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This is Labour at its best. They seem to make their policies without thinking them through, then make a cock-up.

To have a rule book with 200 pages, is typical of them. They have complicated every law, that they have passed.

It was a good headline at the time ///

virtualpostie at #1

May I be allowed a minor correction to your posting?

"This is NEW Labour at its best."

I cannot imagine Wilson, Healey, Crossland, et al, or even Foot, Castle and Kinnock following the path of the current lot of has beens who never were.

Balls - says it all, unless you want to beat the barrell with Cooper. (Get it?).


What a sad day for us all when John Smith passed away. It would have been a privelige to see what he might have achieved as a true socialist.

Only the good die young, as they say.

Mr Brown is both very clever and very dangerous to surround himself with such ineffectual cabinet members.

But, if your snoughts in the trough........

Labour - Hard Labour- I think that is all there is on the horizon

It's typical of Labour, spin and no substance. They have no regard for the taxpayers they purport to represent, they are still, in spite of all the psuedo modernisation they spout, stuck in a left wing timewarp which they think they can manipulate into a populist scenario. Like every Labour government since the second world war, they are totally incompetent ,dishonest and without principle. This mortgage support scheme was a non starter from the beginning, aimed at the over indulgent, the lazy and those with no intention of fulfilling their obligations to the lender. The hard working who lose their job will find that they are not included in the scheme, unless you are part of the state welfare army you have had it.

It is a bit .

It only applies to those who've lost income either as a single earner or as an earner in a two earner family and only if they can prove that it isn't a permanent loss of income to ensure that they can take the mortgage back on at the end of the scheme.

The borrower and lender have to convert the mortgage to interest only and they borrower still has to come up with 30% minimum of each monthly interest payment. The rest gets added to the total still owed and has to be paid back in the future.

If you're looking at long-term unemployment for whatever reason then you won't get onto this scheme. You also still have to have enough income coming in to pay a minimum of 30% of the interest charges and to have savings of less than £16,000.

I don't think that there will be a huge takeup of this scheme.

It's odd because the banks and their major shareholder and guarantor the Government are desperate to keep house prices up because if the prices keep falling then their house loans become worthless and unrecoverable. Selling a house in a falling market where there is a surplus of houses on the market will never enable them to recover the money they lent out as mortgages.

It is another problem linked with 100% and 125% mortgages. If a bank only lends 80% of the value of a house then the house price has to fall 20% before the value of the house falls below the value of the loan.

The banks used to understand this but then they got greedy and stupid and thought house prices would rise forever.

Dougthedug # 4

"If you're looking at long-term unemployment for whatever reason then you won't get onto this scheme. You also still have to have enough income coming in to pay a minimum of 30% of the interest charges and to have savings of less than ?16,000".

Is it safe to think Fred Goodwin will not qualify on points one or three but might just scrape in on point two? Assuming that is that he hasn`t taken himself offshore like the taxes Royal Bank of Taxpayer should have been paying.

Douglas:

I think that the government is having a hard-time making decisions regarding what steps are required to overcome the economic downturn...Regarding employment opportunities..

~Dennis Junior~

Douglas:

The idea that borrowers could defer interest payments for up to two years, and then face a bill for all the backed-up payments plus the risk of a house worth even less, may not prove all that attractive, he suggested.

This idea, with all due respect to the author of it...It is not a brilliant idea...Since, it will delay the time of someone house will be returned to the banker...

~Dennis Junior~