’t think starting a family is easy if you have to take care of your parents and/or grandparents.
There are far too few people working in elderly care because it pays peanuts. It pays peanuts because immigration increases the supply of workers. With a limited supply of workers and increased demand as more people get older, those jobs would pay well and natives would want to do them. It’s basic economy. It works well in countries that are not a free for all regarding immigration.
That is simply wrong. Social work has always been badly paid, exhausting, and ungrateful.
You’re twisting the past to fit into your contrived narrative of immigrants somehow wage-dumping us, but that’s simply wrong, it’s not what has happened in the EU.
I can go with your gut feeling or I can go with what I’ve seen in the market whilst looking for a woman to take care of elders in my family. Or with what I’ve heard from people in the hospitality and agriculture sectors.
It’s not that natives don’t want to work, it’s that immigrants undercut everybody. Not to mention what they’ve done to the housing sector of course. It’s unlivable. We run a country, not a charity.
Edit since I can’t respond anymore:
You assume two things: that you can’t work for less than the minimum wage (you can, since most elder care work is paid under the table) and that you can have a good life with the minimum wage (you can’t, unless you are okay with truly bad living conditions).
And a country has to prioritise the wellbeing of the natives first. You can’t destroy the lives of the poor and the young natives just to feel better about yourself.
It’s no gut feeling. My mother was a lifelong nurse. Again, I don’t know where you live, but in most western countries there’s a minimum wage preventing people from somehow undercutting other people, that’s not happening. Wages in the care sector haven’t dropped considerably since the first major migrations to Europe happened.
We run a country, true; not a capitalist venture. A country is also built on ethics, and that entails adhering to basic human rights for all humans.
The elderly don’t pay much tax, and they are very expensive to the state. Younger migrants contribute more taxes to fund healthcare and social services and pensions used by the elderly.
But yes, I agree, we need to tilt the scales back towards the young.
Plus there are enough people to care of old people. It’s just that immigrants cause such downward pressure on salaries that elder care is not a viable job sector for most.
Do migrants do jobs that native-born citizens would not under any circumstances do, or do they do jobs that native-born citizens would not do for the low wages that migrants are willing to accept?
We’re talking about minimum wage jobs, so the low wages are capped at the bottom for everyone anyway. And yes, there’s absolutely "native born" workers that will and do work for minimum wage already.
Regarding the taxation argument. That may have been true in the past (it doesn't account that many of these people stay and then will need to supported when they become elderly) but under the "Boris Wave" immigration boom that is no longer the case.
It doesn't address the other problems such as social cohesion.
>Plus they often do jobs that many people wouldn't otherwise
because the wages are low, why are the wages low? because these jobs have access to an unlimited amount of strikebreakers/migrants willing to do them for those low wages, so the wage stays suppressed and low, instead of allowing market mechanics to bring those wages up
So the UK (pop 69M) has had net migration figures of 760K, 860K, and 430K over the last three years.
UK finances have wafer-thin fiscal headroom. A significant chunk of monthly borrowing is spent on interest payments.
There is no surplus for increased spending on public services. If demand keeps increasing and supply remains the same, people can feel their quality of life decreasing.
A rapidly increasing population has a greater need for GP appointments, hospital treatment, school places, housing, food, policing, roads, electricity, water, sewage, etc. You can think of it as a meta issue that affects many of our existing capacity problems.
So those who want to hand-wave away immigration as a right-wing dog whistle need to put a bit more thought into it.
The west and the east are still gutting African resources to this day via a bunch of carrots and sticks that rarely include direct bombing by a Western country or China.
Plenty of western mercenary groups supporting traditional land takeover by corporations, funding radical groups to destabilize effective governments forming or growing in strength is still ongoing.
Much of this is often hidden from the public. This argument that people should be somehow punished for actions of others that they are unaware of and have very little power over is insane IMO.
I doubt few are arguing that various Africans should be punished by losing their traditional farming land of many generations because of the iceberg lettuce consuming actions of others they are unaware of.
They are not talking about the Africans. They are talking about the British.
Immigration has had many negative effects on social cohesion in the UK. That is just an unfortunate fact. That is obvious if you have lived in poorer areas of some the cities in the UK.
When this subject is normally broached on TV channels such as the BBC. The argument often put forth is that we should accept large amounts of immigration because of the the British Empire and the wars in the Middle-East. It is often framed as if we should accept it as a form of punishment.
Well, I wouldn't say punishment is exactly fair... But your government did not pay for reparations either, while at the same time, your government does hold other countries for doing so in their own wars (validly so).
That is how many of the left talk about it. Some are more coy than others, but nonetheless that is the theme.
I certainly don't care for it and I certainly doesn't endear me to anyone making the argument.
> But your government did not pay for reparations either, while at the same time, your government does hold other countries for doing so in their own wars (validly so).
So? The vast majority of the people in country had nothing to do with those events.
That unfortunately is a common fallacy that people engage in.
In the first chapter of "Anatomy of the State" this idea is utterly demolished.
> With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, “we are the government.” The useful collective term “we” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves”; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have “committed suicide,” since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.
I hear some Brits & immigrants raise that argument and it's the most retarded thing I've ever heard. Can you imagine seeing yourself as a punishment to be inflicted upon someone else?
Charity? I mean, it's an open secret that both sides understand that the bulk of the money sent to African countries isn't supposed to be spent on the people. It's a subsidy/bribe to their developing-world elites to keep them pliable and obedient to basically everything they're told.
It's almost immediately laundered back into London & Paris real estate and Swiss bank accounts.
Wait, you thought Western countries were handing out gibs/NEETbux to African countries just because they feel bad for them?
Africa is not a unique victim. Plenty of parts of the world have had mass enslavement, wars, genocide, pillaging, colonisation and are on their way up.
Even North Korea is more well developed despite being an isolated communist state run by a mafia.
I recommend reading "the Heart of Darkness" about some pristine unbombed idyllic stretches of the Congo river. Written by a totally English person as well, Joseph Conrad.
Western politicians and their capitalist economy required colonialism and imperialism. To this day, Westerners can't stay where they are without meddling in the affairs of others, and then they complain about it. But worry not, the economic development of Africa and Asia will soon render Europe and Amerika into very isolated and uninteresting parts of the world.
You tell that to the People's Republic of China, to Burkina Faso and many others. If you accepted your silly little racial capitalism wasn't completely obsolete and morally bankrupt, maybe there would be hope for you island people.
On one hand, I can understand your frustration at demographic & social changes. Everybody would be offended at that, no matter their race/nationality. On another, I think you're channeling your angst towards the wrong direction.
Over the past 30-80 years, Western countries collected social security contributions from workers but instead of investing/saving them, spent it all like tax. To fund pensions for that now-aged generation, you need fresh, warm bodies to pay taxes.
Sadly, that generation (boomers) had q modest fertility rate. They also live significantly longer than when social security became a norm in the West. 20-30 years more. So you need to tax their kids aggressively for longer to fund pensions & benefits for the boomers. Oh, and since the boomers' kids are having even fewer kids, it's a vicious cycle.
One way to remedy this is to suck in taxpayers from other countries & put them to work paying for the comfort of the boomers until they shuffle off the mortal coil.
So, here are your options:
1. Cut off the boomers and let them starve. But, it's untenable since their votes are a huge bloc and they'd revolt.
2. Expel every single immigrant and tax receipts will plummet. Your indig. young people will pay even more taxes to fund the boomers, unless you revert back to No. 1. Again, not tenable unless you abolish your democracy and establish a dictatorial state.
3. Maintain the current model and let it drag on.
It did not have to be like this. You could have taken Singapore's path of accumulating massive reserves ($2.5 trillion for 6 million people), but you didn't. I hope you figure it out, but I don't think anything drastic will happen.
Just like in Greece, when European lenders told them to impose austerity, leftist parties claimed they'd get into power and maintain all the benefits they'd promised the people. Fuck the globalists.
But, they got into power and realized their finances were well and truly fucked and they had to quietly undergo restructuring despite all their huffing and puffing.
Many immigrants commit crimes, yes, and I believe they need to be repressed. But, many others gratefully work and pay taxes. If you want to expel them, you need to be ready for the options above. Even if you are, many of your countrymen are not.
How about another, more nuanced option: let in those immigrants who are willing to work (and, ideally, integrate), and not everybody?
And also, crack down on illegal employment. Maybe being an undeclared, underpaid cook in some EU restaurant is better than being bombed in Syria or shot by some random dictator's goons in Africa, but that doesn't really help the local society if it's unfair competition. If you accept people in, insist that they have papers and can afford to be regular members of society.
That'd be the ideal option. So, why don't the Brits do it? Make sure every immigrant is paying into the system from the moment they step off the plane. If you're not doing that, but instead subsidizing refugees, you can't really be mad at them for accepting free stuff that you willingly give them.
I assume that means you couldn't understand the irony.
Europeans colonised and took over most of the world. As in, they moved to places that weren't theirs and imposed their values unto others to steal as much as they could from the countries they invaded. Now they complain others are doing the same to them and whine when others are fighting back.
It's "viral" marketing for progress-party.uk, if you play to the end there is a link to a Google doc to register your interest.
The veiled racism and bigotry in the "sim" is cheap. The current housing situation may be made worse by migration, but the majority of it is legal so hardly the migrants fault if we are inviting them.
So blame the government (predominantly Conservative over the last 20 years) and all the NIMBYs and hypocrites that stop anything changing in this glorious country.
The British people, of course, includes those British Nationals with English as a first language, who served in the British armed forces in World War Two.
The UK government, needing workers to help fill post-war labour shortages and rebuild the economy, invited many British people to come to the metropole.
Like all those dark skinned folk of the Windrush generation, and a good number of people who came across to the UK from India and Pakistan.
In more recent, pre-Brexit, years that invitation to fill a labour vacuum went out to fellow EU member states.
Ethnic Brits are the people whose majority of ancestors two centuries ago were living on the British Isles.
But I was talking about Brits in a wider sense -- the people with British passports and voting rights at the time when those mass migration laws were passed. Which happened against their consent.
Ethnic Brits are immigrants .. all the way down. Wave after wave of them.
> the people whose majority of ancestors two centuries ago were living on the British Isles.
So .. not the House of Windsor then.
> Brits in a wider sense -- Which happened against their consent.
Near as I understand British history not much happened with the broad consent of the masses, hence all the castles and defensive structures built to protect "rulers" from "ethnic brits".
The people that migrated to Britain in the Windrush generation were also British citizens, if you check your history you may recall a long phase in which the then ethnic British majority (who all originated from outside of Britain having cleansed the prior group of ethnic brits) went about claiming large chunks of other peoples multi-generation lands as their own and dabbling in more than a smidgen of miscegenation.
This is just history, beware the seeds you sow, they have a way of coming home to roost.
Worse, in my first scenario, I started a £4,500 but then "girlfriend" ask to move together, so apparently Nick was living solo
And once they moved together, the rent moved to £5,500
> A 50,000 home new town in Kent is blocked because they found nests full of agitated Chupacabras following the government's 'reintroduction' of the cryptid to British arable land. Your deposit requirement increases by £5000.
I feel like it's more particular than 30 year old. Seems to be a white, straight male with an Anglo Saxon heritage living in England. A black lesbian living in Derry would have a vastly different experience despite being just as much "30 year old in the UK."
This isn't a criticism just an interesting case of unconscious bias at play and how we tend to universalise our experiences.
>Seems to be a white, straight male with an Anglo Saxon heritage living in England.
This is in fact an extremely large, dare I say representative, demographic. Je suis Nicolas (30 ans) aussi. And his counterpart Nicola (30 ans) has similar problems herself.
>A black lesbian living in Derry would have a vastly different experience despite being just as much "30 year old in the UK."
By the 2021 census population pyramid, about 12,000 / 1.9M = 0.63% of the population are 30 year old women in Northern Ireland, and about 0.58% of the Northern Ireland population is black. Maybe 5% of women are lesbian? Derry's population is 85,000. So 85k * 0.63% * 0.58% * 5% = 0.15 of a person.
>This isn't a criticism
You are in fact criticising it by accusing the author of "unconscious bias" (and various -isms by insinuation).
> This is in fact an extremely large, dare I say representative, demographic.
It might well be. I didn't suggest otherwise.
> You are in fact criticising it by accusing the author of "unconscious bias"
No, I'm not, that's why I took the time to explicitly say so. I made no "accusation," you've just taken it that way. We all have unconscious biases and we all act them out in various ways. I made absolutely no value judgement and I think I'm a healthy society we should be able to talk about these things without everything having to be taken as an accusation.
> population pyramid
I intentionally used an atypical demographic reality to demonstrate my point: that person is just as much "a 30 year old in the UK" as Nicolas. There are obviously many millions of other people who are not like Nicolas and it's reasonable that a conversation includes an eye to the diversity of experience around us for a host of different reasons.
No, I don't buy this "I'm just making a neutral observation" schtick for one second. When people say "unconscious bias", they believe that the "bias" is harmful. If they didn't, why would it be so important to talk about? You are actually making a value judgement here, you just won't say so explicitly.
>I intentionally used an atypical demographic reality to demonstrate my point: that person is just as much "a 30 year old in the UK" as Nicolas. There are obviously many millions of other people who are not like Nicolas and it's reasonable that a conversation includes an eye to the diversity of experience around us for a host of different reasons.
The housing market in SE England sucks if you're young and work for a living; doesn't matter if gay or straight, man or woman, black or white. At any rate, I reject the notion that we can't talk about problems unless literally every last little niche demographic is affected. Not everything is about everyone. Someone must speak for Nick (30 ans).
> No, I don't buy this "I'm just making a neutral observation" schtick
You're welcome believe what you like but I'm not sure why I should engage with you if you refuse to believe what I assert about my own position and if you insist on re-framing my words with an accusatory tone that wasn't there.
I believe unconscious biases can and do have harmful effects yes. But everyone has them and it's common to let them influence our work. There's no shame in it and I certainly didn't make any value judgement against the author of this piece.
> The housing market in SE England sucks if you're young and work for a living; doesn't matter if gay or straight, man or woman
Similarly, I haven't made any statement remotely to the contrary. This is a strawman.
> I reject the notion that we can't talk about problems unless literally every last little niche demographic is affected.
And once again: this is not a notion that could be reasonably construed from what I said above.
I hope you feel better after getting your emotions out but I would encourage you to re-read this thread tomorrow and ask yourself how much you were projecting and perceived qualm onto me.
The Nick meme is a great way of encapsulating how utterly sick of the UK young professionals are at this point.
There is no way to win. I know many young people who are very comfortably in the top 5% of earners in the UK, paying tens of thousands of pounds of income tax per year, and are still locked into paying massive amounts of rent, because it's near-impossible to actually own a house here at this point. So quite honestly, what is the point any more? It's really no wonder UK productivity is dropping.
It's really hard to describe how bad the general vibe is here.
Meanwhile pensioners sit comfortably in four-bed houses in London suburbs with triple lock pensions guaranteed by the government.
It's not a new thing. I'm genX and I lived in rental until my 40s. Was in a 1 bed flat with my wife and son until he was 4. Eventually managed to buy a small place, but even then I was lucky.
I reject this generational war thing though. British state pensions are the worst in Europe. The triple lock doesn't make pensioners rich; it just keeps them from sliding into abject poverty.
> It's really hard to describe how bad the general vibe is here.
Eh, think that depends upon your social circles, sure it's not perfect but the vibes just fine from my perspective. There seems to be a massive swelling of online opinion that everything's terrible and everyone's deeply unmotivated which certainly doesn't match lived reality for me
As someone sympathetic to this, throwing in the culture war stuff (make jokes about LGBT etc) is a massive own goal and makes it so easy for people to discredit. This could have far more cross-party support but it's just going to amuse the people who already agreed with it and make everyone else think it's the alt-right letting the mask slip..
Where is 100k for a house deposit coming from?! Don't most people start with a way smaller deposit? Like 5% is common these days. Yes you'll pay an enormous amount of interest. You pay rent to the owning class one way or another.
Probably to demonstrate that to ever actually be financially secure you should be paying off a significant part of your mortgage and not wage slave until retirement to only own 80% of the property due to inflation and rising costs.
If you're buying into the 5% you're probably so fiscally irresponsible that nothing good will come off it. The new builds aren't all magically appreciating in value by 20% every year. And if they did the better house you'd want to move into has almost certainly gone up by 30% or more.
Not really. It's secured against the house so worst case is the lender repossesses. Either way, unless you have money you will be paying rent to the people who do, either via rent or interest payments. Yeah, I don't like it either, but that's the game.
The OP makes it seem like renting and saving huge piles of cash is the only way. It's not. You can buy and save into your house instead. As long as interest plus maintenance etc is the same as what you would have paid in rent, you'll probably end up better off if house ownership is your goal.
C'mon... 3 years have passed and only two job offers applied for? What is Nic's degree in? Babylonian history? When I was in this position I applied to 20 ads per month. In addition to applying I had alerts on my phone, if a job ad dropped that matched my cv well I'd call the recruiter within 5 minutes of posting. I scored two great jobs this way. But this was in IT... I hear every other industry is much, much harder
No. Honestly when you have police arresting pensioners for peaceful protest and a govt which is breaking every election promise and triggering 2 calls to hear for a new election (within 12 months of coming into power). Not too mention the population changes that have happened over the last 20 or so years. Knife crime and acid attacks on the rise, social cohesion at an all time low and a standing populace who are struggling to support a national debt over 90% of GDP. Britain is not "safe" and still continue to be getting worse.
But now I'll ask you if he's not the majority why are you attacking a minority? Do you have something against ethnically English, Scottish or Welsh people?
But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.
I recognise that people have all sorts of different circumstances, so this is not meant to minimise the difficulty of affording property, but I'm just not recognising this claim from the outset that you need a £100k deposit or high paid job to get on the property ladder. It's hard, but it's doable for most.
And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.
I want to move back closer to my family as they are getting older. I would like to move back so I can spend more time with my father as he is retiring this year. To afford a flat in Dorset it is 30,000 deposit. A deposits on a house would be about somewhere between £30,000-£100,000.
These aren't mansions BTW. These are normal 2-3 bed houses.
> But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.
My two bed flat (that I got cheap) is £110,000 and I am in the North-West. I've not seen any houses up here that were worth buying less than £200,000.
You typically need a 15% deposit on a flat. I managed to go with some rando building society and get 10%.
Any houses that are £150,000 are always in horrible parts of town or they are complete dumps and need complete renovation.
If you are on a minimum wage (I spent 8 years on it) it is difficult to save money and when something like the boiler goes you are screwed.
That's incorrect. Half of people earn less than the median salary. Depending on where you live, it could be that a lot more than half earn less than the mean salary.
LISAs are a trap if you want to buy in the South. You can only use it if the value of the property is £450k or less. The limit hasn't been raised since 2017 despite crazy house price inflation. So many people got completely fucked by this; they have their money locked up in the LISA, can't buy a house near London with it, and can't transfer it to something else without a huge penalty.
See: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2025/06/lifetime-isa-...
More broadly, "the govt pays the rest" is part of the problem. All this help-to-buy stuff amounts to demand subsidies that just push prices higher and higher.
In London it limits you. Outside of London, including most of the South, where the vast majority of British people live, most first houses cost less than £450k.
The limit should have been raised though yes. Or perhaps it should be set by region, I don't know. Hopefully it will be updated at some point.
He bought it decades ago much cheaper.
This looks like ragebait.
First 2 things I saw:
- the idea that £100k deposit is needed to buy a house
- some weird stuff about nationwide initiatives and hypothesised awkward conversations with people who might be Muslims.
Maybe I got unlucky?
While I admit that I don't live in the UK, I suspect it's similar to my experience from over the sea in Hamburg. I've recently moved there into a district with >50% migrants for roughly 3 yrs - not really expecting anything as I was still positive about everything.
Finding apartment listings in the online portals explicitly saying they will only allow Muslims was surprising to me, but I ignored it thinking, whatever.
Well, after moving into another apartment in the same area was an eye opener for me.
Really, I'm frankly surprised there are people still in denial how bad it's gotten. Well, not really surprised. I mean I was one of them in 2021.
In it is literally has emails from Linda on total nonsense corporate cringe stuff that I am shielded from because I wfh.
- Wishing a colleague a Eid Mubarak, at which the colleague mentions that she's no longer of the faith.
- It's Odd Socks day for Alzheimer awareness. Will you take off a sock? (No -> Linda disapproves.)
- Bring your dog to work day, will you bring treats to work? (No -> it got canceled anyway because of complaints.)
This just sounds like an exhausting attitude to go through life.
I think generally it was reasonably well done as a novelty joke website that is obviously trying to make a political point. That in itself makes it reasonably interesting IMO.
In fact something like this sounds like it comes straight out of office space.
2. What's wrong with celebrating Diwali?
3. Why should anyone care? Did anyone stop you from celebrating Christmas with your friends and family?
P.s. according to your post history you have based anti capitalist positioning on the pointlessness of most white collar labor, what happened to make you participate on the wrong side in a meaningless culture war that's just a distraction from the reduction in material conditions of the working class?
Also that is quite an overreach on basic observations that are generally agreed upon and weren't anti-capitalist.
Tell me you seriously didn't notice this.
Shops will do whatever makes them profit, they are not strictly run by the government.
A fair number of my family are teachers so check your facts before trying your lazy assertions.
3. Why should anyone care?
Most neoliberals (your entire political class) would vehemently disagree with the idea that the labor market is as high as 30% inefficiency, least of all in white collar jobs. That's not how they believe capitalism works. In their fantasy, pointless jobs can't exist, or at least not at such a high volume, since the invisible hand of the market would eliminate them.
You are of course right and they are wrong but my point is not many would agree with us.
Even wealth can’t magically summon the humans necessary to do that kind of work, robots are no solution for the foreseeable future and I don’t think starting a family is easy if you have to take care of your parents and/or grandparents.
You’re twisting the past to fit into your contrived narrative of immigrants somehow wage-dumping us, but that’s simply wrong, it’s not what has happened in the EU.
It’s not that natives don’t want to work, it’s that immigrants undercut everybody. Not to mention what they’ve done to the housing sector of course. It’s unlivable. We run a country, not a charity.
Edit since I can’t respond anymore:
You assume two things: that you can’t work for less than the minimum wage (you can, since most elder care work is paid under the table) and that you can have a good life with the minimum wage (you can’t, unless you are okay with truly bad living conditions).
And a country has to prioritise the wellbeing of the natives first. You can’t destroy the lives of the poor and the young natives just to feel better about yourself.
We run a country, true; not a capitalist venture. A country is also built on ethics, and that entails adhering to basic human rights for all humans.
But yes, I agree, we need to tilt the scales back towards the young.
Plus there are enough people to care of old people. It’s just that immigrants cause such downward pressure on salaries that elder care is not a viable job sector for most.
The immigration policies of my home country Sweden has been detrimental for the Swedes.
I live in Zürich and there are a lot of foreigners here. Here it’s not so clear cut if it’s for the better or for the worse.
It doesn't address the other problems such as social cohesion.
because the wages are low, why are the wages low? because these jobs have access to an unlimited amount of strikebreakers/migrants willing to do them for those low wages, so the wage stays suppressed and low, instead of allowing market mechanics to bring those wages up
UK finances have wafer-thin fiscal headroom. A significant chunk of monthly borrowing is spent on interest payments.
There is no surplus for increased spending on public services. If demand keeps increasing and supply remains the same, people can feel their quality of life decreasing.
A rapidly increasing population has a greater need for GP appointments, hospital treatment, school places, housing, food, policing, roads, electricity, water, sewage, etc. You can think of it as a meta issue that affects many of our existing capacity problems.
So those who want to hand-wave away immigration as a right-wing dog whistle need to put a bit more thought into it.
Plenty of western mercenary groups supporting traditional land takeover by corporations, funding radical groups to destabilize effective governments forming or growing in strength is still ongoing.
None the less it continues to happen.
Immigration has had many negative effects on social cohesion in the UK. That is just an unfortunate fact. That is obvious if you have lived in poorer areas of some the cities in the UK.
When this subject is normally broached on TV channels such as the BBC. The argument often put forth is that we should accept large amounts of immigration because of the the British Empire and the wars in the Middle-East. It is often framed as if we should accept it as a form of punishment.
That is how many of the left talk about it. Some are more coy than others, but nonetheless that is the theme.
I certainly don't care for it and I certainly doesn't endear me to anyone making the argument.
> But your government did not pay for reparations either, while at the same time, your government does hold other countries for doing so in their own wars (validly so).
So? The vast majority of the people in country had nothing to do with those events.
In the first chapter of "Anatomy of the State" this idea is utterly demolished.
> With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, “we are the government.” The useful collective term “we” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves”; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have “committed suicide,” since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.
It's almost immediately laundered back into London & Paris real estate and Swiss bank accounts.
Wait, you thought Western countries were handing out gibs/NEETbux to African countries just because they feel bad for them?
How are people supposed to get things right when they are constantly misled by both their governments and intuitions?
Even North Korea is more well developed despite being an isolated communist state run by a mafia.
...
Actually, no, by an immigrant from Poland.
Tbh I do think we should look to them for how they deal with the Muslims
Over the past 30-80 years, Western countries collected social security contributions from workers but instead of investing/saving them, spent it all like tax. To fund pensions for that now-aged generation, you need fresh, warm bodies to pay taxes.
Sadly, that generation (boomers) had q modest fertility rate. They also live significantly longer than when social security became a norm in the West. 20-30 years more. So you need to tax their kids aggressively for longer to fund pensions & benefits for the boomers. Oh, and since the boomers' kids are having even fewer kids, it's a vicious cycle.
One way to remedy this is to suck in taxpayers from other countries & put them to work paying for the comfort of the boomers until they shuffle off the mortal coil.
So, here are your options:
1. Cut off the boomers and let them starve. But, it's untenable since their votes are a huge bloc and they'd revolt.
2. Expel every single immigrant and tax receipts will plummet. Your indig. young people will pay even more taxes to fund the boomers, unless you revert back to No. 1. Again, not tenable unless you abolish your democracy and establish a dictatorial state.
3. Maintain the current model and let it drag on.
It did not have to be like this. You could have taken Singapore's path of accumulating massive reserves ($2.5 trillion for 6 million people), but you didn't. I hope you figure it out, but I don't think anything drastic will happen.
Just like in Greece, when European lenders told them to impose austerity, leftist parties claimed they'd get into power and maintain all the benefits they'd promised the people. Fuck the globalists.
But, they got into power and realized their finances were well and truly fucked and they had to quietly undergo restructuring despite all their huffing and puffing.
Many immigrants commit crimes, yes, and I believe they need to be repressed. But, many others gratefully work and pay taxes. If you want to expel them, you need to be ready for the options above. Even if you are, many of your countrymen are not.
[...]
2. Expel every single immigrant
3. Maintain the current model
How about another, more nuanced option: let in those immigrants who are willing to work (and, ideally, integrate), and not everybody?
And also, crack down on illegal employment. Maybe being an undeclared, underpaid cook in some EU restaurant is better than being bombed in Syria or shot by some random dictator's goons in Africa, but that doesn't really help the local society if it's unfair competition. If you accept people in, insist that they have papers and can afford to be regular members of society.
It's a you problem.
Europeans colonised and took over most of the world. As in, they moved to places that weren't theirs and imposed their values unto others to steal as much as they could from the countries they invaded. Now they complain others are doing the same to them and whine when others are fighting back.
I got a question that was about extinction rebellion blocking my bus. I chose "move them out of the way." The result:
> You and another guy chuck them off the road. The bus drives through and you run after it and jump back on. The protestors are crying.
Eugh. And everyone clapped. The other guy? Albert Einstein.
It literally happened, though? Bus and everything? More than once, in fact:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/09/watch-motorists-...
https://news.sky.com/story/furious-commuters-drag-extinction...
The veiled racism and bigotry in the "sim" is cheap. The current housing situation may be made worse by migration, but the majority of it is legal so hardly the migrants fault if we are inviting them.
So blame the government (predominantly Conservative over the last 20 years) and all the NIMBYs and hypocrites that stop anything changing in this glorious country.
Of course not, but it's the fault of whoever lobbied for and passed those laws.
> we are inviting them.
Who is this "we"? It's not the British people.
The UK government, needing workers to help fill post-war labour shortages and rebuild the economy, invited many British people to come to the metropole.
Like all those dark skinned folk of the Windrush generation, and a good number of people who came across to the UK from India and Pakistan.
In more recent, pre-Brexit, years that invitation to fill a labour vacuum went out to fellow EU member states.
The Celts, the Saxons, the Romans, the Danes, the Normans, the French, etc?
But I was talking about Brits in a wider sense -- the people with British passports and voting rights at the time when those mass migration laws were passed. Which happened against their consent.
> the people whose majority of ancestors two centuries ago were living on the British Isles.
So .. not the House of Windsor then.
> Brits in a wider sense -- Which happened against their consent.
Near as I understand British history not much happened with the broad consent of the masses, hence all the castles and defensive structures built to protect "rulers" from "ethnic brits".
The people that migrated to Britain in the Windrush generation were also British citizens, if you check your history you may recall a long phase in which the then ethnic British majority (who all originated from outside of Britain having cleansed the prior group of ethnic brits) went about claiming large chunks of other peoples multi-generation lands as their own and dabbling in more than a smidgen of miscegenation.
This is just history, beware the seeds you sow, they have a way of coming home to roost.
Maybe not you, but plenty of British people support immigration. Believe it or not.
not many i bet
has any government ever went to an election with the promise that they are going to increase immigration rates if they are elected, and won?
no because its electoral suicide to do so
So no-one is safe from being made fun of.
I do not find the average person holds these views. I certainly don't want to play a game that assumes I agree with them.
Also
> I don't believe people think that way
...
You're living in a bubble
That part actually made me LOL.
I like that the site seems to use the gov.uk styling.
You can rent a nice, 2 bedroom flat with two showers+toilets, 13 mins' walk from a London Underground station in zone 3, for less than £2,000.
Even if they don't want to share with another couple, Nick and his girlfriend should each be paying less than £1,000, no?
> A 50,000 home new town in Kent is blocked because they found nests full of agitated Chupacabras following the government's 'reintroduction' of the cryptid to British arable land. Your deposit requirement increases by £5000.
This is too real...
This isn't a criticism just an interesting case of unconscious bias at play and how we tend to universalise our experiences.
This is in fact an extremely large, dare I say representative, demographic. Je suis Nicolas (30 ans) aussi. And his counterpart Nicola (30 ans) has similar problems herself.
>A black lesbian living in Derry would have a vastly different experience despite being just as much "30 year old in the UK."
By the 2021 census population pyramid, about 12,000 / 1.9M = 0.63% of the population are 30 year old women in Northern Ireland, and about 0.58% of the Northern Ireland population is black. Maybe 5% of women are lesbian? Derry's population is 85,000. So 85k * 0.63% * 0.58% * 5% = 0.15 of a person.
>This isn't a criticism
You are in fact criticising it by accusing the author of "unconscious bias" (and various -isms by insinuation).
It might well be. I didn't suggest otherwise.
> You are in fact criticising it by accusing the author of "unconscious bias"
No, I'm not, that's why I took the time to explicitly say so. I made no "accusation," you've just taken it that way. We all have unconscious biases and we all act them out in various ways. I made absolutely no value judgement and I think I'm a healthy society we should be able to talk about these things without everything having to be taken as an accusation.
> population pyramid
I intentionally used an atypical demographic reality to demonstrate my point: that person is just as much "a 30 year old in the UK" as Nicolas. There are obviously many millions of other people who are not like Nicolas and it's reasonable that a conversation includes an eye to the diversity of experience around us for a host of different reasons.
>I intentionally used an atypical demographic reality to demonstrate my point: that person is just as much "a 30 year old in the UK" as Nicolas. There are obviously many millions of other people who are not like Nicolas and it's reasonable that a conversation includes an eye to the diversity of experience around us for a host of different reasons.
The housing market in SE England sucks if you're young and work for a living; doesn't matter if gay or straight, man or woman, black or white. At any rate, I reject the notion that we can't talk about problems unless literally every last little niche demographic is affected. Not everything is about everyone. Someone must speak for Nick (30 ans).
You're welcome believe what you like but I'm not sure why I should engage with you if you refuse to believe what I assert about my own position and if you insist on re-framing my words with an accusatory tone that wasn't there.
I believe unconscious biases can and do have harmful effects yes. But everyone has them and it's common to let them influence our work. There's no shame in it and I certainly didn't make any value judgement against the author of this piece.
> The housing market in SE England sucks if you're young and work for a living; doesn't matter if gay or straight, man or woman
Similarly, I haven't made any statement remotely to the contrary. This is a strawman.
> I reject the notion that we can't talk about problems unless literally every last little niche demographic is affected.
And once again: this is not a notion that could be reasonably construed from what I said above.
I hope you feel better after getting your emotions out but I would encourage you to re-read this thread tomorrow and ask yourself how much you were projecting and perceived qualm onto me.
I hope you have a good night in any case. Goodbye
There is no way to win. I know many young people who are very comfortably in the top 5% of earners in the UK, paying tens of thousands of pounds of income tax per year, and are still locked into paying massive amounts of rent, because it's near-impossible to actually own a house here at this point. So quite honestly, what is the point any more? It's really no wonder UK productivity is dropping.
It's really hard to describe how bad the general vibe is here.
Meanwhile pensioners sit comfortably in four-bed houses in London suburbs with triple lock pensions guaranteed by the government.
I reject this generational war thing though. British state pensions are the worst in Europe. The triple lock doesn't make pensioners rich; it just keeps them from sliding into abject poverty.
Eh, think that depends upon your social circles, sure it's not perfect but the vibes just fine from my perspective. There seems to be a massive swelling of online opinion that everything's terrible and everyone's deeply unmotivated which certainly doesn't match lived reality for me
> Escape from system (fire protection trades)
> Build popular web platform for Korean pop music
> Google redirects all korean queries to indian seo scammers for three years (eg, google "BTS" or "BLACKPINK" and count the indian URLs)
If you're buying into the 5% you're probably so fiscally irresponsible that nothing good will come off it. The new builds aren't all magically appreciating in value by 20% every year. And if they did the better house you'd want to move into has almost certainly gone up by 30% or more.
5% down is insane. predatory lending IMHO.
The OP makes it seem like renting and saving huge piles of cash is the only way. It's not. You can buy and save into your house instead. As long as interest plus maintenance etc is the same as what you would have paid in rent, you'll probably end up better off if house ownership is your goal.
I mean, you are literally in power, you can just change it. What's the point of this?
Oh. Just more conservative self-victimization about made up issues. Truly pathetic.
But now I'll ask you if he's not the majority why are you attacking a minority? Do you have something against ethnically English, Scottish or Welsh people?
Hang in there UK.