Sharpe's Opinion
Thursday, 4th Dec, 2008
I Don’t Know What the Worst Thing About This Story Is
Dizzy documents the Great Mortgage Insurance Swindle:
The figure of 70% is an outright lie. The banks, and by that I mean all banks, not just these eight, had, as of July 2008, 635,130 of the 1,214,148 mortgages held in the UK.
That’s 52.2% of mortgages that are from all the banks in the UK. The other 47.8% belong to Building Societies and specialist mortgage lenders such as building society subsidiaries and securitisations. The last time the banks (and again I mean all bank not just the eight mentioned) held close to that market share was 2002 when they held 69.3% of the market.
Since then the specialist mortgages lenders, which include building society subsidiaries and securitisations, has increased its share to 30.6% whilst the banks have dropped to the already mentioned 52.2%. Even if one is generous and accepts that all 52.2% of mortgages will be covered by Brown’s latest plan, that still means just short of half the mortgage holders in the country are not included. Thus the Great Mortgage Insurance Swindle is complete.
I just don’t know what’s worse: that our Prime Minister is happy to stand in Parliament and lie without shame, without fear of being discovered and in the knowledge that the papers will repeat the lie as a truth; or that nobody in Parliament – not even Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition – is willing to take a stand against him and challenge his assertions with anything other than a mild passing comment.
Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about an affair. Our leader can tell untruths which deeply affect our lives and never be challenged. There’s something deeply broken in this country, and a simple change of government will not fix it.
ladytizzy
December 4th, 2008 | 5:44 pm
Today, I had an interesting debate/row with my husband regarding the implied right of civil servants to pass on info to Damian Green.
Brief precis: his assertion was that the gvt opposition were implying that civil servants have enjoyed a long enshrined right to pass on info to MPs who are not part of the gvt. Why should this be since a similar scenario in the commercial world could be considered commercial espionage?
Cutting to the chase, I asked if he believed that all journos should be arrested when they ‘responsibly’ publish secret gvt info. No. Bottom line, we agreed that the main problem was that nobody trusted what this gvt says, ditto previous and future ones.
Again, going further down the food chain to local councils, the distrust is manifest.
Deny the right to form political parties? Dictatorship or anarchy? Bags I be leader of the Anarchists.
Stu
December 4th, 2008 | 6:57 pm
It shouldn’t be wrong for oppositions to seek information from the government at any opportunity. Their job is to keep the government accountable and soliciting leaked information certainly falls under the definition – and I shall not be changing my mind with a change of government, either.
It should be wrong (and I believe it is wrong) for civil servants to engage in party politics. Therefore the person to blame in this case is the civil servant – if he was indeed acting for party political reasons (which I think is a safe assumption).
The thing that I dislike about the Damian Green case is that his arrest seems to have been for no reason other than intimidation. Arresting him was unnecessary and the only effect is to lessen the Opposition’s ability to hold government to account.
As for lies, for all the laws Labour have brought it, it’s shameful that MPs are still allowed to lie with impunity. That’s a law worth making.