Sunday, September 27, 2009

Brown's Own Little World

Brown's mendacity knows no bounds. On Andrew Marr, he just attributed the fact that there have been fewer mortgage defaults than in the 1991 recession to the success of his Mortgage Renegotiation Scheme. What a shame Andrew Marr didn't reveal the fact that this "successful" scheme has helped just eight families at the last count. Eight! Brown lives in his own world where every scheme he launches is a massive success. Luckily, people see through it.

UPDATE: I've compared Brown to Nixon before. He is sweating so profusely during his Marr interview that he looks like Nixon in the 1960 debate!

UPDATE: Marr: What's your biggest mistake?
Brown: Not to move faster on my fairness agenda.

YeGods. He had enough to choose from yet still resorts to hubris.

What a terrible interview. Labour MPs will be mutinous. Well, actually they won't. They haven't got the balls.

31 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brown washing his hand over Lockerbie all over again.

Anonymous said...

Also, as if Marr did not know how rubbish the Labour mortgage has been. This is deliberate BBC bias by omission.

Pete-s

Anonymous said...

Brown constantly lies and misrepresents things. This is why the TV debate will probably turn out to be bad for Cameron. Along with Clegg attacking Cameron at the same time.

Anonymous said...

Marr really is the most useless and very expensive tool!

Silent Hunter said...

W H A T !

And Andrew Marr didn't raise this fact with our great Klunckenfuhrer?

Honestly, one would almost believe that Andrew Marr was biased or something. Shirley not?

Tappestry said...

He's only selling the EU financial regulation directive. he talks of 'leadership. courage. vision' but in reality he's a ground floor EU employee acting out a messiah fantasy.

David Boothroyd said...

As I think I've pointed out before, many people have had their repossession stopped by their lender because the lender was told that the Mortgage Rescue scheme was being started. They don't need to get to the end stage which is where your misleading statistic comes from. In any case you're out of date: these are the most recent and that's only for the previous quarter to now.

Rob said...

What was your biggest mistake?

Sometimes I'm just too good, Andrew honestly. I look in the mirror every morning and say 'Come on Prime Minister, you must save the world...because it's the right thing to do.

FireForce said...

Iain, you say "Luckily, people will see through it"
Do not count on it!
There is a great amount of people (Labour) who through low intelect, I always vote Labour me dad too, them torys are for the toffs.

Not quite as clear cut, sadly far too many of them, and with Labours last 12 years of dumb down education, there are so many, many more.

Sir Edward Heath said...

I knew there was a reason why I didn't have to get up early.

wapping boy said...

5 years from now pupils will be answering A-Level history questions on whether Brown was the worst prime minister in the history of Britain. It will probably be one of the easier questions on the paper. No one else even comes close to being such an incompetent, weak, vacillating, useless, pompous, vain, self-delusional, lying b&stard.

edf said...

Iain I think your comparison of Brown to Nixon is a little unfair. To Richard Nixon that is. For sure Nixon had persoanlity flaws which did for him in the end but I'd say he was one of the strongest most effective geopolitical statesmen the US has ever had as president, in what were some very difficult times. Its a shame the demons got to him in the end, really

Pogo said...

Mr Boothroyd... I had a quick shufti at the spreadsheet and it would appear that the number of "successful" outcomes has increased from 8 to 14. Not exactly orders of magnitude greater.

Anonymous said...

"have been fewer mortgage defaults than in the 1991 recession to the success of his Mortgage Renegotiation Scheme"

No, he referred to that and to paying mortgage interest (for those made unemployed) after 13 weeks, rather than the 26 weeks Herr Thatcher put it up to, thereby ensuring that many had been made homeless before getting to the 6 month stage.

Don't let the facts get in the way of a goos rant though.

Man in a Shed said...

All coming along nicely I see.

Lib Dems destroy themselves in Bournemouth.

Labour hold onto Brown - with a bit of luck.

Maybe Alistair Campbell has a point after all about the Tories having it too easy ...

jailhouselawyer said...

Labour hasn't got balls? What about Ed?

Martin S said...

Labour MPs will be mutinous. Well, actually they won't. They haven't got the balls.

The closer they get to the election, the more mutinous they'll become.

Or deded as the wv says! I like that.

neil craig said...

The reason we aren't having re[possessions is because interest rates are artificially low. This is simply putting off the evil day.

Lola said...

I know I should make the effort to watch Brown be interviewed or make a speech or whatever, but I just can't any more. All I end up doing is shouting at the radio/tv/interweb and my wife starts threatening to biff me if I carry on. The man is just the biggest liar I have ever come accross - and I've met some dillies.

Lola said...

Anon 12.27

Since I run an FS business, which as part of our offering provides mortgage advice, and since our consistent advice since about 2002 was not to buy a house and if you did make sure that you could afford the payments, and made sure that you proper unemployment payment protection cover in place (of which we supply can offer a selection of excellent value plans) I am singulraly unsympathetic to most people who have over-mortgaged themselves. Why should I who have not done so be coerced into making transfer payments to those who have so making it very difficult for me to support my own children's income as they struggle to stay solvent because they also are being taxed to buggery for the same reason even though they are low earners because they are just starting out.

And it is not just me that has been saying don't buy a house since 2002 ish, many other sane commentaters and advisers have also stated this.

Of the biggest promoter of debt, especially mortgage debt, is Brown himself.

A simple system would be to get the repossession out of the way. Then use funding from the private sector to buy the house off the bank and then let it to the previous owners.

I have proposed this before as an entirely private way of doing this and I know financiers who could be interested. In fact I think some one is already doing this. You'd get one or other of the housing associations to manage the letting for you and you could supply debt advice to help the repossessed family sort out their future. In any case they would have a home and if they needed to move the Housing Assoc would be able to sort it. What's not to like? Well lefties for a start because it almost entirely cuts the state out of the loop.

Anonymous said...

Absolutely - Labour MP's have no courage,ball's or morals - they are a spineless bunch of navvies.

I am not of ANY political persuasion - but the fact that none of his Labour Party who have the power to kick him have done it says it all.

Spineless,the lot of them.

Unknown said...

Funny that McCoward didn't own up to the FSA being a load of useless tossers and that handing out 125% or self certified mortgages wasn't such a good idea.

And why can't Liebour say CUTS? Peter Hain was waffling on about investment in education on Sky News, yet we know they plan to cut education spending.

The public are way ahead of Liebour about cuts which is why the Tories are doing so well.

Anonymous said...

Fortunately, Brown's performance worsens by the minute. May the trend continue.

Not long to go now ...

Anonymous said...

Fortunately, Brown's performance worsens by the day. May the trend continue.

Not long to go now ...

Anonymous said...

Fortunately, Brown's performance worsens by the day. May the trend continue.

Not long to go now ...

Lola said...

Martin @ 5.48

125% mortgages and self cert mortgages were not the cause of this ferrago. What causd this ferrago was Brown deliberately increasing the money supply in a boom to encourage indebtedness so that he could massage the GDP by confusing debt and spending with wealth creation.

I have been successfully doing self cert mortgages for years and years. I have only one client (out of dozens and dozens) that gives me any worry. I strictly pre-underwrote these cases and would present them to lenders unless I was sure that the borrower understood the ramifications.

Brown's excess liquidity forced banks to seek ever more and more risky customers to make money, and they thought that by packaging securitising their very badly underwritten debt they could reduce the risk.

Similarly, if used sensibly the 125% mortgage could be used to sucessfully help indebted people move on. But again carefull pre-underwriting is required.

From our point of view these are expensive to do cases. Our fees for self cert are 2% of the advance.

As regards the FSA they are indeed useless. They are useless because they were set up by Brown. Brown is useless, so anything he does is useless. QED.

Anonymous said...

B*gger! Apols for the repetition - each time, "Publish your comment" elicited an error: "Sorry, your post could not be published"!

John Chaytor said...

I didn't know that you had made the same comparison I made years ago!!!

I told everyone I knew that Brown was our Nixon.

When I look at Nixon in the 1960 presidential debate I can only think of Brown. The jaw is the same.

As someone who also has a sweat problem I identity with Brown this morning.

If I were him, I'd insist on a fan positioned just off camera to cool me down. Surely, as PM, he could arrange this.

For us people who have problems with sweating it's a real problem.

Would you joke if he were 26 stone and had a fat problem?

Victor, NW Kent said...

David Boothroyd

The number of people saved from repossession is tiny indeed. What is not tiny is the forecast of 71,000 repossessions this year.

I remember poor little Nick Clegg being shouted down by the Labour backbench when he said that the matter was serious since 2008 might see as many as 45,000 repos. The mighty clunking fist replied that there would be no return to the level of repossession that had existed under the Tories.

What might have worked is the simpler scheme proposed by Osborne and introduced rapidly instead of at tortoise speed.
We are no longer swallowing the idea that what Labour announces is what Labour achieves. They have a new word - an aspiration. That is their weasel word for "promises we have no intention of keeping".

Anonymous said...

Lola, Not all the unemployed bought houses only since 2002; you may have given useful/correct advice, most did/do not; most enquiries that I have heard of regarding unemployment insurance seem to show that it is of little use for most people (other than those making commision); you should make transfer payments to those in difficulties because you are a good caring person.

You make a perhaps not unattractive suggestion for a new system involving keeping people in their houses. Will the next tory government be doing anything like that? Or just find another way to punish the poor? - gee, I wonder what the odds would be.

Lola said...

Anon @ 2;19 pm. I did not say that the unemployed bought houses. That is clearly bonkers. What I said was that from about 2002 we have been advising people - employed or self employed - to think very carefully before over-indebting themselves in housing. Especially FTB. Self cert is a very useful facility for the small and modest s/e businessman who are invriably the most committed to keeping the payments up to date. What you do not want to use s/c mortgages for are most employed clients. Unscrupulous people did that to get high LTE multiples. You could s/c for employees who receive high and variable annual bonuses, bankers for example.

UB40 insurance of good quality IS available. But generally not through banks or other lenders. We have been able to supply UB40 insurance and have had successful claims. We, though, stick rigidly to the basic insurance principle of utmost good faith when preparing applications for clients. I have seen copy UB40 insurance applications prepared by bank reps where clearly the rep had just ticked all the right boxes and got it on the books for his bonus. When the insurer underwrites a claim based on one of these he'll just, quite rightly, kick it out.

Basically, don't go to a lender for mortgage advice. They are clueless.

And I accept that there were many mortgage 'advisers' trading in the boom market who were, well, in my view just as useless. Most of those have now gone. But, the only reason they ever had the opportunity goes right back to Browns fiscal and monetary policy errors.