Yep, I feel sorry for them really. Who will they direct their bitterness and bile at now ? Who are they going to blame for their own inadequacies and inability to achieve in life ?

People paid for "stuff" from money they had saved or sometimes through HP. The only real debt a household may have was a mortgage for those who decided to buy rather than rent. But at that time rents accounted for only around 20% of household income, so really were affordable.

Don't worry, so long as there are tories left, we won't be lacking any suitable targets

Then you'll always be fighting a war you can't win. We live in an aspirational consumer society, any party which wants to govern these days has to be 'conservative' to an extent. Idealism is fine but practical reality will always win in the end. Even if the Tories were ousted tomorrow their replacements would still need to face the realities of the economy and continue with cuts and public expenditure reforms. The world changes, for better or worse, sometimes you just have to accept it and adapt accordingly.

lets have some actual figures, what was the rent compared to the mortgage?

in 1996ish i was paying around £220 per month on a mortgage with interest rates at 7% which was around 25% of my income. but i didn't get 33%-50% discount on the purchase.

so, you're a wage slave if you have a mortgage to pay but not a wage slave if you have rent to pay.

If you need to work to pay either, you're pretty much a wage slave. After all no landlord has ever evicted a tenant for not paying rent, have they?

The difference being; until relatively recently rents, especially council house rents, were considerably lower than mortgage repayments. Councils, as landlords, were also more sympathetic to their tenants than private landlords. My early mortgage repayments were considerably more than friends who lived in council houses paid in rent. To achieve the mortgage we not only had to show we could afford the 20% deposit and the repayments, we also had to show two years of regular savings with the building society. A condition that few first-time buyers could meet today.



But housing cost (rent or mortgage)is only one aspect of wage slavery. Since the 1980s there has been a massive increase in non-mortgage personal debt. Debts that are used to buy cars and other consumer goods. When I applied for a bank loan in 1982 to buy a new (to me) car, I had to stump up 20% deposit in cash before the bank would entertain me. Now if a deposit is required, the lender will accept payment by credit card for both deposit and repayments. It's barmy.

Did anyone see The Big Question today. One was 'is it ok to celebrate someones death' and Nadine Dorries had said that the protesters should think of Thatchers kids and how they are feeling, one of the guests was Benjamin Zephaniah and he said 'why, Carol Thatcher thinks people like me are gollis and her son is an arms dealer'. The conversation after that was something like



Dorries: 'I thought better of you Benjamin'



BZ: 'why, are you saying she never said it'



ND: 'I thought you were better than that'



BZ: 'are you saying she never said it'



ND: 'I just thought better of you'



BZ: 'did she say it, did she say it'



ND: 'well, yes she did'



I magine if you or I said it, we would (quite rightly) be prosecuted.

Don't talk soft. It was a stupid comment made off hand to some colleagues. She got sacked over it. The notion that the police should be investigating that and pursuing a prosecution is ridiculous.



If she's said it directly to a person to cause offence and the person complained then she would be prosecuted, but in those circumstances no one would be. She was punished far worse than virtually anyone else would have been. If anyone else had said it the other people would think she was a tvvat and maybe distance themselves from her, but that's it.



And it's a remarkably trivial offence to deserve the celebration of her mother's death

I suppose the level of triviality is dependent on the skin your wearing.

[url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/14/thatcher-is-dead-but-who-reinvented-her-life?CMP=twt_guThatcher is dead but who reinvented her life?[/url

It may be to you but to those who experienced suffering at the hands of her policies or who lost loved ones as a result it's not.