As Above, So Below...

Exit one ex-Prime Minister with a somewhat flexible attitude to verity, to be replaced - barring the briefest of interregnums that was the Truss administration - by our current PM, largely lauded for his business head and his fiscal and monetary probity: Captain Steady, back from being cast adrift by the mutinous Johnson, to steady the Mother Ship, and navigate her back to safe waters. A bland man in a slightly-too-small blue suit, preaching from on high about financial security and the need for public-purse parsimony. When taxed about the current mortgage crisis - about to escalate massively, according to the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Bank of England, and just about any well-established, trustworthy organ - all we were offered was that the Tories would encourage lenders and borrowers to aim for extended mortgage terms or interest-only mortgages!

In the first case, many, many people these days are already borrowing well beyond their retirement dates, storing up a whole raft of problems for well into their late middle and old ages. And as to the second option, words fail me. Interest-only borrowing on property is like playing Russian Roulette with all six chambers of your revolver loaded with live rounds: a guaranteed lose-lose bet: you're actively risking the most valuable asset you will ever own. And all this from Captain Steady, the man with his hand on the tiller of our economy. Only a rich and thoughtless man with scant grip on the true realities of life could suggest such arrant, dangerous tosh to a hard-pressed nation, struggling to keep it's head just above the waves. Shameful.