Update: Advice to Russians (to anybody!) thinking about moving to the UK
Published: 4 September 2022 ~ Thinking about moving to the UK? Think again!
This post is an addendum to, or update of, four posts I wrote earlier advising Russians on what to expect should they ever contemplate the possibility of emigrating to the UK.
Previous posts for Russians contemplating a life in the UK
Advice for Russians Emigrating to UK
Advice for Russians Moving to the UK
Russians moving to London: Costs
For Russians Moving to UK Towns not London
My advice today is simple: Don’t!
You may think that ‘Don’t!’ derives from the Russophobic situation that is sweeping across the West faster than coronavirus leaked from a US weapons lab, but the proliferation of anti-Russian sentiment is small potatoes, chicken feed, compared to the calamitous financial mess with which the UK is engulfed.
The extent of this crisis, if not its far-reaching societal consequences, can be ascertained from a simple experiment. Go to Googlenews.co.uk and in the search window key in each of the following search terms in succession and see what they bring up:
- UK cost of living soars
- UK standard of living falls
- UK house prices rocketing
Here are five randomly selected media articles pertaining to each of the search categories (as of 24 August 2022)
UK cost of living soars
UK inflation hits 10.1% in new 40-year high as cost-of-living crisis continues to soar
‘A tragedy’: Britain’s cost-of-living crisis worsens as rents soar and energy bills top $5,000
Cost of living crisis: Wages plunge at record pace as bills soar
Mother-of-four says ‘every day is a struggle’ as cost of living soars
Cost-of-living payments branded insufficient as energy bills soar
UK standard of living falls
UK living standards ‘to fall at fastest rate since mid-1950s’
UK faces worst drop in living standards since 1970s, economists warn
Brits told to brace themselves for worst standard of living since records began
UK faces long recession and deepest plunge in living standards on record, Bank of England warns
Britain, a services superpower sinking into stagnation
UK house prices rocketing
UK house prices rise at 11% annual rate despite cost-of-living crisis
UK house prices set to rise even higher despite a 36% decline in buyer demand, experts say
Postal districts around the Olympic Park see house prices increase as much as £537k over ten years
UK house prices rise at the fastest rate for 18 years
UK builder Bellway reports record revenue as house prices climb
As you can see from the randomly selected online headlines, cost of living in the UK is soaring, the standard of living is in decline and yet, against this backdrop of misery and woe, house prices are rocketing.
Discard immediately any reports that you read in the UK media that house prices are ‘slowing’ or that there is a ‘correction’ in the housing market. Statements of this nature appear periodically in the UK press, every six months or less, but by the time you have digested them house prices are off again, climbing that fateful ladder from which the only way down is rapid and fatal. It is interesting to note in this respect that, as Sherlock Holmes would say, ‘The game is afoot’. In the last three days UK media, with nothing new on the coronavirus front to bluster about and the British public’s Twitter-afflicted attention span no longer able to focus on Ukraine, has turned to startling prophesies of an impending crash in the housing market to provide my fellow Brits with the crisis fix they crave.
Whatever they tell you, the fact remains that cost of living is up; standard of living is down; and buying a house in the UK is out of reach for most people.
To understand the mechanism by which the catastrophic gulf between cost of living, standard of living and artificially inflated house prices have come about in the UK, you need to turn the clock back to a time that several generations of Britons were born too late to know. In this era, which was a continuation of hundreds of years of history, homes, as the word implies, were houses where people lived, typically for the entirety of their lives and for generations of a family’s descendants.
The key word in this scenario is ‘home’, since that is what houses had always been and were, homes, and to a large extent they remained as such until the Thatcherite era of the 1980s, when houses ceased to be homes and became instead a speculative commodity.
In the 1980s under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Thatcherism, as it became to be known, was turbo-charged capitalism. Faced with no other way of shoring up the country’s coffers, plundered and sacked as usual by the outgoing Labour government, Maggie had no alternative but to sell off the ‘family silver’, privatising everything in sight (well, almost). In her zeal to mobilise the country’s economy1, she sacrificed the right, the historic right, to a stable family home, by turning houses into a make-money-quick scheme. Instead of a home for life, houses became speculative investments to buy for profit, not to live in. The nation became obsessed, first by the aspirant desire to join the ranks of owner occupiers and then, like them, to make money from their acquisition. This obsession continues today.
As part of her grand plan, Maggie also introduced the Right to Buy, a housing act giving tenants of local authority housing (council houses), the right to buy their ‘home’. This programme of apparent social mobility, which had the soon-to-become socialist dinosaurs breathing fire and brimstone, was all well and good as long as ‘home’ and ‘right to buy’ appeared in the same sentence. But it didn’t quite work that way. A good many social housing converts had no sooner bought their ‘home’ than, following the lead of legacy homeowners, they were selling them on for a profit. An Englishman’s home was no longer his castle, it was a rapid succession of cash cows: sell the house, buy another house, use the cash from the sale of the first property to develop the new house. Invariably, however, there was never enough money from the sale of the first property to entirely fund the second, so in order to make up the shortfall, it was cap in hand and off to the bank for a mortgage. Did you hear the sound of thunder off-stage! As any seasoned Monopoly player will tell you, once the mortgaging starts for many the game is over.
The immoral transformation of home to commodity, which would re-energise the wealth and social aspirations of a generation of Brits during the Thatcher years who, let’s face it, had been ‘shat upon’ by Labour, rapidly gained traction in the UK and has steamrolled ever since. It gave ‘ordinary people’ the chance to make what they saw as mega bucks by buying properties, knobbing them up, living in them until they felt the time was right and then swiftly selling them on. In all fairness some of these latter day quick-profit speculators did make money, some, a minority, made a fortune. Very few had a home. My boss bought and sold the houses in which he and his family lived so many times in succession that his son once tellingly remarked that he had no idea what a proper home was! But whilst ‘your average punter’ was sweating and toiling away to keep up with his relocating neighbours, those who made the lion’s share and are coining it in still, were and are ~ surprise, surprise ~ property developers, bankers and financiers.
By the time ‘our Tony’, Tony Blair, arrived on the scene, the die had been cast. Not since Al Capone had built a criminal empire on the back of prohibition had one so young been better positioned to re-align a political party, adopt and adapt the housing boom template and make, by all accounts, a tidy profit in the process4 whilst driving the country into debt, more debt, greater debt, desperation and moral depredation. The old rank and file socialists, what’s left of them, must, when they look back on Blaire’s stewardship of the country, hear the ghostly voice of Val Doonican singing “If I knew then what I know now” (Sorry, what’s that you say? You’ve got all his LPs?), for Tony’s New Labour was, and is ~ as we all know now ~ no longer Labour at all but the New globalist-oriented Liberal-Lefty party2, a syndicated branch of the Davos Globalist Cartel.
Not content with flooding the country with unwanted immigrants, all of whom needed housing of their own (funny, that!), Tony threw himself body and ~ well, we won’t say soul ~ behind the housing boom, making in the process, so it is alleged, a pretty penny or two for himself whilst subjecting the nation to fictitious wealth, unrelenting debt and eventual penury3.
Under Blairism, loans and credit cards were floating around like confetti at a wedding of 85 genders. It was all aboard the unsecured loans, unaffordable mortgages, credit cards bandwagon and nobody seemed to realise ~ or if they did, they did not care as long as they might make money ~ that the final destination would be Debt. Irrefusable offers and multiple invitations to climb aboard the credit bandwagon dropped through Britain’s letter boxes in such monstrous egalitarian profusion that they almost outdid Reader’s Digest in their contribution to the junk mail mountain.
Today, whilst most Britons feel like door mats for the political elite to wipe their mucky boots on, at least their own door mats are virtually free of offers which they should never have not refused. With the goose no longer laying the golden egg of unlimited loans, the days of making a ‘fast buck’ on your home, whilst not entirely over, is fraught with pitfalls. Now, the only way for ordinary folk to claw back a little money from their property is to sell and move into a shoe box. This symptom of desperation, the practice of fleeing to a smaller home, relies on the buzzword ‘downsizing’ to sugar coat the pill, but people do it, and more and more, because moving into a smaller and less desirable property is practically the only way of keeping the bailiffs from the door and, in the process, with a good back wind, to extricate yourself from your incumbent children who, since they cannot afford a mortgage themselves, could otherwise be living with you until they receive that telegram from the Queen.
By divvying up the dosh from the sale of your former and better property, your cherished family home, you might just be able to give your children the amount of wonga required to meet the mortgage deposit demanded by the bank. This down payment (and ‘down’ is the word to note), should ensure that yet another generation signs its precious life away to the mortgage devil. Don’t worry, the bank will help you. It’s skilled in the art of having your leg up onto the property treadmill.
Do I mean ‘the property ladder’? No, I meant what I said. For a 25-year mortgage is a sure and certain way of condemning yourself to a job in which you dare not rock the boat or dive overboard even if your sanity depends upon it, because you are chained to that monthly mortgage payment, and if you cannot afford to stump up the money every month on the dot you are going to lose your house, which means you are going to lose your home. As it says in the small print of every mortgage contract (always read the small print), ‘if you cannot keep up payments on your mortgage you are liable to lose your ‘home’ ~ that’s right ‘your home’: the threat could not be more explicit ~ Got you, wage slave!
However, just because the majority of folk in the UK are no longer making lots of wonga on playing the property game, it does not mean that everyone is in the same leaky boat. This is because not everyone is a wage slave ~ most are, but not everyone. Inflated house prices, big-big mortgages, high-interest loans and revolving credit is just about the only thing that keeps the UK afloat, the definition of what constitutes the UK restricted to bankers, financiers, politicians and moneyed elites. The gilded members of this UK, a club that only the few belong to, have been living it up, metaphorically and actually, on their luxury yachts for years and only now are beginning to wonder if the collective term for their privileged buoyancy is spelt the same as Titanic. It’s almost time to look for the lifeboats, which for many won’t be there.
Thinking about moving to the UK? Think again!
For the majority of ordinary Brits, keeping one’s head above water is difficult enough. It is widely recognised that given their track record Britain’s politicians couldn’t save a drowning man in a back garden paddling pool, let alone provide adequate lifeboats to save the nation. But the economic situation has become so tragic that most Britons would willingly settle for a half share in a snorkel, if only they could afford one.
In this tragi-financial-comedy, every time the victims of artificially inflated house prices take on a mortgage it offers the same security as flipping a coin. But no matter which side up the coin lands, for the political-legal-banker cartel the outcome is always a winner. These are they who are literally coining it in.
Vital Statistics
Deposit: At least 5% of the cost of the house you would like to purchase. If you are a first-time buyer, most banks will expect potential buyers to pay a 10% deposit
Average cost of a house in the UK: As of May 2022, the average UK house price was approximately £280,000 which represents an average increase of £30,000 in a 12-month period
Predicted rise in utility bills in UK end of 2022: Energy prices are forecast to more than double in the 12-month period ending 2022. Some sources suggest that energy prices will exceed £5000 by the end of 2023.
Making much about house prices is a justifiable exposition when it comes to laying bare the problems of living in Britain. It is not by far the only cross that Britons have to bear when it comes to making ends meet, but when all is said and done housing is the big one.
As I noted in my earlier posts, whilst keeping up mortgage payments on your home will devour at least half of your monthly income, what’s left of it will be gobbled up by utility bills and council tax. As for those other ‘necessities’ ~ contents’ and buildings’ insurance, the cost of running a motor vehicle or two (including petrol costs), internet connection bills, credit card payments … let’s not go there! But do remember to bear them in mind!
In the pecking order of daylight robbery, after burglary by mortgage comes mugging by utility bills: always a dreaded spectre; now they are downright terrifying.
How convincingly the meteoric rise in gas and electricity prices can be attributed to the UK establishment’s wanton participation in the United States’ criminal Ukraine adventure is debateable. Unlike Europe that relies for its comfortable existence on Russian gas, it is claimed that Britain only has a 5% reliance stake in gas from Russia. Be this as it may, it doesn’t help any when you are a small country devoid of natural resources to turn your suppliers into your enemy just to please a collapsing United States and to indulge Liz Truss’s make believe that she is Margaret Thatcher.
There are, in fact, a number of interlocking issues that explain why the British public are being hit with gargantuan utility bills: historic bad management of the economy is one of them; the other is the bogus alternative energy argument, which is the alternative energy industry; and the other, of course, is Ukraine.
The Russians dun it
Citing Russia’s special operation in Ukraine as a reason for old age pensioners freezing to death in energy-starved Britland this winter, is part of western governments’, and therefore western media’s, shaky mainstream narrative. At the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, western leaders actively exhorted the easily-manipulated British public to invite a Ukrainian refugee into their country, even into their homes, orating in glowing terms of how humanitarian crises in far-flung distant lands were infinitely more important than selfish preoccupations such as keeping warm in winter, keeping the lights on at home and keeping yourself from fainting with shock when you pay for your fuel at the filling station. But such gung-ho noble sentiments whilst entertaining in summer tend to lose their ennobling appeal as the icy blasts of winter gather upon the horizon of the western hemisphere. And it is no consolation that whilst the majority of Britons will be rubbing their hands together in an attempt to generate warmth, a small and privileged minority, viz the CEOs of utility companies, will be rubbing theirs and each other’s for entirely different reasons.
Western politicians and the media with which they collude are keen to sell the line to the British public that the Ukraine conflict is driving up the global gas price as traders are concerned that they may not have access to Russian gas in the future, whilst carefully omitting that the reason why Brits will go cold, broke or possibly both this winter is a direct consequence of US globalist ambition. The US-led western collective’s attempt to crush the Russian economy and destabilise the country by imposing sanction after sanction on it and perpetuating the Ukraine conflict by throwing public money away on arms shipments has barely dented Russia but has subjected the British populace to energy and standard-of-living impoverishment barely known in the UK since old man Labour was last in power. Come on liberal lefties! What about the NHS and the escalating energy bills! Get out those banners and riot around the streets!
Another thing that is rarely mentioned, if ever, is that the renewable energy industry, which has long been touted as the answer to the Earth maiden’s prayer, is full of rapacious snake oil salesmen. The suspicion that renewable energy is a complete fraud is echoed and substantiated by socio-political experts around the world, who agree that inordinate amounts of tax-payers money is siphoned off each year to fund futile renewable energy projects at the expense of energy security5.
Most UK politicians do not want to hear this, and the Greens are having a shit fit! How dare renewable energy be exposed for the fraud that it is!6 Goodness knows what they, the Greens, are going to do this winter to keep warm. Downsize into the smallest shoe box imaginable, put on a couple of extra anoraks and get their live-in Ukrainian to pump the bellows around the candle? Mind you, the cabbage-brained Greens are so adept at producing hot air about the so-called iniquities of those on the right (and usually in the right) of politics and trumpeting loud and long about bizarre, unworkable loony-left policies that they could keep the entire country warm by the laughter that they generate.
But is it a laughing matter (snigger)?
The UK is often cited as a country that no longer makes things or produces anything. It is a funny little place that pushes funny money around on computer screens in banks, loan shark offices, credit card companies and in one of the biggest gambling houses in the world (although the news on the street is that even this is losing its edge to foreign competition) the London Stock Exchange (see: Charlie Richardson and the British Mafia). Inflating house prices and concreting over the countryside with little unattractive, unimaginative red-brick boxes badly built and not worth a quarter of the money that they are ‘valued’ at is the UK’s financial equivalent of The Last Chance Saloon. ‘Britain needs more houses’ is as facile and environmentally catastrophic as Britain needs more immigrants is suicidal, but old slogans, like old habits, die hard, especially when they serve the self-serving interests of the country’s corporate carpetbaggers and its slippery liberal politicians.
The UK is also a country that allows (did I hear you say ‘encourages’?), a monthly tsunami of illegal immigrants from all corners of the third world; thousands upon thousands of freeloaders whose social security benefits, hotel bills, translator and interpreter fees, housing costs ~ the list goes on ~ comes out every pocket of every working British citizen in his, her or its taxes, just so liberal lefty can say, “Hello Sammy from Bongoland, aren’t we kind and tolerant!” The only reason that this silly country, the UK, is not a silly bankrupt country is that as soon as the going gets tough, those at the top of the very pointy pyramid simply print more money, as they did when tipped the wink by the WHO that coronavirus was the perfect excuse for doing so.
Thinking about moving to the UK? Think again!
I am not going to expatiate on the auxiliary costs of living in the UK and the reason why The Smiths’ lyrics, “I was looking for a job and then I found a job and heaven knows I’m miserable now!” is so applicable to modern UK life. Suffice it to say, and we’ve all been there, that once you’ve got that job that took six months, 100 application letters and almost as many interviews to get, you soon learn, usually the day after the euphoria dies, that it will never pay enough to keep your head above water: cue credit cards, sequential loans and very happy financiers. It’s not long before you hate that job. In fact, you loathe and detest it. All that shit from your employers and those awful people with whom you have to work, who, if you saw them coming towards you in the street, you’d quickly cross the road to avoid. But you are trapped: your mortgage depends on your salary, and in an overpriced, under-governed and horribly overcrowded country where hundreds of people chase every job, you have no other option but to stay put and endure it, no matter how desperately skint you are and how tragically miserable your life has become.
Apart from this, living in the UK is bad (at last whilst the liberal-lefty globalists are in charge). Why would you want to live there? Why would you want to go there? This post has discussed the positives, next we’ll expose the negatives.
Man the lifeboats! What am I saying!!! ‘Its and Others first!’
Footnote: See reference 3 below. In this article published in 2015, the author writes:
“It is crucial that the next government introduce detailed, workable and effective measures to boost housing supply across the country.” That’s the UK for you! All they can think of is ‘build more houses’ Like unlimited immigration, where, or rather how, will it all end?
References
1.https://www.reuters.com/article/idUS120413522020130410
2.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254356162_Globalisation_and_public_policy_under_New_Labour
3. https://www.cityam.com/general-election-2015-how-tony-blair-presided-over-biggest-rise-house-prices-history/
4. https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/mar/18/tony-blair-profiting-housing-crisis-investment-property?CMP=twt_gu
5. https://www.netzerowatch.com/why-the-renewable-energy-industry-is-mostly-a-scam/
6. https://stopthesethings.com/2020/05/27/green-left-furious-at-michael-moore-for-exposing-renewable-energy-as-complete-fraud/
Copyright © 2018-2022 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.
Image attributions:
Sunk boat: https://www.needpix.com/photo/1343217/ [author: Darren Lewis (publicdomainpictures.net)]
Credit card: https://www.needpix.com/photo/27375/
Shoe box: https://www.needpix.com/photo/1536959/ [author: George Hodan (publicdomainpictures.net)]
Man with bill: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Man-worried-about-the-bill-vector/2313.html
Freezing man: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Freezing-man/73316.html