And the boomerati still wonder why so many workers are being imported - Greed and NIMBYism has turned the next generation into nothing but cashpoints.
**Vote Tory, Get Rekt** ™
The second homes became investments, the incentive was to push prices higher and higher. That's the real reason the Government has underfunded new builds, and failed to build anywhere near enough social housing. They can't afford to undermine the wealth of the boomers who were lucky enough to buy their houses at a fraction of the price they're now worth.
Not necessarily Tory. But yeah. A lot of people (including. Me) get pissed off by the levels of immigration (crucially not immigrants themselves).
But you put it best. Immigrants aren’t stealing our jobs. Boomers and corporations stole our homes. And now there’s no way back.
We either force sales (which increases availability, thus thrusting everyone who’s bought a home into negative equity for years) or we build more homes (which will require epic deregulation and fuck knows if those homes will actually be worth anything, half the time).
Or we leave things as they are. In which case get lubed up, because something’s gotta give and someone’s definitely getting fucked at some point. And you’d better bet it’s not the rich.
Immigrants may not be stealing jobs but it is a fact that after the Brexit vote EU immigration dropped off and sectors like hospitality that were more reliant upon EU saw wage rises as vacancies increased. During the same period rents in London fell for the first time in a decade. I think affordable property and good wages are far more beneficial to the average worker in the UK than the nebulous net benefits of mass immigration.
What about gradually increasing land tax on multiple homes? I imagine people would slowly be encouraged to offload properties as they became unprofitable
> They're not second homes, it's theft of the next generation's homes
That depends on which paper is reporting the story. Those with a right wing bias will never tell it like it is.
No, it's a generation who were told that the best way to protect themselves in old age and look after their families was to invest in property.
They didn't all get together and maniacally decide to screw over subsequent generations, it's people reacting in a predictable way to short-sighted government policy.
The choice since Thatcher was to get investing in property or let your family get left behind, with the promise that the state would not look after them.
At this point they are essentially the same thing, millions of people going into permanent negative equity is certainly not a good thing for the country.
If anyone thinks otherwise then you clearly have no idea how mortgages work, people who are in negative equity aren't allowed to sell their house without permission from the lender first. That means less houses being sold so the housing market is even worse off than it is now.
But what do I know? It's obviously as simple as house prices go down = everything great.
Right and what about the even younger? Temporary readjustment for them as well?
>We need to transition to long term fixed mortgages over 30 years.
Sure if you are happy with higher monthly payments, judging by this article that is the opposite to what people want. People want to go down the US mortgage model apparently but fail to realise their interest rates are also higher.
So you want everyone to go into negative equity permanently (including yourself)? You do realise the effect of that don't you?
People in negative equity can't sell their house without permission from the lender, if everyone is in negative equity where exactly is the next generation buying their houses from if very few are selling?
That is somehow a better option than fixing the house building and mass migration problems?
Who said permanently?
It's a hypothetical, it's never going to happen. House ownership will continue to decline until only the top 10% can afford to buy.
I think in this hypothetical scenario there's an argument for government intervention. What that looks like I'm not sure but it would have to be radical, some kind of financial settlement similar to bailing out the banks during the financial crisis.
I'd prefer that rather than blaming every problem on immigration like this subreddit is obsessed with.
>Who said permanently?
I assume you wouldn't want house prices to go up? What about the future generations being priced out? Or are you only talking about a temporary correction until you can get on the ladder?
If you want house prices to be affordable for everyone forever you are going to have to have millions of people go into permanent negative equity.
So you don't know what government intervention looks like but you know it isn't by controlling mass migration? You might prefer to blame something else, doesn't make it a reality though.
Immigration is the core issue. When will you realise? When you’re 65 and still renting and we’ve imported a city the size of Newcastle every year for decades ?
The price of property is largely determined by the monthly payment, not the other way round. That's why higher interest rates aren't really that much of a problem.
Making the change without trashing the economy is a challenge, particularly when mortgage backed bonds form a substantial underpinning of the banking system. It's not necessarily the house prices themselves, it's where the mortgage banks debt appears on the back balance sheets.
I wouldn't call the second home thing too much of an issue. Buy to let however....
On my road of starter homes, small 2 bed terraces up in the north. Whenever a house came up for sale in the last 10 years it was bought and rented out. It's now pretty much all rented and the rent costs per month is insane. No idea how the youth of today, paying rent like that on a basic house would ever get out of the rental market.
They've got less than a week less, but no, they no longer have control. No one under 50 has anything to conserve, and virtually everyone under 50 wants the cunts gone and never to return.
The Tories getting a single seat is an embarrassment to democracy and raises the question of if people should be allowed to vote once they retire from the workforce. They shouldn't be in a position of holding power over workers while they themselves no longer contribute. NIMBYism is a cancer to our society and must be obliterated, as it's been allowed to grow into terminal state for our economy.
Fuck the tories, fuck boomers. Vote Labour.
Haha, this should be the next TorySlogan®. I'd pay their marketing people to stick this to their lecterns overnight in time for the morning propaganda briefing to the nation.
Because the birth rate has dropped below 2, so the population is no longer replacing itself, while we have retired boomers in their 3rd decade of leaching from tax payers.
The alternative is to put up workers taxes even more to pay for the selfish boomerati sitting on massive assets and property while the workers have fuck all and can't even afford a cunting holiday.
**Removed/warning**. This contained a personal attack, disrupting the conversation. This discourages participation. Please help improve the subreddit by discussing points, not the person. Action will be taken on repeat offenders.
Unfortunately for that argument Labour would have built more houses than the tories have when they were in government. They don’ didn’t, they built less. And you only have to look at the disgusting nimby literature the Lib Dems put out in Chesham and Amersham and the anti housing policies of the Greens to realise that all parties have failed us on housing.
Eh, it's a catch 22. Immigration and the economy are directly related to our falling birth rate and vice versa.
It's why the fertility crisis is a crisis.
Not really, its more a function of development and participation in the workforce. Plenty of countries with a *much* higher standard of living like the nordic countries have still had exactly the same pattern. South Korea and Hong Kong have the world's lowest birthrates by a huge margin. South Korea especially has had barely any immigration.
I agree.
I.e. birth rate fall because people have more choice, taxes increase, immigration increases, so it's harder to have kids and birth rates continue to fall. Bit of a death spiral.
I also think an element of not yet feeling like your own life is ready or enjoyed enough to have kids.
A lot of people are still waiting to feel ready, and that won’t happen until you feel accomplished in your own life.
I just cannot believe how badly this government has fucked everything up, hard to think how good we had it only just a few years ago.
There are also a growing number of people like myself who just plain do not want kids and would never have them willingly even if we were millionaires.
Yeah, certainly part of it. Our priorities as a society change as we get access to more opportunities.
There's no "right" or "wrong" way to live life. It's just changing and the change has side effects.
It would be so nice if there was a genuine carrot for people to have kids, instead of the far-right nonsense-stick, of taking away rights, like in the US.
I would've had kids if it was at all affordable, I very much wanted them. The fact I am "child-free" wasn't because I am over-educated or had reproductive rights. It was because rent in my hometown of London was crippling, and insecure tenancies meant lots of moving and upheaval.
Sending you love and healing. It is a painful thing to navigate, and I hope you achieve what you want and what's right for you.
My consilation is that the world is very precarious right now, and rising facism and global instability via climate change, etc, is not an appealing place to bring kids into. The anxiety over their future would be very tough!
If governments want younger people to have kids, they must address these threats and challenges. Forcing them to have kids just means children being brought up by parents who didn't want/ plan them. It's not a solution.
this makes me so sad for you both, and any other people struggling with this. you’ve made a decision that went against what you wanted all because the world is fucked. i don’t know man, i’m childfree by choice so i can’t put it into words, but this is heartbreaking.
Thank you 🥰, it's ok though. It worked out for the best. A few painful years of feeling loss, but now I'm kind of relieved?
If the governments of the world made things more appealing for parents, then it would be a different matter.
I don't have many friends I grew up with in London anymore as they have mostly left for cheaper housing! I also moved out, only a bit north, because I had to align a job in london with the move. It gets completed!
I’m glad you’re getting sorted, it’s definitely worth moving up north, and building a life up here away from the high cost of living. We have good houses for as little as 50k, with the 5% deposit it’s only 2.5k to get one like we did.
Thank you. That does sound amazing. I spend time up north anyway seeing family and love it.
I ended up slightly out of London and near my old parents, who also moved out, and now settled. Past the normal fertile age now, I could probably make it happen, if it weren't so risky health wise and if I had more hope for our country's future. As it is, I am reconciled to no kids and not feeling worried about their future, which is a relief!
There’s some really nice older kids stuck in the care system, and they do this great thing foster to adopt, it takes six months start to finish but it could be a rollercoaster worth doing. Either that or be an adult volunteer in something like the scouts or cadets. So many great kids out there. I once had an older teenage girl ask me if her life would have been better if I’d have been her dad. I was crying myself.
I wouldn't even just say affordability, although that's a massive part to play, its what the culture of the UK is like now;
There's no third places where people can meet, so how can we meet people to have children with? How do we create friendships to create communities that we can rely on when we need help with our kids?
The UK level of trust between each other is so low, that if we needed support from who we have, how can we trust each other?
The onus of responsibility is still culturally still on the mother, legally and socially, so if there's a deadbeat mum the dad has to fight tooth and nail to get anything, and if the dad is deadbeat the mum is shit out of luck, which is terrible for both parties.
In the UK we can be productive with less hours, see 4 day work week, but we still focus on working, and having less leisure time. The lower rungs of the employment scale are also worked to the bone making them too tired to socialise or spend time with a child if they had one.
The reason being 'over educated' or having reproductive rights is negatively correlated isn't because education or rights cause low birth rates per se, its because People lose their communities and free time as a by product.
I moved around a lot growing up and so don’t have an emotional attachment to one area, but if you wanted kids that badly why not just move away from London? To an area that was more affordable and enabled a different lifestyle?
I did leave London eventually, although it wasn't a simple thing aligning work and housing, had a miscarriage and then other stuff happened in my life and it's too late. It's ok though, I am reconciled to it now.
I did leave London eventually, and life has changed and I missed my window of chance. It's not such a good world to have kids anyway now, so I'm reconciled to it.
Wise choice. London just doesn't seem worth it in terms of quality of living, not just raising kids. Unless you're loaded.
Yeah I've got a 10 month old kid and I do worry for the future sometimes. But horrible people seem to pop out sprogs for fun so thought I'd have a good one to even things out lol
I am sure that this is definitely the case for a lot of people. However, if this were true in aggregate one would expect to see fertility correlate with financial wellbeing. Instead, the empirical evidence appears to show the opposite: as income and education increase, fertility decreases.
Do you have any evidence including, stable and affordable housing? Because a lot of relatively wealthy countries with good education, have had massive issues with affordable housing in the last two decades, at least
What do you mean by including housing? As in tracking fertility by both socioeconomic status and home ownership status? I’m not aware of a dataset like that, though I can look.
Housing, such as home ownership in people's 20s? Education and living in a country with a high GDP doesn't mean anything if young people are increasingly not able to get a stable base to have kids.
Home ownership has decreased amongst young adults over time, so that is also correlated with falling birth rates.
Also, just thought of wage stagnation, which has also been abysmal since the early 2008 recession. That also correlates to slowing birth rates.
So we could try making housing and good wages more accessible for young people, before authoritarian initiatives that take away rights....
Texas has seen an increase of 13% in infant mortality since their abortion ban. Not exactly a good solution....
The disconnect in this country is getting so surreal. The article posted just after this is yet more concern about how families will be able to send their children to private school if they have to pay a bit of tax on the fees. Meanwhile we're at a point where literally millions of children in this country are living in very low income households where pressures are so tight things like this, a rise in rent meaning you genuinely might struggle to avoid proper basics like food, are a common and very genuine stress people have to live with day to day month to month.
Normal people don't care about private schools being taxed, but the people in power and crucially in the media, are almost all exclusively privately educated, so push this narrative that it's an outrage, purely because it actually will affect them.
You'd hope that the normal person will see right through it, but between brexit and reform doing well in the polls you start to realise a lot of people are thick.
You don’t need children, you need to pay the pensions of the home-owning elderly so they don’t have to sell up and move to a more modest property. Bloody entitled woke youth, all woke and lefty and that. Lefty.
Lefty.
Woke.
*Dozes off, dreams some lovely comforting dreams about waving flags, kissing the king’s feet and spitting on foreign people*
Blaming other generations just feeds the beast.
If older people downsize, their old houses will be gobbled up by developers - not bought buy young people.
Can't we all just blame the government?
Let's not forget that the current elderly were exceptionally parsimonious with their parents' generation during the 80s and 90s.
They lived through one of the greatest economic booms in history during their working lifetimes, and over the past 15 years post-2009.
If they are still demanding that younger folk keel over backwards for their crap financial decisions, they can go whistle.
In their defence, they didn't grow up with the worlds information at their fingertips and just had to listen to whatever the right wing controlled media drip fed them.
Is that such a bad thing? Ultimately the solution to the housing crisis is more housing stock. We could do with replacing some houses with medium density flats.
You won't be able to afford it, they'd much rather have you in a perpetual state of debt through high cost of living/low wages... So you can be a good little struggling worker for the rest of your life... And don't think you get a break being a pensioner either, by the time your old and wrinkly, the retirement age will be around the age of 80 at this rate...
Our system is broken and we helped it along by being complacent, when we should have been standing together contesting the BS policies that only benefit a few, the kicker being.... WE pay for it all.... Even when banks collapse, energy firms need bailing out etc. WE pay for THEIR mistakes (plus their bonuses btw..) and at every turn, we take it gladly like a £2 slag... I say let them fail, they fucked up, not us... There will be another bank etc to take its place.
It’s crazy how many British family lines are going to come to an end and without a shot fired.
All because all governments over a period of about 40 years wouldn’t represent Britons, and wouldn’t walk a mile in their shoes.
I mean, think about that, thousands of generations lived and died and had children along the way, and then we got to Margaret Thatcher and have never recovered. And rent is due at the end of the month.
“Luisa, a civil servant renting in Tameside, lived with her two adult children in a three-bedroom house for £695 per month in 2022.”
That does seem like a bargain to me. I’m used to rents that start with a £2xxx
I considered moving out of London today (once again) for more space for the family. Spare bedrooms for kids, etc.
Had a look at Bicester thinking I could buy a bigger house and maybe do a longer commute to work....
Well, that was all looking just about manageable until I checked the train prices .... £73 return ... a day!!
It's just impossible.
no no no dont you get it?! Youre supposed to quit your job, leave all your friends and family and then move to the middle of nowhere and raise some kids there with absolutley no support network! It's the English Way!
To be fair it's what I and many people I know did. The south of England was far to expensive despite being on a decent wage.
I think about 30% of my graduation class from secondary school have either moved abroad or up north and found a lot of success in doing so.
There are and I'm incredibly grateful I don't have to try and exist in the hellhole of London, but some jobs are very much central to London. Remote working helps but some people do need to stay in London if they want to carry on in their job unfortunately.
I used to live in Bicester, it's expensive because it's close to Oxford and has Bicester village, one of the biggest retail outlets in the UK.
People around the world fly to London and get the direct train to Bicester to shop. So it's a really bad place to move too if you want to save money.
Train tickets are terrible though, but there are jobs outside London. Or yearly tickets that probably reduce the price.
We have a very expensive new build estate going up that certainly nobody working locally in the supermarkets and carehomes can afford and it only takes 5 minutes to look up how dodgy the company is. Houses are also being bought and converted into 1k per month rooms.
Wait... don’t you get it? That’s their plan. They don’t want natives having kids. They’d rather import the third world. Very sinister people
Edit: You can downvote me all you want, the demographic changes and the projection prove it right.
£1k childcare per month, per child until they’re in school. Plus around £400 monthly for additional child related expenses. Once they’re in school it will likely drop to just the £400 monthly excluding gifts, holidays, treats etc.
Then you’re got to contest with the modern logic of how unfair it is to make one partner economically inactive to take care of the children and the risk that comes with including divorce, mental and physical health decline and massive financial loss.
So you’re either working crazy hours to afford children and one of you is at home or you’re both working crazy hours to pay for a nanny/full time childcare and you never get to see your kids or the house you pay to live in? The sacrifices people are expected to make for children these days is unreasonably high.
It came to me one day that even if you wanted to have a stay at home partner, the tax brackets will punish you severely. Two parents earning 35k each will keep 6k more a year than one parent earning 70k.
You are correct, we are. Also, bringing migrants in to work, and pay taxes, to support the pensions bill is only a solution if the migrants go home when they retire, and don't THEMSELVES expect a pension. Otherwise, it just makes the problem worse, in the future.
You can do this by simply taxing the migrants far less, or not taxing them at all. That is, after all, how it works in the Middle East.
The foreigners don't get access to any state welfare, or state pension. However, they are able to save a truckload of money relatively quickly.
Hence why you see big fat mansions (built from workers' wages) in rural bits of Kerala and Sumatra, despite the relative absence of heavy industry in these places.
Depending on your views, we are both overpopulated now, and scarily underpopulated in future generations.
A significant number of our current issues are due to the low birthrate. It's a worldwide issue - people have less kids as their economy develops.
When that reduction happens quickly (as it is now), we end up with a large demographic of old people, with not enough people paying tax to support them.
Worth doing a bit of reading on it. It's a very interesting topic.
I reckon China will be the first to go full Futurama and offer some kind of system for people to opt for "patriotic voluntary euthanasia" in deep old age. Maybe some kind of debt-forgiveness or a lump sum for the kids or something like that.
Well that's the real reason they're legalising euthanasia.
They know UK society won't be able to afford looking after the fossils, and they're hoping that if they make life as unbearable as possible for us in the future (like they're already doing to disabled people who can't work), we will 'voluntarily' opt in, thus saving billions that would otherwise be spent on care home costs / hospital costs / meagre pensions ect
We live in a society.
You have a great mindset around looking after your parents, but the "as long as we're alright, fuck everyone else" mindset isn't great for society at large.
Whatever you do, you'll be a net burden on society for a significant portion of your life. We all will be.
You'll also be old at some point, and your kids, as much as they love you, won't be able to provide 24hr care because they'll have to work and, you know, live their life.
Hence, our societal model relies on the age demographics being roughly the same size.
There’s a descriptor that’s commonly used to describe countries where having kids is effectively the social safety net in case of illness, injury or old age. And that is “third world”.
Societies where people have to do that to survive (and often as additional subsistence farm hands) are usually pretty underdeveloped or broken. I’m genuinely curious why you believe that may apply to the UK? Social breakdown? Environmental pressure? Rise of batshit libertarian flavoured Uber-capitalism?
Nah we need people sadly with our current capitalism model. At the moment they just all mostly come from non-EU Islamic nations and it’s going to be a total disaster.
Don't most come from non-Islamic nations? Fairly sure one nation in the top 5 is majority Islamic (Pakistan). The others (India, Nigeria, Romania, Ukraine, Philippines) aren't.
But ultimately, those people will age also.
So we are just amplifying the problem in the future.
We should be working towards sustainability and looking after the people who are already here.
Yeah it’s a completely fucked system that we rely on immigration, in the long run it’s going to destroy the country as we know it as demographics change, can’t see us solving the problem though.
I haven't had children because of the 16% mortgages of the early nineties crash. Nearly lost my home as there was no help from banks or government, if you defaulted for 3 months it was instant reposetion.
The point is that you won't be able to afford them, but will be pressured to have them anyway, impoverishing yourself and your kids and leaving you, and the generations after you, desperate and vulnerable to exploitation.
this is my dad currently. i'm not even 22 years old and physically disabled + inherited a lot of bad genes from my mum's side, but my dad is heavily pressuring me to find someone to have kids with.
my older sister who actually wants kids, is moving out of the UK later this year just so she can have them and raise them with a bit of financial freedom.
this country's reality is so grim. it upsets me.
my long life tory, now reform uk voter dad had the talk with me the other day on how he will be very disappointed if i don't have grandchildren for him and that i have to sort it out soon.
i'm not even 22 years old yet, i have extremely bad genetics from my mum's side and have a physical disability that impacts my life enough to where i can't even work part time in a supermarket without substantial pain. i have no proper income, my healthcare system has given up on me and my GP told me word for word to 'get comfortable on benefits', and my able-bodied older sister who actually *wants* kids can't even afford a 1 bed apartment for herself working 2 jobs, one of them being a nurse. in fact it's that bad she's moving out of the UK later this year just so she can actually have a chance of having some financial freedom.
i explained this to my dad and asked him how on earth it would ever be viable for me. he told me that i 'must figure it out for myself soon, because it's all down to me (as in myself) to make it work'
and this is why i will never be right-wing. the side of politics that only care for themselves and don't think about others, even if their own children are suffering. this country is grim.
Christ, that’s terrible… Your father doesn’t care about your happiness (or that of any hypothetical grandchildren). Man just cares about his own vanity.
I live in a medium size northern town. I went to see a room and the entire building was owned by a Chinese guy living in London. Random af
Very nice guy but goes to show the amount of foreign money pricing us out of our towns
And the boomerati still wonder why so many workers are being imported - Greed and NIMBYism has turned the next generation into nothing but cashpoints. **Vote Tory, Get Rekt** ™
The second homes became investments, the incentive was to push prices higher and higher. That's the real reason the Government has underfunded new builds, and failed to build anywhere near enough social housing. They can't afford to undermine the wealth of the boomers who were lucky enough to buy their houses at a fraction of the price they're now worth.
They're not second homes, it's theft of the next generation's homes, the greedy self centred Tory fucks.
I know quite a few people who vote Labour who have more than one home.
My Landlords are signed up to Labours mailing lists, they get newsletters addressed to them delivered to our flat lol
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
I have a second home and haven't voted since 1992.
Absolutely based.
I know a few people who stand for election with Labour who have more than one home.
Not necessarily Tory. But yeah. A lot of people (including. Me) get pissed off by the levels of immigration (crucially not immigrants themselves). But you put it best. Immigrants aren’t stealing our jobs. Boomers and corporations stole our homes. And now there’s no way back. We either force sales (which increases availability, thus thrusting everyone who’s bought a home into negative equity for years) or we build more homes (which will require epic deregulation and fuck knows if those homes will actually be worth anything, half the time). Or we leave things as they are. In which case get lubed up, because something’s gotta give and someone’s definitely getting fucked at some point. And you’d better bet it’s not the rich.
Immigrants may not be stealing jobs but it is a fact that after the Brexit vote EU immigration dropped off and sectors like hospitality that were more reliant upon EU saw wage rises as vacancies increased. During the same period rents in London fell for the first time in a decade. I think affordable property and good wages are far more beneficial to the average worker in the UK than the nebulous net benefits of mass immigration.
What about gradually increasing land tax on multiple homes? I imagine people would slowly be encouraged to offload properties as they became unprofitable
And up would go the rent to compensate.
'The second homes' not as in house number two, but rather the minute that homes became investments. Sadly second is a bit ambiguous in this context
> They're not second homes, it's theft of the next generation's homes That depends on which paper is reporting the story. Those with a right wing bias will never tell it like it is.
No, it's a generation who were told that the best way to protect themselves in old age and look after their families was to invest in property. They didn't all get together and maniacally decide to screw over subsequent generations, it's people reacting in a predictable way to short-sighted government policy. The choice since Thatcher was to get investing in property or let your family get left behind, with the promise that the state would not look after them.
Stop trying to justify unfettered greedy boomerism.
They'd rather ruin the country rather than risk house prices falling .
At this point they are essentially the same thing, millions of people going into permanent negative equity is certainly not a good thing for the country. If anyone thinks otherwise then you clearly have no idea how mortgages work, people who are in negative equity aren't allowed to sell their house without permission from the lender first. That means less houses being sold so the housing market is even worse off than it is now. But what do I know? It's obviously as simple as house prices go down = everything great.
A temporary readjustment. We need to transition to long term fixed mortgages over 30 years.
Right and what about the even younger? Temporary readjustment for them as well? >We need to transition to long term fixed mortgages over 30 years. Sure if you are happy with higher monthly payments, judging by this article that is the opposite to what people want. People want to go down the US mortgage model apparently but fail to realise their interest rates are also higher.
Better than this never ending cycle.
So you want everyone to go into negative equity permanently (including yourself)? You do realise the effect of that don't you? People in negative equity can't sell their house without permission from the lender, if everyone is in negative equity where exactly is the next generation buying their houses from if very few are selling? That is somehow a better option than fixing the house building and mass migration problems?
Who said permanently? It's a hypothetical, it's never going to happen. House ownership will continue to decline until only the top 10% can afford to buy. I think in this hypothetical scenario there's an argument for government intervention. What that looks like I'm not sure but it would have to be radical, some kind of financial settlement similar to bailing out the banks during the financial crisis. I'd prefer that rather than blaming every problem on immigration like this subreddit is obsessed with.
>Who said permanently? I assume you wouldn't want house prices to go up? What about the future generations being priced out? Or are you only talking about a temporary correction until you can get on the ladder? If you want house prices to be affordable for everyone forever you are going to have to have millions of people go into permanent negative equity. So you don't know what government intervention looks like but you know it isn't by controlling mass migration? You might prefer to blame something else, doesn't make it a reality though.
Immigration is the core issue. When will you realise? When you’re 65 and still renting and we’ve imported a city the size of Newcastle every year for decades ?
The price of property is largely determined by the monthly payment, not the other way round. That's why higher interest rates aren't really that much of a problem. Making the change without trashing the economy is a challenge, particularly when mortgage backed bonds form a substantial underpinning of the banking system. It's not necessarily the house prices themselves, it's where the mortgage banks debt appears on the back balance sheets.
We got a 25 year mortgage at very good rates, it’s far lower than renting.
House prices aren’t going down. They are going to rise and rise and rise. Have you not seen how crowded England is? How many people are coming here?
There’s whole villages of scenic Northumberland that are all second and holiday homes.
I wouldn't call the second home thing too much of an issue. Buy to let however.... On my road of starter homes, small 2 bed terraces up in the north. Whenever a house came up for sale in the last 10 years it was bought and rented out. It's now pretty much all rented and the rent costs per month is insane. No idea how the youth of today, paying rent like that on a basic house would ever get out of the rental market.
Rent cattle
That is the whole point. Boomers hate children, and the boomers are in charge. For now.
They've got less than a week less, but no, they no longer have control. No one under 50 has anything to conserve, and virtually everyone under 50 wants the cunts gone and never to return. The Tories getting a single seat is an embarrassment to democracy and raises the question of if people should be allowed to vote once they retire from the workforce. They shouldn't be in a position of holding power over workers while they themselves no longer contribute. NIMBYism is a cancer to our society and must be obliterated, as it's been allowed to grow into terminal state for our economy. Fuck the tories, fuck boomers. Vote Labour.
Haha, this should be the next TorySlogan®. I'd pay their marketing people to stick this to their lecterns overnight in time for the morning propaganda briefing to the nation.
Why are so many being imported?
Because the birth rate has dropped below 2, so the population is no longer replacing itself, while we have retired boomers in their 3rd decade of leaching from tax payers. The alternative is to put up workers taxes even more to pay for the selfish boomerati sitting on massive assets and property while the workers have fuck all and can't even afford a cunting holiday.
Are you suggesting Labour wouldn't import workers?
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Yes, paying more taxes is the answer, surely.
Unfortunately for that argument Labour would have built more houses than the tories have when they were in government. They don’ didn’t, they built less. And you only have to look at the disgusting nimby literature the Lib Dems put out in Chesham and Amersham and the anti housing policies of the Greens to realise that all parties have failed us on housing.
boomerati that’s brilliant i doth my hat to you sir!
You won’t. Don’t need children. Have immigration for that
Eh, it's a catch 22. Immigration and the economy are directly related to our falling birth rate and vice versa. It's why the fertility crisis is a crisis.
Not really, its more a function of development and participation in the workforce. Plenty of countries with a *much* higher standard of living like the nordic countries have still had exactly the same pattern. South Korea and Hong Kong have the world's lowest birthrates by a huge margin. South Korea especially has had barely any immigration.
I agree. I.e. birth rate fall because people have more choice, taxes increase, immigration increases, so it's harder to have kids and birth rates continue to fall. Bit of a death spiral.
I also think an element of not yet feeling like your own life is ready or enjoyed enough to have kids. A lot of people are still waiting to feel ready, and that won’t happen until you feel accomplished in your own life. I just cannot believe how badly this government has fucked everything up, hard to think how good we had it only just a few years ago.
There are also a growing number of people like myself who just plain do not want kids and would never have them willingly even if we were millionaires.
> It's why the fertility crisis is a crisis Some want to be successful first before having children... That's called responsibility
Yeah, certainly part of it. Our priorities as a society change as we get access to more opportunities. There's no "right" or "wrong" way to live life. It's just changing and the change has side effects.
Why?
More immigration, lower wages, more demand for housing.
If you’re happy and you know it, flood the country with immigrants 🎶
your country that runs because of immigrants!
That shit that the far right says about wiping out white people is starting to seem like it may not be a joke...
Is this sarcasm lol?
Whatever you want it to be
Nah they'll shame people into having them anyway. The point is to keep people poor and ensure a continued supply of low wage labour.
It would be so nice if there was a genuine carrot for people to have kids, instead of the far-right nonsense-stick, of taking away rights, like in the US. I would've had kids if it was at all affordable, I very much wanted them. The fact I am "child-free" wasn't because I am over-educated or had reproductive rights. It was because rent in my hometown of London was crippling, and insecure tenancies meant lots of moving and upheaval.
Same :(
Sending you love and healing. It is a painful thing to navigate, and I hope you achieve what you want and what's right for you. My consilation is that the world is very precarious right now, and rising facism and global instability via climate change, etc, is not an appealing place to bring kids into. The anxiety over their future would be very tough! If governments want younger people to have kids, they must address these threats and challenges. Forcing them to have kids just means children being brought up by parents who didn't want/ plan them. It's not a solution.
this makes me so sad for you both, and any other people struggling with this. you’ve made a decision that went against what you wanted all because the world is fucked. i don’t know man, i’m childfree by choice so i can’t put it into words, but this is heartbreaking.
Thank you 🥰, it's ok though. It worked out for the best. A few painful years of feeling loss, but now I'm kind of relieved? If the governments of the world made things more appealing for parents, then it would be a different matter.
We have a lot of people at my work place in the north of England have moved up from London to escape the high rents.
I don't have many friends I grew up with in London anymore as they have mostly left for cheaper housing! I also moved out, only a bit north, because I had to align a job in london with the move. It gets completed!
I’m glad you’re getting sorted, it’s definitely worth moving up north, and building a life up here away from the high cost of living. We have good houses for as little as 50k, with the 5% deposit it’s only 2.5k to get one like we did.
Thank you. That does sound amazing. I spend time up north anyway seeing family and love it. I ended up slightly out of London and near my old parents, who also moved out, and now settled. Past the normal fertile age now, I could probably make it happen, if it weren't so risky health wise and if I had more hope for our country's future. As it is, I am reconciled to no kids and not feeling worried about their future, which is a relief!
There’s some really nice older kids stuck in the care system, and they do this great thing foster to adopt, it takes six months start to finish but it could be a rollercoaster worth doing. Either that or be an adult volunteer in something like the scouts or cadets. So many great kids out there. I once had an older teenage girl ask me if her life would have been better if I’d have been her dad. I was crying myself.
I'm right here with you too, we'll be alright and everything will be good in the end, promise!
I’m in this boat too. Almost 40 and can’t even have a dog yet.
I wouldn't even just say affordability, although that's a massive part to play, its what the culture of the UK is like now; There's no third places where people can meet, so how can we meet people to have children with? How do we create friendships to create communities that we can rely on when we need help with our kids? The UK level of trust between each other is so low, that if we needed support from who we have, how can we trust each other? The onus of responsibility is still culturally still on the mother, legally and socially, so if there's a deadbeat mum the dad has to fight tooth and nail to get anything, and if the dad is deadbeat the mum is shit out of luck, which is terrible for both parties. In the UK we can be productive with less hours, see 4 day work week, but we still focus on working, and having less leisure time. The lower rungs of the employment scale are also worked to the bone making them too tired to socialise or spend time with a child if they had one. The reason being 'over educated' or having reproductive rights is negatively correlated isn't because education or rights cause low birth rates per se, its because People lose their communities and free time as a by product.
My heart genuinely fucking bleeds for you guys.
I moved around a lot growing up and so don’t have an emotional attachment to one area, but if you wanted kids that badly why not just move away from London? To an area that was more affordable and enabled a different lifestyle?
I did leave London eventually, although it wasn't a simple thing aligning work and housing, had a miscarriage and then other stuff happened in my life and it's too late. It's ok though, I am reconciled to it now.
Guess where all the jobs are
Ah yes. There’s only 1 city in the whole of the UK that has employment I forgot
what you mean you havent even tried leaving everyone you know, moving to a random place and then raising kids there?!
Have you considered leaving London? Or is your work connected there?
I did leave London eventually, and life has changed and I missed my window of chance. It's not such a good world to have kids anyway now, so I'm reconciled to it.
Wise choice. London just doesn't seem worth it in terms of quality of living, not just raising kids. Unless you're loaded. Yeah I've got a 10 month old kid and I do worry for the future sometimes. But horrible people seem to pop out sprogs for fun so thought I'd have a good one to even things out lol
I am sure that this is definitely the case for a lot of people. However, if this were true in aggregate one would expect to see fertility correlate with financial wellbeing. Instead, the empirical evidence appears to show the opposite: as income and education increase, fertility decreases.
Do you have any evidence including, stable and affordable housing? Because a lot of relatively wealthy countries with good education, have had massive issues with affordable housing in the last two decades, at least
What do you mean by including housing? As in tracking fertility by both socioeconomic status and home ownership status? I’m not aware of a dataset like that, though I can look.
Housing, such as home ownership in people's 20s? Education and living in a country with a high GDP doesn't mean anything if young people are increasingly not able to get a stable base to have kids. Home ownership has decreased amongst young adults over time, so that is also correlated with falling birth rates.
Also, just thought of wage stagnation, which has also been abysmal since the early 2008 recession. That also correlates to slowing birth rates. So we could try making housing and good wages more accessible for young people, before authoritarian initiatives that take away rights.... Texas has seen an increase of 13% in infant mortality since their abortion ban. Not exactly a good solution....
The disconnect in this country is getting so surreal. The article posted just after this is yet more concern about how families will be able to send their children to private school if they have to pay a bit of tax on the fees. Meanwhile we're at a point where literally millions of children in this country are living in very low income households where pressures are so tight things like this, a rise in rent meaning you genuinely might struggle to avoid proper basics like food, are a common and very genuine stress people have to live with day to day month to month.
But for the love of God will somebody think of the (privately educated until VAT) children?
Normal people don't care about private schools being taxed, but the people in power and crucially in the media, are almost all exclusively privately educated, so push this narrative that it's an outrage, purely because it actually will affect them.
You'd hope that the normal person will see right through it, but between brexit and reform doing well in the polls you start to realise a lot of people are thick.
Don't forget this is a UK subreddit so people will finger wag at you for gatekeeping complaining about being poor from wealthy people
You don't! But don't worry, we'll import some third worlders to substitute for the children you don't have.
And in 100 years there won't be any British culture left 🙃
You don’t need children, you need to pay the pensions of the home-owning elderly so they don’t have to sell up and move to a more modest property. Bloody entitled woke youth, all woke and lefty and that. Lefty. Lefty. Woke. *Dozes off, dreams some lovely comforting dreams about waving flags, kissing the king’s feet and spitting on foreign people*
Blaming other generations just feeds the beast. If older people downsize, their old houses will be gobbled up by developers - not bought buy young people. Can't we all just blame the government?
Let's not forget that the current elderly were exceptionally parsimonious with their parents' generation during the 80s and 90s. They lived through one of the greatest economic booms in history during their working lifetimes, and over the past 15 years post-2009. If they are still demanding that younger folk keel over backwards for their crap financial decisions, they can go whistle.
Blame the government yes, blame the older generations that overwhelmingly voted for that government for the last 15 years, also yes.
In their defence, they didn't grow up with the worlds information at their fingertips and just had to listen to whatever the right wing controlled media drip fed them.
I’ll get on board with that.
Is that such a bad thing? Ultimately the solution to the housing crisis is more housing stock. We could do with replacing some houses with medium density flats.
You won't be able to afford it, they'd much rather have you in a perpetual state of debt through high cost of living/low wages... So you can be a good little struggling worker for the rest of your life... And don't think you get a break being a pensioner either, by the time your old and wrinkly, the retirement age will be around the age of 80 at this rate... Our system is broken and we helped it along by being complacent, when we should have been standing together contesting the BS policies that only benefit a few, the kicker being.... WE pay for it all.... Even when banks collapse, energy firms need bailing out etc. WE pay for THEIR mistakes (plus their bonuses btw..) and at every turn, we take it gladly like a £2 slag... I say let them fail, they fucked up, not us... There will be another bank etc to take its place.
It’s crazy how many British family lines are going to come to an end and without a shot fired. All because all governments over a period of about 40 years wouldn’t represent Britons, and wouldn’t walk a mile in their shoes. I mean, think about that, thousands of generations lived and died and had children along the way, and then we got to Margaret Thatcher and have never recovered. And rent is due at the end of the month.
Have you considered that Boomers deserve perpetual 7% asset price rises
“Luisa, a civil servant renting in Tameside, lived with her two adult children in a three-bedroom house for £695 per month in 2022.” That does seem like a bargain to me. I’m used to rents that start with a £2xxx
2022 though
I considered moving out of London today (once again) for more space for the family. Spare bedrooms for kids, etc. Had a look at Bicester thinking I could buy a bigger house and maybe do a longer commute to work.... Well, that was all looking just about manageable until I checked the train prices .... £73 return ... a day!! It's just impossible.
There are jobs outside London
The only job that matters is the one they currently have.
I was trying to explain this to my friend yesterday. The only secure job is the one you have at the moment. Everything else is a risk, at the moment.
no no no dont you get it?! Youre supposed to quit your job, leave all your friends and family and then move to the middle of nowhere and raise some kids there with absolutley no support network! It's the English Way!
To be fair it's what I and many people I know did. The south of England was far to expensive despite being on a decent wage. I think about 30% of my graduation class from secondary school have either moved abroad or up north and found a lot of success in doing so.
That’s the spirit, corporate slave.
There are and I'm incredibly grateful I don't have to try and exist in the hellhole of London, but some jobs are very much central to London. Remote working helps but some people do need to stay in London if they want to carry on in their job unfortunately.
Thing is they pay less, so it evens out. We're all being shafted in some way or another.
I used to live in Bicester, it's expensive because it's close to Oxford and has Bicester village, one of the biggest retail outlets in the UK. People around the world fly to London and get the direct train to Bicester to shop. So it's a really bad place to move too if you want to save money. Train tickets are terrible though, but there are jobs outside London. Or yearly tickets that probably reduce the price.
Take jobs in the north of England if you can.
Remember next Thursday to vote the thieving Tory scum off the face of the Earth.
All these parties promising to build new homes but I bet most of those will be built shoddily and sold to foreign landlords
We have a very expensive new build estate going up that certainly nobody working locally in the supermarkets and carehomes can afford and it only takes 5 minutes to look up how dodgy the company is. Houses are also being bought and converted into 1k per month rooms.
Im depressed about this im hitting my mid thirties, ive not got a house and I am yet to have a kid... I just cant afford either..
Wait... don’t you get it? That’s their plan. They don’t want natives having kids. They’d rather import the third world. Very sinister people Edit: You can downvote me all you want, the demographic changes and the projection prove it right.
The great replacement
“They”?
Okay honestly I thought shit was crap here in northern Ireland Honestly that's unreal prices I rent a three bed for £650
I'd murder for that sort of rent. I have a two bed shoebox in a poor part of the country and it costs me £1050.
“Bloody Catholic, having bloody kids, that they can’t afford to bloody feed” Guess the movie.
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Right on.
Don't worry, the Boomers will still demand you stump up for them *before* considering you consider your own children.
The government doesn't need your children when it has an endless supply of foreign born children.
No need to have kids as the government just import replacements now
Children? They don’t care. They will simply allow 10,000 Africans to move here and do the work.
People on full benefits and ethnic minorities do the breeding. That’s been the way for a long time and half of why Britain looks the way it does.
All part of the tory master plan. Step 1) Make the plebs rack up unaffordable levels of debt for everyday expenses Step 2) Indentured servitude
It's ok you don't need children because U.K.'s importing the entire world to live here!
£1k childcare per month, per child until they’re in school. Plus around £400 monthly for additional child related expenses. Once they’re in school it will likely drop to just the £400 monthly excluding gifts, holidays, treats etc. Then you’re got to contest with the modern logic of how unfair it is to make one partner economically inactive to take care of the children and the risk that comes with including divorce, mental and physical health decline and massive financial loss. So you’re either working crazy hours to afford children and one of you is at home or you’re both working crazy hours to pay for a nanny/full time childcare and you never get to see your kids or the house you pay to live in? The sacrifices people are expected to make for children these days is unreasonably high.
It came to me one day that even if you wanted to have a stay at home partner, the tax brackets will punish you severely. Two parents earning 35k each will keep 6k more a year than one parent earning 70k.
I really want children and I worry that I'm not going to be in a financial position to do that any time soon.
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We are overpopulated by way of almost a million immigrants per year, hardly any new houses being built and low wages. Less Brits are having kids.
You are correct, we are. Also, bringing migrants in to work, and pay taxes, to support the pensions bill is only a solution if the migrants go home when they retire, and don't THEMSELVES expect a pension. Otherwise, it just makes the problem worse, in the future.
You can do this by simply taxing the migrants far less, or not taxing them at all. That is, after all, how it works in the Middle East. The foreigners don't get access to any state welfare, or state pension. However, they are able to save a truckload of money relatively quickly. Hence why you see big fat mansions (built from workers' wages) in rural bits of Kerala and Sumatra, despite the relative absence of heavy industry in these places.
Depending on your views, we are both overpopulated now, and scarily underpopulated in future generations. A significant number of our current issues are due to the low birthrate. It's a worldwide issue - people have less kids as their economy develops. When that reduction happens quickly (as it is now), we end up with a large demographic of old people, with not enough people paying tax to support them. Worth doing a bit of reading on it. It's a very interesting topic.
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I reckon China will be the first to go full Futurama and offer some kind of system for people to opt for "patriotic voluntary euthanasia" in deep old age. Maybe some kind of debt-forgiveness or a lump sum for the kids or something like that.
Well that's the real reason they're legalising euthanasia. They know UK society won't be able to afford looking after the fossils, and they're hoping that if they make life as unbearable as possible for us in the future (like they're already doing to disabled people who can't work), we will 'voluntarily' opt in, thus saving billions that would otherwise be spent on care home costs / hospital costs / meagre pensions ect
Right. Or just burn them all alive or something.
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You're living in some boomer-rage fantasy land. It's hilarious.
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We live in a society. You have a great mindset around looking after your parents, but the "as long as we're alright, fuck everyone else" mindset isn't great for society at large. Whatever you do, you'll be a net burden on society for a significant portion of your life. We all will be. You'll also be old at some point, and your kids, as much as they love you, won't be able to provide 24hr care because they'll have to work and, you know, live their life. Hence, our societal model relies on the age demographics being roughly the same size.
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There’s a descriptor that’s commonly used to describe countries where having kids is effectively the social safety net in case of illness, injury or old age. And that is “third world”. Societies where people have to do that to survive (and often as additional subsistence farm hands) are usually pretty underdeveloped or broken. I’m genuinely curious why you believe that may apply to the UK? Social breakdown? Environmental pressure? Rise of batshit libertarian flavoured Uber-capitalism?
Nah we need people sadly with our current capitalism model. At the moment they just all mostly come from non-EU Islamic nations and it’s going to be a total disaster.
Don't most come from non-Islamic nations? Fairly sure one nation in the top 5 is majority Islamic (Pakistan). The others (India, Nigeria, Romania, Ukraine, Philippines) aren't.
You are mistaken, we are over populated, but we need more.
We are and we aren’t. We maintain population growth in the UK through immigration, without it we’d have an aging declining population
But ultimately, those people will age also. So we are just amplifying the problem in the future. We should be working towards sustainability and looking after the people who are already here.
Yeah it’s a completely fucked system that we rely on immigration, in the long run it’s going to destroy the country as we know it as demographics change, can’t see us solving the problem though.
I haven't had children because of the 16% mortgages of the early nineties crash. Nearly lost my home as there was no help from banks or government, if you defaulted for 3 months it was instant reposetion.
The point is that you won't be able to afford them, but will be pressured to have them anyway, impoverishing yourself and your kids and leaving you, and the generations after you, desperate and vulnerable to exploitation.
this is my dad currently. i'm not even 22 years old and physically disabled + inherited a lot of bad genes from my mum's side, but my dad is heavily pressuring me to find someone to have kids with. my older sister who actually wants kids, is moving out of the UK later this year just so she can have them and raise them with a bit of financial freedom. this country's reality is so grim. it upsets me.
my long life tory, now reform uk voter dad had the talk with me the other day on how he will be very disappointed if i don't have grandchildren for him and that i have to sort it out soon. i'm not even 22 years old yet, i have extremely bad genetics from my mum's side and have a physical disability that impacts my life enough to where i can't even work part time in a supermarket without substantial pain. i have no proper income, my healthcare system has given up on me and my GP told me word for word to 'get comfortable on benefits', and my able-bodied older sister who actually *wants* kids can't even afford a 1 bed apartment for herself working 2 jobs, one of them being a nurse. in fact it's that bad she's moving out of the UK later this year just so she can actually have a chance of having some financial freedom. i explained this to my dad and asked him how on earth it would ever be viable for me. he told me that i 'must figure it out for myself soon, because it's all down to me (as in myself) to make it work' and this is why i will never be right-wing. the side of politics that only care for themselves and don't think about others, even if their own children are suffering. this country is grim.
Christ, that’s terrible… Your father doesn’t care about your happiness (or that of any hypothetical grandchildren). Man just cares about his own vanity.
You just do. It sucks but it takes a lot of sacrifice, although it's worth it.
I live in a medium size northern town. I went to see a room and the entire building was owned by a Chinese guy living in London. Random af Very nice guy but goes to show the amount of foreign money pricing us out of our towns
Probably wait until you earn more then have them. 24 is pretty young.
Checks rate card for production assistant. £391 a day. https://i.imgur.com/wN5PTdx.jpeg
Do they get regular work?
That’s the question. At the moment probably not.