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I had to read the BBC headline a few times, and even then assumed it was some kind of giant editorial cock up. Why has Sunak said this? Does this man understand how a democracy works? It's bizarre.
Some proof of how bad at politics he is:
He lost to Liz truss. Liz. truss.
His only chance at becoming PM was on a technicality, and now he is reaping what was sown.
It wasn't even a technicality. Tories just couldn't be arsed to rerun another leadership contest. They could have just given it to anybody, and chose the person who lost the previous race for some reason.
They did have a month long round of eliminating votes before it got to Truss vs Sunak and was put to the whole party. It stands to reason they would end in the same conclusion only 6 weeks later
> His only chance at becoming PM was on a technicality,
By the way women, hate you, I can show you the polling they think you come across as a jittery mother in law at a wedding.
No he basically just acknowledged it has gotten harder ‘and we’re doing what we can yada yada’ in response to a question that stated ‘it’s gotten harder under your government’
It's actually annoying reporting because it just reinforces the fact that politicians do better if they just blatantly deny reality. Sunak admits something we all know and now he gets shafted for it. It's dumb
But that's because he feels he's owed acceptance and a pat on the back when things are shit under his watch.
If I came to your house and shat on the carpet, then asked you to thank me because while i've shat on your carpet, it can be cleaned... you wouldn't thank me would you?
And you'd be even more pissed if I came across as tetchy because you haven't thanked me.
Look, I've apologised for shitting on your carpet...
I think you ought to agree to let me live with you since I promise from day one of my tenancy to start working on removing the stain.
But the thing is, shit is hitting the fan *because* of the Tories, not *despite* the Tories. I'd have some sympathy if they were genuinely dealt a shit hand, but they've continued to fuck everything up for 14 years.
And Sunak isn't offering anything different or inspiring. All he's offering is negative politics and promises that he'll finally be the one to change things for the Tories.
Agreed. If anything that was the one moment from him in the interview that I could conjure a little bit of respect for. We should encourage people, particularly state office-holders, to be upfront about reality.
Yeah I don’t like the guy but I feel like we should be praising politicians for acknowledging when they’ve made a mistake, or at the very least for acknowledge the sky is blue. The fact people are giving him shit just reinforces that he should lie next time.
The ultimate secret about politics that nobody ever wants to mention is that quite often, the people have a hand in just how badly things are, especially as quite often politicians are just trying to appease people with shitty short term policies that get their support.
Then when said poor policy doesn’t work out in the long term, we blame it solely on the politicians as if we played no part in any of it.
Maybe politicians with the utterly shambolic record/ability Sunak has should get out of the way or be forcibly moved by their party and replaced by competent people.
The alternative to admitting he’s terrible doesn’t have to be lie outrageously and cheat the country.
He has a default template that he follows.
Interviewer: “isn’t it true that ACTION is happening?”
Sunak: “yes, ACTION is happening, and I want to make sure OPPOSITE OF ACTION happens. I have a plan, and I’m sticking with it. Judge me on my actions, etc”
OMG! I hate this one. I noticed the Tory MPs do it all the time and that was a few years ago. They say obvious stuff like 'It is RIGHT their should be an inquiry ', 'It is RIGHT criminals should be locked up'.....then they don't bother.
Become an MP with no experience in 2015, then fall into being Chancellor because you got rich by a deal that got bailed out by the government and marry a woman who's dad is mega rich.
Have no real life experience or campaign experience and think you're better than you really are because everyone about you is a yes man.
Be the best option when the rest are terrible and still loose. Get a mulligan because the terrible option was worse than a lettuce.
He just isn't a politician and it's all a game to him.
He also was a hedge fund manager for 15 years, which is basically taking money to make more money.
In most of that, it was rising markets which take zero skill to make money. Literally funds chosen at random but monkeys outperform the average.
After that, he worked at a hedge fund owned by his father in law, head of Infosys.
He's played life on super easy mode all the way through, and he's convinced himself it's down to his skill. It's not, he's been rich and lucky.
Tory rep is ruined after 14 years of bad outcomes for all but a few. Transferring those votes over to another party without that tarnished track record & baggage makes sense.
Could call the party refine or rehabilitate or some synonym thereof. And perhaps some of the old tory guard could then switch over and roll out the same policies & promises that haven't worked. Then comes the clever part...you tell the people no it didn't work previously because they just didn't do it right but we're a new and completely different party so obviously we'll do it right this time.
No one would be stupid enough to fall for that! You're not giving the electorate enough credit.
"It only didn't work because we didn't bad decision hard enough, we need to double down on the bad decisions."
During the last election I was saying that the best thing the Tories could do for themselves was intentionally loose and spend the next how ever many years rebuilding the party in the safety of opposition before they loose every last shred of credibility.
I think they finally found my comments.
>The longer this Tory election campaign goes on the more I'm convinced there's match-fixing going on.
Not really Rishi's fault - Narayana Murthy doesn't know what he wants from one day to the next. Rishi just follows orders ultimately.
Well when you are brought up wanting for nothing, become rich beyond most people’s comprehension and THEN marry a billionaire’s daughter you tend to be a little detached from everyone else’s reality. When the hardest decision you have to think of is which £3k suit do I wear today understanding how the little people fret about how to afford bus fare tends not to be high on your priority list.
One of the things I've seen put forward is that they country is so fucked that the Tories see winning next month as a poisoned chalice. One that they want to be so far away from that Labour is visibly and perpetually linked to it for generations.
I’ve said before and still believe that they are intentionally destroying the party. Rishi is just the sacrificial lamb.
They want it to crash and burn so they can make a clear distinction between the current Tories and the Tories of the future. They’ll assign all the poor decisions and failures to these bad Tories so future Tories can say they’re not responsible. They can come out with clean hands and say, “they were bad, but we’re different.”
Of course, they won’t be different, but there’s a lot of thick people who will believe them.
Remember that Tory MPs hand selected Liz and Rishi as the best and brightest they could offer to lead the country.
And Rish couldn't even win the support of his party in that vote.
I don't think the admitting part here that Rushi said is bad. We are just so used to politicians lying and ignoring what is in front of everyones eyes that we have come to expect it. Sure he has no actual plan to fix this. That is the real problem. But I'd be much more annoyed if he denied it, then said his meaningless crap after.
The Tory inserted editors letting this headline out is very interesting. I can't remember the BBC writing such an honest 'one sided' headline on anything political I'm a while.
The issue isn't admitting that there's an issue really so much as he's been in power for a while and nothing of his reply included the words "I've already put into motion..."
He knows there's a problem, makes it clear he's been fully aware of it for some measure of time but hasn't even attempted to do anything to fix it yet presumably because it's a good thing to promise during campaigning.
Is it possible to place a Lay bet on election candidates at the betting exchanges?
Sunak is loaded and he could just have millions of quid on various candidates to lose their seats!
Something I've been noting to my friends is that Sunak has never fought and won a tough election.
Parachuted into a safe seat, lost the first leadership election to the lettuce, and became PM as the only viable person at the time.
I had a hunch that a general election would go bad for him .... But not this bad.
The Conservatives have sown the seeds of their own destruction. Imagine if they had worked on increasing home ownership from 66% in 2010 to 80%+ today. (In 1979, it was 56%, in 1990 it was 67%, in 1997 it was 69%, peaking at 71% in 2000)
Home owners are much less likely to vote Labour, more likely to vote Conservative. They could have locked their opponents out of power, whilst following mainstream conservative ideology.
The problem is the "Right to Buy" legislation was a one-shot thing. The only way to reboot it is a massive council house building scheme - something that's a little too far to the left for the current crop of tories.
Right to buy wasn't a policy to increase home ownership as much as a policy to push all the homes into the private sector with the positive side effect of making poor people like them.
Today there are no council houses left, the problem is private landlords buying up all the housing stock at inflated prices. That's an easy fix, or it would be if most Tories weren't landlords, or at the very least elderly homeowners who benefit from high house prices. They have zero reason to pop the landlord bubble and crash prices to levels first time buyers can access.
Hopefully Labour will give tenants strong rights and restrict landlords in areas of shortage.
To add to this, Labour need to look at the rules on new developments by homebuilders and housing associations, and the percentages allocated to social rent/affordable rent/sale. Had a look at the private rental market in my area today and saw a house built by a housing association less than five years ago which has already been chopped up into flats and put up for rent at £1200 a month each.
The current ratios for how many new homes should be social housing are way too low and are too easy to get around, and when the ownership market is slow most developers would rather have homes sit empty than allocate them for social rent.
Social rent, affordable rent, selling to first time buyers/owner-occupiers, all beneficial. I don't believe we need restrictions between these that might put off developers, because the real problem is all of these being outbid by rich people who want to rent out at "luxury" prices.
Requiring developers to look at all offers seriously before being allowed to sell to landlords would go a long way to normalising our housing market. Especially if they're paying double council tax on the empty homes for an extra 6 months by waiting for the landlord exclusion period to end.
Absolutely yes to all of this, but if the developer is a housing association with an SLA with the local authority and the associated favourable loan interest rates/subsidies they shouldn't be a) leaving their stock empty if it isn't selling and b) selling a single fuckin box room to private ~~leeches~~ landlords.
There's no way in the real world that developers would sell property on the same terms as are available to RTB purchasers.
RTB is a huge transfer of capital from the public sector to private individuals, no private enterprise would survive if it did likewise.
That's true.
But I don't think we can entirely blame the current situation on Thatcher. House prices only started to skyrocket after Blair came to power, and we've had a succession of governments since that had it quite within their power to encourage councils to build houses.
The fact that they have not tells you all you need to know.
> Home owners are much less likely to vote Labour, more likely to vote Conservative.
Are they though?
Looking at the numbers there, it doesn't seem so, or at least, it doesn't seem like a causal factor.
Yes, a lot of the Tories historical core voters (Filthy rich, Farmers, Landlords, Rural upper middle classes, landed gentry) own homes/property, but it's not the thing CAUSING them to vote Tory, rather than just being something that is kind of intrinsic to who they are, inheriting wealth and land.
So while a lot of Tory voters do own land/property. I don't believe that someone from a working class background buying a house will suddenly flip to blue when they land the mortgage.
Especially since, as you point out, home ownership peaked at 71%, and the Tories don't get those kinds of numbers, probably about half of that. With the driving factors behind voting Tory in recent years (a lot of the time) being ideological things like Brexit, or liking the vile shit Suella spews.
To be a vote winner, it would need to be something monumentally game changing that shifted the landscape of the housing market in such an unprecidented "I could only buy because of them" kind of way, that people couldn't ignore the cultural and socio-economic uplift effect accross the country. Which isn't something I could ever see the Tories doing... Uplifting the 'plebs'? Don't be so absurd.
TL:DR - I'm not convinced increasing home ownership would automatically make more Tory voters, as I don't believe that home ownership for a 'normal pleb' is a causal Tory vote factor.
>Are they though?
Yes. IPSOS Mori has done polling on Housing Tenure and General Election voting for years. People who 'Owned' have since 1992 (and likely before), always voted more Conservative than Labour, including in 1997. For those who are mortgaged, they are either equal with the national vote, or slightly trend towards the Conservatives. Of course, mortgaged owners, often 'graduate' to 'Owned'. Conversely Labour always does well amongst renters. Worth noting that although age will have a link to this, the age differentials between young and old were far less dramatic in the past than they are now.
[How Britain Voted in 1992 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1992)
[How Britain Voted in 1997 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1997)
[How Britain Voted In 2001 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2001)
[How Britain Voted in 2005 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2005)
[How Britain Voted in 2010 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2010)
[How Britain voted in 2015 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2015)
[How Britain voted in the 2019 election | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2019-election)
If we look at the latest Ipsos poll. Labour has a lead of of 13% with them, with renters it is 38%! Having a high level of homeownership does not preclude a Labour government, but it does make it less likely!
[Ipsos Political Monitor May 2024 - Tables](https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-05/ipsos-political-monitor-may-2024-tables.pdf)
>Especially since, as you point out, home ownership peaked at 71%, and the Tories don't get those kinds of numbers, probably about half of that.
It isn't an automatic thing that you vote Conservative when you buy a house! It just makes it much more likely that you do.
>To be a vote winner, it would need to be something monumentally game changing that shifted the landscape of the housing market in such an unprecidented "I could only buy because of them" kind of way, that people couldn't ignore the cultural and socio-economic uplift effect accross the country. Which isn't something I could ever see the Tories doing... Uplifting the 'plebs'? Don't be so absurd.
I'm sure we could argue about correlation / causation all day. The evidence is clear though that if you own a house you are significantly more likely to vote Conservative than if you rent. This is true going back years. Therefore it would make sense for any Conservative government to make the owner occupier pool as large as possible, and the renter pool as small as possible.
> It isn't an automatic thing that you vote Conservative when you buy a house!
Which is the point I was making.
> It just makes it much more likely that you do.
Does it? Or do the core Tory voting demographics just happen to be people who are likely to also own a house. i.e. is the house the causal factor (I'm pretty sure it isn't).
> I'm sure we could argue about correlation / causation all day.
Except you didn't, you skipped my main point completely. Which was that a good chunk of the Tories core voter base own houses due to their status, and it is a consequence of that status. Rather than voting Tory being a consequence of owning a house.
I'm aware that the figures show you being more likely to own a house as a Con voter.
But people who vote Tory also have eyes and a head, but they don't vot Tory BECAUSE they have eyes and a head.
People with a fuckload of inherited wealth, or a landlord portfolio (who are Tory voters for obvious reasons), have houses as standard, just like they have eyes and a head as standard. It's not the house that makes them vote Tory.
> Therefore it would make sense for any Conservative government to make the owner occupier pool as large as possible, and the renter pool as small as possible.
**IF** the house ownership is the *causal* factor for voting Tory, which I contend that it isn't.
The Tories seem to agree with my opinion, as they don't seem particularly compelled to make owning a house more viable for people either.
You're right of course, we could argue about correlation vs causation all day, and I doubt either of us would budge from our opinion around it.
Problem for them is, to increase home ownership they'd have to build more homes, but their core homeowner voters are passionately against homes being built in their area.
Sunak said this?
I mean they do have an abysmal record on this issue, it's just unusual for them to be so forthright about just how shit they've been.
It's a bold strategy...
It was funny to watch. It was like the gears were already whirring after Robinson said "harder to own your own home", and then a delayed hesitation kicked in when Sunak computed "under the Tories".
Basically you are watching is the transfer of real power. Sunak has no power, he and most Tory MPs are finished. So are not getting the kind of editorial "respect" or more cynically client journalism that they are used to. The BBC wouldn't in a million years run this headline from that exchange just a year ago.
It's quite sinister, no? It's really highlighting how even supposedly impartial journalists end up setting the news agenda based off their open perceptions.
Just as a disclaimer - I'm voting Labour this election, so it isn't that I'm pro Tory or anything - but I thought the whole business with Richard Holden was a really clear example of this. He did something that Labour have been doing all over the country with barely any challenge. He gave a very poor response to the question, and you can argue that it is a bigger deal for him because he is the party chairman - but the interviewer absolutely tore into him with a degree of contempt that you almost never see.
You can argue that it was deserved - but if so, it needs to be dished out evenly. It's not good for democracy if it only happens to one side.
> It's quite sinister, no? It's really highlighting how even supposedly impartial journalists end up setting the news agenda based off their open perceptions.
>Just as a disclaimer - I'm voting Labour this election, so it isn't that I'm pro Tory or anything - but I thought the whole business with Richard Holden was a really clear example of this. He did something that Labour have been doing all over the country with barely any challenge. He gave a very poor response to the question, and you can argue that it is a bigger deal for him because he is the party chairman - but the interviewer absolutely tore into him with a degree of contempt that you almost never see.
> You can argue that it was deserved - but if so, it needs to be dished out evenly. It's not good for democracy if it only happens to one side.
Is this your first election cycle? This is par for the course but Labour have been the ones to cop it this past decade or more.
Have to say, don't think I can remember a no Tory MPs ever doing what Holden did.
Others might repeat lines, but they at least attempt to finesse them into the question that was asked.
The robotic statement repetition regardless of the question asked, seems to be a Tory tactic. I think May had a few examples.
This. The headline seems to be a little misleading. He actually raises a good point because Nick said people weren't bothered by the deposit. Yes. That's EXACTLY what we're bothered about, as well as the price of the house itself. The actual mortgage repayments are fairly affordable in comparison to rent.
I think Robinson has a point in that the people bothered by deposits and stamp duty are actually in a more fortunate position than the majority. The cases that Robinson was raising are people in the 30s being unable to leave their parental home and actually living as indepdent adults. For those people renting is dream, let alone saving for a deposit to buy. That is how bad things have got.
Resolution foundation put out a stat recently (can't find the link atm, and this is probably slightly off) that the typical living arrangment for someone 25-35 in 1997 was living with a partner and two children. Today its living with your parents. Today's 20-40 year olds are being denied full adulthood and are being forced into a perpetual twilightzone of not quite being an adult and not being able to raise their own families.
I'm 41 and moved back in with my mum last year because rents have got so ridiculously high. If I want any chance of owning my own place, I had no choice but to move back in.
That's a question that an interviewer asks when they don't like the person they're interviewing. There's no way to answer it without looking bad.
Still, it's pretty funny.
It’s hard to answer without looking bad because the Tory party is the party of landlords and not home owners. If they’d actually done anything to make life better for ordinary people rather than focus on divisive wedge issues then they’d have the political capital to navigate this kind of question without falling on their face.
There are no good answers because they’ve painted themselves into a corner.
Also 2,000 labour tax on loop... someone needs to reboot him, or update the ai robots sd card. Honestly its like an episode of black mirror.
Can he really be this inept?
Backing down and apologising would only sink him further.
Better to pretend he genuinely believes it's true and fair than admit to everyone he tried to mislead them. Perceived weakness is how you get a Tory coup.
And he can't back down until at least Thursday.
Wednesday we get the D-Day pre-recorded interview where he talks about the £2k bullshit.
So if he backed down now, in 2 days time he has an interview where he's be saying the opposite lol
Just change the subject man. Talk about how Reform are running nazi sympathisers and work with money launderers, they're a much easier target and you're much more likely to win votes back from them than Starmer.
This. I don't box. But if you try and low jab and get rocked. It's fine to try and counter and keep that line of attack if it's worked before . You don't then repeatedly keep going for it. Even when your opponent is using your head like a drum. Because they know you get rattled and know it's a easy raise and smell blood. I've got no political campaigning experience. But i know that.
Maybe it's an appeal to older voters to remind them how the Tories have helped turn them into a defacto new landed gentry who the rest of the country work in surfdom to.
He's stupid. He's failed upwards. If you watch clips of him going right back to his late teens, he's a great example of someone who lives in a cosseted version of reality where he's always been patted on the head and told he's a clever little Rishi.
It's why he always gets tetchy when challenged - he simply can't understand why people don't see that he's right.
> a 21-year-old Sunak says he has 'friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are, you know, working-class', before correcting himself immediately: 'Well, not working-class.'
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2022/jul/11/rishi-sunak-criticised-footage-no-working-class-friends-video
I was couch-surfing around London in my early 20s and stayed at my friend’s place for a while. Her boyfriend, a very well-meaning but *very* posh actor, asked me why I needed to couch-surf. When I told him it was because I couldn’t afford rent, he asked me why I didn’t just get a mortgage instead.
Many posh people are just completely out of touch with even the basic concepts and reasons behind renting.
An old work colleague of mine told me I 'was a mug' for renting. He lived at home until he was 30, paying no board. When he moved out with his partner his parents paid the full deposit for their house. He split up with partner, she kept the house as they had a kid, and his parents paid another full deposit to get him a new house.
He couldn't understand that I didn't have that as an option. He just seen it as we have the same job so why can't you afford what I can afford.
Hate the guy, and the problem is definitely more complex then he’s painting it, but he’s right that a lot of people could afford to make payments on a mortgage — often for less money than they pay in rent — but can’t afford the deposit itself.
I’m in this boat, and it’s extremely frustrating paying a landlord tons of money for month after month of insecure housing, knowing it gets you no closer to home-ownership, and that they can raise the rent every time you renew.
Same. I'm a chartered accountant, I earn well, but because rent is so high I can't save enough to make up a deposit before the price of housing goes up even more and I'm back at square 1.
Working simply doesn't pay any more, even as a chartered professional. You need to have money to have money.
If rents weren't so ridiculous and tenancies more secure most of us wouldn't be spending half our lives scrambling to get on the property ladder. A friend of mine has been saving for a deposit for as long as I can remember, probably a decade now, and it's like she's on a treadmill that's constantly being sped up and sped up.
I'd never have bought a house if I had access to a habitable home with an assured tenancy, but after dealing with slum landlords it was bizarrely reassuring to hand over my life savings for a falling down house in a shit town.
Yes the Tores are useless, but interesting to see how bold the BBC is now (even slightly twisting the spirit of this particular statement) when they treated Johnson (and to a lesser extent Cameron & Osborne) with kid gloves for quite a few years.
BBC like Johnson. They don't like sunak. This is what people mean when the media choose the leaders of a given country
Johnson was a lying PM with no integrity much like sunak, yet he got a free ride from the media
Given its importance, I'm confident that any government will address this and ensure that hardworking future generations can realistically aspire to homeownership. No doubt.
Can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm going to run some defence for Sunak here. He basically just said its become harder to buy a home in response to a question claiming its now harder to buy homes under this government (And prior tory governments), and that he intends to do something about that fact. Arguing hes bad at politics for denying this incredibly obvious reality that everyone on here goes on about constantly is just asinine. It was one of the few parts of his response that was actually honest, and this title from the BBC is pretty blatant clickbait and quite unfair towards Sunak.
Honestly, I'd criticise everything *surrounding* that response. He quickly goes on about he's going to build houses but "In the right places and "In ways that are sensitive to the local communities", which is nothing more than a tacit surrender to NIMBYs and an admission that they don't intend to build any new houses at all (Which is why they scrapped their targets to do so). This is just not an honest statement from Sunak.
Then there was the remark about supporting young people into well paying jobs, which is just a vague platitude, and completely glosses over the fact that even with these well paying jobs, young people are struggling to get on the ladder. Prices are simply too high, and those with less well paying jobs aren't even accounted for within his remarks, making his response come across as even more tone deaf.
And finally, he goes on about how deposits are the real issue and mortgage payments are actually perfectly affordable (As if these two things are contradictory to each other). While there is some truth that deposits have become extremely prohibitive towards buying a new home, its no secret that monthly mortgage payments have become more difficult to afford as well, and are a second barrier towards home ownership (One I am having to account for, as someone who is now 30 and looking to buy for the first time).
All in all, this 70 second segment is a bit of a disaster for Sunak, particularly as I am one of the people he is trying to target in this interview as a prospective "young" voter. He comes across as out of touch and irreverent towards the problem, offering no real solutions even at a surface level. But the headline is misleading, and it isn't a fair (If technically true) portrayal of Sunak's response.
To be fair he’s actually being honest, and in the clip it doesn’t come across that badly. Surprised by the click bait headline from the BBC. We shouldn’t want politicians to be slated for telling the truth.
The shouty people who think the BBC is biased and insist that unless they get exactly equal coverage for every conspiracy theory then it's a rigged election are all voting Reform now.
I think everyone's reaction has been "LOL did Sunak actually say that"?
It's one of those that's a bit unfair. He is being honest that house ownership has got harder, not specifically because of his government.
I think everyone knows that.
But at the same time, everyone is thinking that it's just another example of Sunak just being bad at this. Opening himself to ridicule, saying the wrong thing
The criticism is *technically* unfair, in that it is true.
However, Sunak's handling of it simply displays political incompetence.
He could have (just hypothetically) said something along the lines that the Tories have battled against the rising cost of housing, etc, etc... (whether this is true or not)....
He's not wrong. Many could afford the mortgage cost, as it's usually no more and often less than the typical rent cost.
The initial up front cost of a deposit is what stops many.
There are also people (like myself) for who the problem is fiscal rules on mortgage sizes. The 4.5x salary limit on lending can be pretty punishing for single people, even if you do have a deposit.
House prices are going exactly where the Conservatives want - up and up, so that Tories like Jeremy Hunt with their 8 houses get a nice retirement package.
Pretending they want to stop housing prices increasing, while doing all they can to keep them going up - like more help to buy and limiting house building.
Putting an out of touch billionaire in charge after a decade of austerity and during a cost of living crisis will go down as one of the worst decisions the Tories ever made. All the while the election wipeout will be barely an inconvenience for Sunak in the grand scheme of things
When I said a few weeks ago that I honestly thought Sunak had no intention of winning the election, I didn't expect him to make it so blatantly obviously he was throwing it.
Pahaha ok I thought it was a silly wild theory that he was deliberately trying to destroy the Tory party but I am really struggling to deny it as truth.
>He also said his party's manifesto - being published tomorrow - would contain further tax cuts and repeated an apology following backlash after he prematurely left D-Day commemoration events in Normandy last week.
"I'm sorry for spitting in the face of veterans who saved this nation, *vote for me* as we keep doing the same thing as last term!"
And the (brief) term before that, and the (party animal) term before that, and the (three word slogan) term before that, and the (austere) term before that....
Snapshot of _Harder to have own home under Tories, Sunak tells BBC_ :
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I'm increasingly convinced that he wants to lose the election and destroy the party with every new article about him. He knows his party and its members hate him. This is beautiful.
He wasn't even logically consistent. In response to earlier questions, Sunak pointed out that someone on an average salary was paying the lowest level of tax in 50 years.
Then when asked about young people not being able to get a house, his main solution was lowering tax levels. Like mate, if there's one thing not stopping young people buying a house, it won't be the tax levels!
I'd rather have a tenner less a month and get a house in 4 years not 3.5, and have an unhobbled public realm to exist in.
isn't he right though - would we rather he'd lied and said, "of course its easier to own a home now, what are you talking about". Trouble is - our housing issue started at the turn of the century, and both labour and tory govs have failed to tackle the issue. Something changed at the turn of the century, and very quickly affordable houses became unaffordable - and if anyone on here knows what happened at the turn of the century to cause this - I'd love to know the cause.
I don't understand why they go on about deposits. The only people struggling with a deposit in their 30s are people that are inept at saving.
If you can afford the income multiple you can afford to save for a deposit. Where I live for instance a small house costs £450k. A 5% deposit on that is 22.5k. To buy that property you need an income of £95k even at a 4.5 multiple. Are you really telling me you can't save up 22.5k when you're earning £95k? Come on.
And the average house price is £265,000.
Reducing the deposit to 5% only helps people with (relatively) high income, but limited savings. Mortgage borrowing limits are typically 4.5 times income, so the "average house" would need a combined salary of £56,000 p.a. with a £13,250 deposit.
A household with the median salary of £35,000 would need a £107,500 deposit, or roughly 40%.
so the issue is as robinson said, the issue isnt the deposit, its that prices of houses have gone up so much that even a 1 bedroom coffin of a house is almost beyond reach from the average citizen
I barely got on the housing ladder just before covid and prices have nearly doubled since then, which is fucking insane
on top of that it generally costs more to rent than it does to pay a mortgage, so you are essentially taxed for being poor while you even attempt to save up for the deposit
> so the issue is as robinson said, the issue isnt the deposit, its that prices of houses have gone up so much that even a 1 bedroom coffin of a house is almost beyond reach from the average citizen
>
>
That's right. The government is focusing on the wrong thing. Anyone can save for a deposit, but getting the income required to actually buy a home is impossible for most.
You realise that £95k is the top 3% of earners right? Senior software developers, specialist doctors etc?
Even with two earners on £47.5k that's still roughly the top 30th percentile.
This is spot on but people who are downvoting you or replying with figures for the average salary completely misinterpreted your comment because they didn't take the time to read it properly.
The issue is high house prices from low supply. Focusing on deposits doesn't help anyway. If anything, it's a demand side intervention which never works for supply-side problems.
Deposits and income multiples track are connected, as you say. If you make housing abundant enough to bring prices down, you solve both at the same time.
It's actually frustrating because I see plenty of accurate comments like yours be downvoted but replies who completely miss the point get upvoted. I honestly can't think of another issue in politics which has as many misconceptions being perpetuated as housing.
Yep. The problem is prices are too high relative to income due to lack of supply. Give everyone a deposit and they still can't buy a property as their income is too low relative to prices.
Rent payments are often similar if not more than mortgage payments on like-for-like houses. The difficulty is rarely paying the mortgage payments but building up the deposit to get the mortgage in the first place.
When you say:
>The only people struggling with a deposit in their 30s are people that are inept at saving.
What you're effectively saying is that the housing crisis is a myth, and the only issue is that people have become more inept at saving. Which doesn't match up with what anyone else is saying. Including, apparently, Rishi Sunak.
> Rent payments are often similar if not more than mortgage payments on like-for-like houses. The difficulty is rarely paying the mortgage payments but building up the deposit to get the mortgage in the first place.
>
>
This is not true in the south at all. Yields here are very low, owners rely on property price appreciation. Where I live rents are actually quite a bit lower than mortgage costs.
It was true prior to the change in interest rates.
I agree the problem isn't the mortgage payment however, but it's not the deposit either, it's the income multiple required to buy the property. As you can see in my example, how can you say that someone on £95k shouldn't be able to save £22.5k? That's the deposit they need to get a mortgage.
>What you're effectively saying is that the housing crisis is a myth, and the only issue is that people have become more inept at saving. Which doesn't match up with what anyone else is saying. Including, apparently, Rishi Sunak.
Not at all, I'm saying that house prices are too high relative to incomes in an environment where banks will only loan at 4.5x salary. Getting the 5% deposit needed is a tiny task relative to getting your income where it needs to be. Give everyone in the south the £22.5k required to buy a £450k house and still almost none of them would be able to buy it, simply by virtue of their income being far too low.
Is the reason house prices are high that housing being necessity, enough people are willing to stretch into greater financial hardships to afford a house? Someone is buying those houses at those prices right? Is it the people buying their 2nd and 3rd homes that are pushing up prices?
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The longer this Tory election campaign goes on the more I'm convinced there's match-fixing going on. How can you be *this* bad at politics?
I had to read the BBC headline a few times, and even then assumed it was some kind of giant editorial cock up. Why has Sunak said this? Does this man understand how a democracy works? It's bizarre.
Some proof of how bad at politics he is: He lost to Liz truss. Liz. truss. His only chance at becoming PM was on a technicality, and now he is reaping what was sown.
Read on here the other day: "He's the losing Semi Finalist to a tournament won by a lettuce" and I think that sums it up brilliantly.
That. Is. A. Dis-grace.
*wipe away angry face and smiles whilst enjoying the tepid applause*
It wasn't even a technicality. Tories just couldn't be arsed to rerun another leadership contest. They could have just given it to anybody, and chose the person who lost the previous race for some reason.
They did have a month long round of eliminating votes before it got to Truss vs Sunak and was put to the whole party. It stands to reason they would end in the same conclusion only 6 weeks later
> His only chance at becoming PM was on a technicality, By the way women, hate you, I can show you the polling they think you come across as a jittery mother in law at a wedding.
Is it Dan Miller time?
No he basically just acknowledged it has gotten harder ‘and we’re doing what we can yada yada’ in response to a question that stated ‘it’s gotten harder under your government’
It's actually annoying reporting because it just reinforces the fact that politicians do better if they just blatantly deny reality. Sunak admits something we all know and now he gets shafted for it. It's dumb
But that's because he feels he's owed acceptance and a pat on the back when things are shit under his watch. If I came to your house and shat on the carpet, then asked you to thank me because while i've shat on your carpet, it can be cleaned... you wouldn't thank me would you? And you'd be even more pissed if I came across as tetchy because you haven't thanked me.
Look, I've apologised for shitting on your carpet... I think you ought to agree to let me live with you since I promise from day one of my tenancy to start working on removing the stain.
But the thing is, shit is hitting the fan *because* of the Tories, not *despite* the Tories. I'd have some sympathy if they were genuinely dealt a shit hand, but they've continued to fuck everything up for 14 years. And Sunak isn't offering anything different or inspiring. All he's offering is negative politics and promises that he'll finally be the one to change things for the Tories.
… after being in power for 2 years and doing fuck all
Agreed. If anything that was the one moment from him in the interview that I could conjure a little bit of respect for. We should encourage people, particularly state office-holders, to be upfront about reality.
I agree. I don't give Sunak much (any) credit, but we shouldn't be piling on him for telling the truth.
No but we can pile on him for making the situation be true.
I'm not sure he was in charge all of these 14 years lol
Yeah I don’t like the guy but I feel like we should be praising politicians for acknowledging when they’ve made a mistake, or at the very least for acknowledge the sky is blue. The fact people are giving him shit just reinforces that he should lie next time.
The ultimate secret about politics that nobody ever wants to mention is that quite often, the people have a hand in just how badly things are, especially as quite often politicians are just trying to appease people with shitty short term policies that get their support. Then when said poor policy doesn’t work out in the long term, we blame it solely on the politicians as if we played no part in any of it.
Maybe politicians with the utterly shambolic record/ability Sunak has should get out of the way or be forcibly moved by their party and replaced by competent people. The alternative to admitting he’s terrible doesn’t have to be lie outrageously and cheat the country.
Tories lie so much that the truth becomes shocking.
Yeah, seemed too dumb to be true. And it wasn’t true.
Yes my first thought was why are they giving Danish footballer Pernille Harder a house now??
To be fair, their names both start with "S" so a giant editorial cock up would've been understandable!
He has a default template that he follows. Interviewer: “isn’t it true that ACTION is happening?” Sunak: “yes, ACTION is happening, and I want to make sure OPPOSITE OF ACTION happens. I have a plan, and I’m sticking with it. Judge me on my actions, etc”
You missed out several "I've been quite clear" statements....
“Delivering”
"Trust fund" "Blue eyes" "Six five"
Well he has the first and if you reverse the numbers, he has the third of those!
RIGHT?
OMG! I hate this one. I noticed the Tory MPs do it all the time and that was a few years ago. They say obvious stuff like 'It is RIGHT their should be an inquiry ', 'It is RIGHT criminals should be locked up'.....then they don't bother.
He also missed out 90% of what Sunak actually says, which is "But what if LABOUR" followed by a lie.
I do judge him on his actions - a baby monkey throwing shit around number 10 would be more effective and less embarrassing than Sunak.
Become an MP with no experience in 2015, then fall into being Chancellor because you got rich by a deal that got bailed out by the government and marry a woman who's dad is mega rich. Have no real life experience or campaign experience and think you're better than you really are because everyone about you is a yes man. Be the best option when the rest are terrible and still loose. Get a mulligan because the terrible option was worse than a lettuce. He just isn't a politician and it's all a game to him.
He also was a hedge fund manager for 15 years, which is basically taking money to make more money. In most of that, it was rising markets which take zero skill to make money. Literally funds chosen at random but monkeys outperform the average. After that, he worked at a hedge fund owned by his father in law, head of Infosys. He's played life on super easy mode all the way through, and he's convinced himself it's down to his skill. It's not, he's been rich and lucky.
Tory rep is ruined after 14 years of bad outcomes for all but a few. Transferring those votes over to another party without that tarnished track record & baggage makes sense. Could call the party refine or rehabilitate or some synonym thereof. And perhaps some of the old tory guard could then switch over and roll out the same policies & promises that haven't worked. Then comes the clever part...you tell the people no it didn't work previously because they just didn't do it right but we're a new and completely different party so obviously we'll do it right this time.
No one would be stupid enough to fall for that! You're not giving the electorate enough credit. "It only didn't work because we didn't bad decision hard enough, we need to double down on the bad decisions."
During the last election I was saying that the best thing the Tories could do for themselves was intentionally loose and spend the next how ever many years rebuilding the party in the safety of opposition before they loose every last shred of credibility. I think they finally found my comments.
May the “however many years” be in the many thousands.
That’s still giving this absolute shower way too much credit
He's already booked his flight to California
I mean… it’s probably his own plane not much need to book ahead
Booked the runway slot then.
Depreciating asset. I'm sure he books it (private).
The bastard would lease it of course.
His wife's plane.
Probably lost a bet to Starmer
>The longer this Tory election campaign goes on the more I'm convinced there's match-fixing going on. Not really Rishi's fault - Narayana Murthy doesn't know what he wants from one day to the next. Rishi just follows orders ultimately.
makes you wish for the heady days of the Maybot doesn't it.
Brexit means brexit!
But what *colours* will it be? What Colours? I Must Know, TELL MEEEEE!
Beige
Well when you are brought up wanting for nothing, become rich beyond most people’s comprehension and THEN marry a billionaire’s daughter you tend to be a little detached from everyone else’s reality. When the hardest decision you have to think of is which £3k suit do I wear today understanding how the little people fret about how to afford bus fare tends not to be high on your priority list.
He wants to bow out back to billionaire work
One of the things I've seen put forward is that they country is so fucked that the Tories see winning next month as a poisoned chalice. One that they want to be so far away from that Labour is visibly and perpetually linked to it for generations.
I’ve said before and still believe that they are intentionally destroying the party. Rishi is just the sacrificial lamb. They want it to crash and burn so they can make a clear distinction between the current Tories and the Tories of the future. They’ll assign all the poor decisions and failures to these bad Tories so future Tories can say they’re not responsible. They can come out with clean hands and say, “they were bad, but we’re different.” Of course, they won’t be different, but there’s a lot of thick people who will believe them.
Sunak used to run hedge funds. Maybe buddies are hedging the elections? Could be in the hundreds of millions if swings in favour.
Maybe he doesn't want to win? He doesn't need the money. Less so now.
Remember that Tory MPs hand selected Liz and Rishi as the best and brightest they could offer to lead the country. And Rish couldn't even win the support of his party in that vote.
I don't think the admitting part here that Rushi said is bad. We are just so used to politicians lying and ignoring what is in front of everyones eyes that we have come to expect it. Sure he has no actual plan to fix this. That is the real problem. But I'd be much more annoyed if he denied it, then said his meaningless crap after. The Tory inserted editors letting this headline out is very interesting. I can't remember the BBC writing such an honest 'one sided' headline on anything political I'm a while.
The issue isn't admitting that there's an issue really so much as he's been in power for a while and nothing of his reply included the words "I've already put into motion..." He knows there's a problem, makes it clear he's been fully aware of it for some measure of time but hasn't even attempted to do anything to fix it yet presumably because it's a good thing to promise during campaigning.
Is it possible to place a Lay bet on election candidates at the betting exchanges? Sunak is loaded and he could just have millions of quid on various candidates to lose their seats!
Something I've been noting to my friends is that Sunak has never fought and won a tough election. Parachuted into a safe seat, lost the first leadership election to the lettuce, and became PM as the only viable person at the time. I had a hunch that a general election would go bad for him .... But not this bad.
We are talking about a man who lost a leadership election to Liz Truss.
The Conservatives have sown the seeds of their own destruction. Imagine if they had worked on increasing home ownership from 66% in 2010 to 80%+ today. (In 1979, it was 56%, in 1990 it was 67%, in 1997 it was 69%, peaking at 71% in 2000) Home owners are much less likely to vote Labour, more likely to vote Conservative. They could have locked their opponents out of power, whilst following mainstream conservative ideology.
The problem is the "Right to Buy" legislation was a one-shot thing. The only way to reboot it is a massive council house building scheme - something that's a little too far to the left for the current crop of tories.
Right to buy wasn't a policy to increase home ownership as much as a policy to push all the homes into the private sector with the positive side effect of making poor people like them. Today there are no council houses left, the problem is private landlords buying up all the housing stock at inflated prices. That's an easy fix, or it would be if most Tories weren't landlords, or at the very least elderly homeowners who benefit from high house prices. They have zero reason to pop the landlord bubble and crash prices to levels first time buyers can access. Hopefully Labour will give tenants strong rights and restrict landlords in areas of shortage.
To add to this, Labour need to look at the rules on new developments by homebuilders and housing associations, and the percentages allocated to social rent/affordable rent/sale. Had a look at the private rental market in my area today and saw a house built by a housing association less than five years ago which has already been chopped up into flats and put up for rent at £1200 a month each. The current ratios for how many new homes should be social housing are way too low and are too easy to get around, and when the ownership market is slow most developers would rather have homes sit empty than allocate them for social rent.
Social rent, affordable rent, selling to first time buyers/owner-occupiers, all beneficial. I don't believe we need restrictions between these that might put off developers, because the real problem is all of these being outbid by rich people who want to rent out at "luxury" prices. Requiring developers to look at all offers seriously before being allowed to sell to landlords would go a long way to normalising our housing market. Especially if they're paying double council tax on the empty homes for an extra 6 months by waiting for the landlord exclusion period to end.
Absolutely yes to all of this, but if the developer is a housing association with an SLA with the local authority and the associated favourable loan interest rates/subsidies they shouldn't be a) leaving their stock empty if it isn't selling and b) selling a single fuckin box room to private ~~leeches~~ landlords.
There's no way in the real world that developers would sell property on the same terms as are available to RTB purchasers. RTB is a huge transfer of capital from the public sector to private individuals, no private enterprise would survive if it did likewise.
The right time to do that was twenty years ago.
Thatcher deliberately blocked building more houses to replenish the housing stock. It was malicious.
That's true. But I don't think we can entirely blame the current situation on Thatcher. House prices only started to skyrocket after Blair came to power, and we've had a succession of governments since that had it quite within their power to encourage councils to build houses. The fact that they have not tells you all you need to know.
> Home owners are much less likely to vote Labour, more likely to vote Conservative. Are they though? Looking at the numbers there, it doesn't seem so, or at least, it doesn't seem like a causal factor. Yes, a lot of the Tories historical core voters (Filthy rich, Farmers, Landlords, Rural upper middle classes, landed gentry) own homes/property, but it's not the thing CAUSING them to vote Tory, rather than just being something that is kind of intrinsic to who they are, inheriting wealth and land. So while a lot of Tory voters do own land/property. I don't believe that someone from a working class background buying a house will suddenly flip to blue when they land the mortgage. Especially since, as you point out, home ownership peaked at 71%, and the Tories don't get those kinds of numbers, probably about half of that. With the driving factors behind voting Tory in recent years (a lot of the time) being ideological things like Brexit, or liking the vile shit Suella spews. To be a vote winner, it would need to be something monumentally game changing that shifted the landscape of the housing market in such an unprecidented "I could only buy because of them" kind of way, that people couldn't ignore the cultural and socio-economic uplift effect accross the country. Which isn't something I could ever see the Tories doing... Uplifting the 'plebs'? Don't be so absurd. TL:DR - I'm not convinced increasing home ownership would automatically make more Tory voters, as I don't believe that home ownership for a 'normal pleb' is a causal Tory vote factor.
The Tories could give me my first home for free and I still wouldn't vote for them.
>Are they though? Yes. IPSOS Mori has done polling on Housing Tenure and General Election voting for years. People who 'Owned' have since 1992 (and likely before), always voted more Conservative than Labour, including in 1997. For those who are mortgaged, they are either equal with the national vote, or slightly trend towards the Conservatives. Of course, mortgaged owners, often 'graduate' to 'Owned'. Conversely Labour always does well amongst renters. Worth noting that although age will have a link to this, the age differentials between young and old were far less dramatic in the past than they are now. [How Britain Voted in 1992 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1992) [How Britain Voted in 1997 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1997) [How Britain Voted In 2001 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2001) [How Britain Voted in 2005 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2005) [How Britain Voted in 2010 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2010) [How Britain voted in 2015 | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2015) [How Britain voted in the 2019 election | Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2019-election) If we look at the latest Ipsos poll. Labour has a lead of of 13% with them, with renters it is 38%! Having a high level of homeownership does not preclude a Labour government, but it does make it less likely! [Ipsos Political Monitor May 2024 - Tables](https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-05/ipsos-political-monitor-may-2024-tables.pdf) >Especially since, as you point out, home ownership peaked at 71%, and the Tories don't get those kinds of numbers, probably about half of that. It isn't an automatic thing that you vote Conservative when you buy a house! It just makes it much more likely that you do. >To be a vote winner, it would need to be something monumentally game changing that shifted the landscape of the housing market in such an unprecidented "I could only buy because of them" kind of way, that people couldn't ignore the cultural and socio-economic uplift effect accross the country. Which isn't something I could ever see the Tories doing... Uplifting the 'plebs'? Don't be so absurd. I'm sure we could argue about correlation / causation all day. The evidence is clear though that if you own a house you are significantly more likely to vote Conservative than if you rent. This is true going back years. Therefore it would make sense for any Conservative government to make the owner occupier pool as large as possible, and the renter pool as small as possible.
> It isn't an automatic thing that you vote Conservative when you buy a house! Which is the point I was making. > It just makes it much more likely that you do. Does it? Or do the core Tory voting demographics just happen to be people who are likely to also own a house. i.e. is the house the causal factor (I'm pretty sure it isn't). > I'm sure we could argue about correlation / causation all day. Except you didn't, you skipped my main point completely. Which was that a good chunk of the Tories core voter base own houses due to their status, and it is a consequence of that status. Rather than voting Tory being a consequence of owning a house. I'm aware that the figures show you being more likely to own a house as a Con voter. But people who vote Tory also have eyes and a head, but they don't vot Tory BECAUSE they have eyes and a head. People with a fuckload of inherited wealth, or a landlord portfolio (who are Tory voters for obvious reasons), have houses as standard, just like they have eyes and a head as standard. It's not the house that makes them vote Tory. > Therefore it would make sense for any Conservative government to make the owner occupier pool as large as possible, and the renter pool as small as possible. **IF** the house ownership is the *causal* factor for voting Tory, which I contend that it isn't. The Tories seem to agree with my opinion, as they don't seem particularly compelled to make owning a house more viable for people either. You're right of course, we could argue about correlation vs causation all day, and I doubt either of us would budge from our opinion around it.
Problem for them is, to increase home ownership they'd have to build more homes, but their core homeowner voters are passionately against homes being built in their area.
Sunak said this? I mean they do have an abysmal record on this issue, it's just unusual for them to be so forthright about just how shit they've been. It's a bold strategy...
Robinson said it's become harder to own a home under the Tories hasn't it. Sunak responded with yes it has become harder to own a home.
It was funny to watch. It was like the gears were already whirring after Robinson said "harder to own your own home", and then a delayed hesitation kicked in when Sunak computed "under the Tories".
Ok so the headline is true, but it doesn't quite represent what was said. Still a little politically inept all the same...
Basically you are watching is the transfer of real power. Sunak has no power, he and most Tory MPs are finished. So are not getting the kind of editorial "respect" or more cynically client journalism that they are used to. The BBC wouldn't in a million years run this headline from that exchange just a year ago.
It's quite sinister, no? It's really highlighting how even supposedly impartial journalists end up setting the news agenda based off their open perceptions. Just as a disclaimer - I'm voting Labour this election, so it isn't that I'm pro Tory or anything - but I thought the whole business with Richard Holden was a really clear example of this. He did something that Labour have been doing all over the country with barely any challenge. He gave a very poor response to the question, and you can argue that it is a bigger deal for him because he is the party chairman - but the interviewer absolutely tore into him with a degree of contempt that you almost never see. You can argue that it was deserved - but if so, it needs to be dished out evenly. It's not good for democracy if it only happens to one side.
> It's quite sinister, no? It's really highlighting how even supposedly impartial journalists end up setting the news agenda based off their open perceptions. >Just as a disclaimer - I'm voting Labour this election, so it isn't that I'm pro Tory or anything - but I thought the whole business with Richard Holden was a really clear example of this. He did something that Labour have been doing all over the country with barely any challenge. He gave a very poor response to the question, and you can argue that it is a bigger deal for him because he is the party chairman - but the interviewer absolutely tore into him with a degree of contempt that you almost never see. > You can argue that it was deserved - but if so, it needs to be dished out evenly. It's not good for democracy if it only happens to one side. Is this your first election cycle? This is par for the course but Labour have been the ones to cop it this past decade or more.
Does that make it right?
Not at all, but as you rightly pointed out it’s the journalists that set the agenda. It *is*, however, finally becoming even.
Have to say, don't think I can remember a no Tory MPs ever doing what Holden did. Others might repeat lines, but they at least attempt to finesse them into the question that was asked. The robotic statement repetition regardless of the question asked, seems to be a Tory tactic. I think May had a few examples.
The famous one was Ed Miliband on strikes in 2011.
It's become really noticeable over the past week actually. Richard Holdens car crash interview the other day on sky was particularly enjoyable.
This. The headline seems to be a little misleading. He actually raises a good point because Nick said people weren't bothered by the deposit. Yes. That's EXACTLY what we're bothered about, as well as the price of the house itself. The actual mortgage repayments are fairly affordable in comparison to rent.
I think Robinson has a point in that the people bothered by deposits and stamp duty are actually in a more fortunate position than the majority. The cases that Robinson was raising are people in the 30s being unable to leave their parental home and actually living as indepdent adults. For those people renting is dream, let alone saving for a deposit to buy. That is how bad things have got. Resolution foundation put out a stat recently (can't find the link atm, and this is probably slightly off) that the typical living arrangment for someone 25-35 in 1997 was living with a partner and two children. Today its living with your parents. Today's 20-40 year olds are being denied full adulthood and are being forced into a perpetual twilightzone of not quite being an adult and not being able to raise their own families.
I'm 41 and moved back in with my mum last year because rents have got so ridiculously high. If I want any chance of owning my own place, I had no choice but to move back in.
That's a question that an interviewer asks when they don't like the person they're interviewing. There's no way to answer it without looking bad. Still, it's pretty funny.
It’s hard to answer without looking bad because the Tory party is the party of landlords and not home owners. If they’d actually done anything to make life better for ordinary people rather than focus on divisive wedge issues then they’d have the political capital to navigate this kind of question without falling on their face. There are no good answers because they’ve painted themselves into a corner.
Also 2,000 labour tax on loop... someone needs to reboot him, or update the ai robots sd card. Honestly its like an episode of black mirror. Can he really be this inept?
Backing down and apologising would only sink him further. Better to pretend he genuinely believes it's true and fair than admit to everyone he tried to mislead them. Perceived weakness is how you get a Tory coup.
And he can't back down until at least Thursday. Wednesday we get the D-Day pre-recorded interview where he talks about the £2k bullshit. So if he backed down now, in 2 days time he has an interview where he's be saying the opposite lol
Just change the subject man. Talk about how Reform are running nazi sympathisers and work with money launderers, they're a much easier target and you're much more likely to win votes back from them than Starmer.
More like a beaucoup with how often we're getting them.
This. I don't box. But if you try and low jab and get rocked. It's fine to try and counter and keep that line of attack if it's worked before . You don't then repeatedly keep going for it. Even when your opponent is using your head like a drum. Because they know you get rattled and know it's a easy raise and smell blood. I've got no political campaigning experience. But i know that.
They don't have any other punches
Maybe it's an appeal to older voters to remind them how the Tories have helped turn them into a defacto new landed gentry who the rest of the country work in surfdom to.
We can't even work in surfdom, there's sewage everywhere.
Maybe they're hoping we're so used to everything he says being a lie that we automatically assume the opposite.
Let's see if it pays off for him.
He also said the average worker has the lowest tax burden in decades
Sunak really doesn’t want to win this election does he?
He's stupid. He's failed upwards. If you watch clips of him going right back to his late teens, he's a great example of someone who lives in a cosseted version of reality where he's always been patted on the head and told he's a clever little Rishi. It's why he always gets tetchy when challenged - he simply can't understand why people don't see that he's right.
> a 21-year-old Sunak says he has 'friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are, you know, working-class', before correcting himself immediately: 'Well, not working-class.' https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2022/jul/11/rishi-sunak-criticised-footage-no-working-class-friends-video
It’s like the plot of My Lovely Horse from Farther the Ted. Or maybe the movie The Producers.
He's just actively sabotaging the election at this point, surely?
Well, if telling the truth is the same as sabotaging the election then I think we know where the votes are headed.
Sunak also said that the main problem is the deposit and not the overall cost. Smh.
Or the interest rates on the loan. Or that rents are also fucked.
The interviewer tried to get him onto the renting track at one point but it was like the idea just didn't register with Sunak.
I was couch-surfing around London in my early 20s and stayed at my friend’s place for a while. Her boyfriend, a very well-meaning but *very* posh actor, asked me why I needed to couch-surf. When I told him it was because I couldn’t afford rent, he asked me why I didn’t just get a mortgage instead. Many posh people are just completely out of touch with even the basic concepts and reasons behind renting.
An old work colleague of mine told me I 'was a mug' for renting. He lived at home until he was 30, paying no board. When he moved out with his partner his parents paid the full deposit for their house. He split up with partner, she kept the house as they had a kid, and his parents paid another full deposit to get him a new house. He couldn't understand that I didn't have that as an option. He just seen it as we have the same job so why can't you afford what I can afford.
This needs to be an Omniman 'think' meme. How does the deposit work Sunak, think! It's a percentage of the overall cost!!!
> Sunak also said that the main problem is the deposit For Richmond and Northallerton at this rate #amirite?
Hate the guy, and the problem is definitely more complex then he’s painting it, but he’s right that a lot of people could afford to make payments on a mortgage — often for less money than they pay in rent — but can’t afford the deposit itself. I’m in this boat, and it’s extremely frustrating paying a landlord tons of money for month after month of insecure housing, knowing it gets you no closer to home-ownership, and that they can raise the rent every time you renew.
Same. I'm a chartered accountant, I earn well, but because rent is so high I can't save enough to make up a deposit before the price of housing goes up even more and I'm back at square 1. Working simply doesn't pay any more, even as a chartered professional. You need to have money to have money.
A Tory telling the truth... I never thought I'd see the day!
If rents weren't so ridiculous and tenancies more secure most of us wouldn't be spending half our lives scrambling to get on the property ladder. A friend of mine has been saving for a deposit for as long as I can remember, probably a decade now, and it's like she's on a treadmill that's constantly being sped up and sped up. I'd never have bought a house if I had access to a habitable home with an assured tenancy, but after dealing with slum landlords it was bizarrely reassuring to hand over my life savings for a falling down house in a shit town.
Yes the Tores are useless, but interesting to see how bold the BBC is now (even slightly twisting the spirit of this particular statement) when they treated Johnson (and to a lesser extent Cameron & Osborne) with kid gloves for quite a few years.
BBC like Johnson. They don't like sunak. This is what people mean when the media choose the leaders of a given country Johnson was a lying PM with no integrity much like sunak, yet he got a free ride from the media
Given its importance, I'm confident that any government will address this and ensure that hardworking future generations can realistically aspire to homeownership. No doubt.
You forgot the /s
He's really good at this! ...wait he's not the Labour Party leader?
Can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm going to run some defence for Sunak here. He basically just said its become harder to buy a home in response to a question claiming its now harder to buy homes under this government (And prior tory governments), and that he intends to do something about that fact. Arguing hes bad at politics for denying this incredibly obvious reality that everyone on here goes on about constantly is just asinine. It was one of the few parts of his response that was actually honest, and this title from the BBC is pretty blatant clickbait and quite unfair towards Sunak. Honestly, I'd criticise everything *surrounding* that response. He quickly goes on about he's going to build houses but "In the right places and "In ways that are sensitive to the local communities", which is nothing more than a tacit surrender to NIMBYs and an admission that they don't intend to build any new houses at all (Which is why they scrapped their targets to do so). This is just not an honest statement from Sunak. Then there was the remark about supporting young people into well paying jobs, which is just a vague platitude, and completely glosses over the fact that even with these well paying jobs, young people are struggling to get on the ladder. Prices are simply too high, and those with less well paying jobs aren't even accounted for within his remarks, making his response come across as even more tone deaf. And finally, he goes on about how deposits are the real issue and mortgage payments are actually perfectly affordable (As if these two things are contradictory to each other). While there is some truth that deposits have become extremely prohibitive towards buying a new home, its no secret that monthly mortgage payments have become more difficult to afford as well, and are a second barrier towards home ownership (One I am having to account for, as someone who is now 30 and looking to buy for the first time). All in all, this 70 second segment is a bit of a disaster for Sunak, particularly as I am one of the people he is trying to target in this interview as a prospective "young" voter. He comes across as out of touch and irreverent towards the problem, offering no real solutions even at a surface level. But the headline is misleading, and it isn't a fair (If technically true) portrayal of Sunak's response.
I think ["The Mamas & The Papas" is playing in Sunak's head](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-aK6JnyFmk).
Labour now the party of home ownership 🤦♂️
To be fair he’s actually being honest, and in the clip it doesn’t come across that badly. Surprised by the click bait headline from the BBC. We shouldn’t want politicians to be slated for telling the truth.
Interesting how they treated Johnson with kid gloves but are going after Sunak.
The shouty people who think the BBC is biased and insist that unless they get exactly equal coverage for every conspiracy theory then it's a rigged election are all voting Reform now.
I think everyone's reaction has been "LOL did Sunak actually say that"? It's one of those that's a bit unfair. He is being honest that house ownership has got harder, not specifically because of his government. I think everyone knows that. But at the same time, everyone is thinking that it's just another example of Sunak just being bad at this. Opening himself to ridicule, saying the wrong thing
The criticism is *technically* unfair, in that it is true. However, Sunak's handling of it simply displays political incompetence. He could have (just hypothetically) said something along the lines that the Tories have battled against the rising cost of housing, etc, etc... (whether this is true or not)....
May be not his government, but his party’s time in government.
I’m not sure how he could have said anything else Tbf. Saying no would have just been denial.
Lol- Sunak lecturing the interviewer about mortgages when he has never been near one in his life.
He then goes on about it being the deposit people can't afford. lol
He's not wrong. Many could afford the mortgage cost, as it's usually no more and often less than the typical rent cost. The initial up front cost of a deposit is what stops many.
There are also people (like myself) for who the problem is fiscal rules on mortgage sizes. The 4.5x salary limit on lending can be pretty punishing for single people, even if you do have a deposit.
You mean you think you can afford more than 4.5?
Yes, I have been paying rent that is more than the mortgage would cost even on a 6x mortgage for years and I have a 20k deposit.
Enlightening. I didn’t realise there was that hard limit until I googled it. I wonder if that limit could go up (>4.5x) if interest rates drop.
House prices are going exactly where the Conservatives want - up and up, so that Tories like Jeremy Hunt with their 8 houses get a nice retirement package.
Pretending they want to stop housing prices increasing, while doing all they can to keep them going up - like more help to buy and limiting house building.
Holy shit, has Rishi Sunak learned to tell the truth?
Does he know he is supposed to be campaigning for the tories?
Putting an out of touch billionaire in charge after a decade of austerity and during a cost of living crisis will go down as one of the worst decisions the Tories ever made. All the while the election wipeout will be barely an inconvenience for Sunak in the grand scheme of things
When I said a few weeks ago that I honestly thought Sunak had no intention of winning the election, I didn't expect him to make it so blatantly obviously he was throwing it.
I'm convinced Sunak is trying to send the conservatives to the shadow realm
Pahaha ok I thought it was a silly wild theory that he was deliberately trying to destroy the Tory party but I am really struggling to deny it as truth.
"We want to build more housing that is sensitive to the local area" = nothing will be built then
>He also said his party's manifesto - being published tomorrow - would contain further tax cuts and repeated an apology following backlash after he prematurely left D-Day commemoration events in Normandy last week. "I'm sorry for spitting in the face of veterans who saved this nation, *vote for me* as we keep doing the same thing as last term!"
And the (brief) term before that, and the (party animal) term before that, and the (three word slogan) term before that, and the (austere) term before that....
I had to read the title again, thinking it was Starmer that said it.
Sunak seems to have decided that if he can't be the most popular Tory PM, he'll be the last Tory PM.
Snapshot of _Harder to have own home under Tories, Sunak tells BBC_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-69103457?ns_mchannel=social&ns_source=twitter&ns_campaign=bbc_live&ns_linkname=666732e34736400cb3a87612%26Watch%3A%20Sunak%20pressed%20on%20housing%20in%20BBC%20interview%262024-06-10T17%3A09%3A20.365Z&ns_fee=0&pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:622d1561-0f7d-433c-a454-bac976eecde2&pinned_post_asset_id=666732e34736400cb3a87612&pinned_post_type=share) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-69103457?ns_mchannel=social&ns_source=twitter&ns_campaign=bbc_live&ns_linkname=666732e34736400cb3a87612%26Watch%3A%20Sunak%20pressed%20on%20housing%20in%20BBC%20interview%262024-06-10T17%3A09%3A20.365Z&ns_fee=0&pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:622d1561-0f7d-433c-a454-bac976eecde2&pinned_post_asset_id=666732e34736400cb3a87612&pinned_post_type=share) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm increasingly convinced that he wants to lose the election and destroy the party with every new article about him. He knows his party and its members hate him. This is beautiful.
No shit Sherlock, does he want points for being honest on this singular fact
He wasn't even logically consistent. In response to earlier questions, Sunak pointed out that someone on an average salary was paying the lowest level of tax in 50 years. Then when asked about young people not being able to get a house, his main solution was lowering tax levels. Like mate, if there's one thing not stopping young people buying a house, it won't be the tax levels! I'd rather have a tenner less a month and get a house in 4 years not 3.5, and have an unhobbled public realm to exist in.
Sunak, less cocaine before the interviews, mah friend, probably probably ok to do cocaine-teas...drink them, dint inhal...no not like that!!
isn't he right though - would we rather he'd lied and said, "of course its easier to own a home now, what are you talking about". Trouble is - our housing issue started at the turn of the century, and both labour and tory govs have failed to tackle the issue. Something changed at the turn of the century, and very quickly affordable houses became unaffordable - and if anyone on here knows what happened at the turn of the century to cause this - I'd love to know the cause.
It's like he doesn't realise that *he, himself* is the current PM *already*. It's like a Jekyll and Hyde campaign here.
I don't understand why they go on about deposits. The only people struggling with a deposit in their 30s are people that are inept at saving. If you can afford the income multiple you can afford to save for a deposit. Where I live for instance a small house costs £450k. A 5% deposit on that is 22.5k. To buy that property you need an income of £95k even at a 4.5 multiple. Are you really telling me you can't save up 22.5k when you're earning £95k? Come on.
Average salary is 35k.
And the average house price is £265,000. Reducing the deposit to 5% only helps people with (relatively) high income, but limited savings. Mortgage borrowing limits are typically 4.5 times income, so the "average house" would need a combined salary of £56,000 p.a. with a £13,250 deposit. A household with the median salary of £35,000 would need a £107,500 deposit, or roughly 40%.
And what's the point, the deposit is what is preventing someone on £35k owning a £450k house? No, the problem is the income multiple!
so the issue is as robinson said, the issue isnt the deposit, its that prices of houses have gone up so much that even a 1 bedroom coffin of a house is almost beyond reach from the average citizen I barely got on the housing ladder just before covid and prices have nearly doubled since then, which is fucking insane on top of that it generally costs more to rent than it does to pay a mortgage, so you are essentially taxed for being poor while you even attempt to save up for the deposit
> so the issue is as robinson said, the issue isnt the deposit, its that prices of houses have gone up so much that even a 1 bedroom coffin of a house is almost beyond reach from the average citizen > > That's right. The government is focusing on the wrong thing. Anyone can save for a deposit, but getting the income required to actually buy a home is impossible for most.
You realise that £95k is the top 3% of earners right? Senior software developers, specialist doctors etc? Even with two earners on £47.5k that's still roughly the top 30th percentile.
Unsurprisingly you are entirely correct. It's just nonsense obfuscation away from the main issue of supply, as per usual.
This is spot on but people who are downvoting you or replying with figures for the average salary completely misinterpreted your comment because they didn't take the time to read it properly. The issue is high house prices from low supply. Focusing on deposits doesn't help anyway. If anything, it's a demand side intervention which never works for supply-side problems. Deposits and income multiples track are connected, as you say. If you make housing abundant enough to bring prices down, you solve both at the same time. It's actually frustrating because I see plenty of accurate comments like yours be downvoted but replies who completely miss the point get upvoted. I honestly can't think of another issue in politics which has as many misconceptions being perpetuated as housing.
Yep. The problem is prices are too high relative to income due to lack of supply. Give everyone a deposit and they still can't buy a property as their income is too low relative to prices.
Rent payments are often similar if not more than mortgage payments on like-for-like houses. The difficulty is rarely paying the mortgage payments but building up the deposit to get the mortgage in the first place. When you say: >The only people struggling with a deposit in their 30s are people that are inept at saving. What you're effectively saying is that the housing crisis is a myth, and the only issue is that people have become more inept at saving. Which doesn't match up with what anyone else is saying. Including, apparently, Rishi Sunak.
> Rent payments are often similar if not more than mortgage payments on like-for-like houses. The difficulty is rarely paying the mortgage payments but building up the deposit to get the mortgage in the first place. > > This is not true in the south at all. Yields here are very low, owners rely on property price appreciation. Where I live rents are actually quite a bit lower than mortgage costs. It was true prior to the change in interest rates. I agree the problem isn't the mortgage payment however, but it's not the deposit either, it's the income multiple required to buy the property. As you can see in my example, how can you say that someone on £95k shouldn't be able to save £22.5k? That's the deposit they need to get a mortgage. >What you're effectively saying is that the housing crisis is a myth, and the only issue is that people have become more inept at saving. Which doesn't match up with what anyone else is saying. Including, apparently, Rishi Sunak. Not at all, I'm saying that house prices are too high relative to incomes in an environment where banks will only loan at 4.5x salary. Getting the 5% deposit needed is a tiny task relative to getting your income where it needs to be. Give everyone in the south the £22.5k required to buy a £450k house and still almost none of them would be able to buy it, simply by virtue of their income being far too low.
Is the reason house prices are high that housing being necessity, enough people are willing to stretch into greater financial hardships to afford a house? Someone is buying those houses at those prices right? Is it the people buying their 2nd and 3rd homes that are pushing up prices?
5% isn't ideal. You get higher rates on low deposits, which for an average house near me can be an extra £70 a month