Whilst a degree for the sake of it is no way to go, and a degree is not for everyone, I’d be very careful assuming that that jobs which currently do not require a degree will stay that way in the future…

The nature of the economy is changing and the nature of work is changing – it’s splitting into relatively well-paid knowledge jobs or poorly paid low-skilled jobs with little middle ground for the unqualified…

Look what’s happening in the bike trade – you need to be able to run a warehouse, website, logistics and digital marketing operation rather than a shop. If you don’t have the technical know-how to set up, maintain, and update a website (incl mobile site and/or app) and manage stock levels to a very high standard (look at the critcisms that fly on this website about ‘unsatisfactory’ service… then do you have a business anymore?

Worth taking a look at this doc…(or at least bits of it…)

Working Futures – government research

From pg 13

Focussing on the other key measure of skills used in Working Futures, the supply of people holding higher level qualifications such as degrees is projected to grow steadily to 2024, despite the rising costs of attending university. The proportion of the labour force remaining unqualified is expected to represent only a small minority by 2024.

Measuring the demand for formal qualifications is more difficult. The number of jobs in occupations typically requiring a high level qualification is expected to continue to grow, albeit more slowly than over the previous decade.

It is projected that the supply of high qualified people will grow more quickly than demand for such qualifications, as implied by projections of the patterns of employment by qualification level within industries and occupations. This results in be an increase in qualification intensity within most occupations, especially those that have not previously employed many people with higher level qualifications. This is where there is more scope for increase (rather than in those occupations in which the workforce is
already highly qualified, such as professionals).

This does not necessarily indicate an of excess supply of such qualifications. The nature of jobs may be changing to make higher qualifications a necessary requirement for those jobs.

IMO if a degree isn’t right for you then get an apprenticeship… but don’t assume that decent jobs will be available without any kind of advanced qualification

Full disclosure: I work at the OU. It’s a wonderful place :-) Quite honestly we all have massive respect for our students and the commitment it takes to graduate. Our research suggests employers highly value OU graduates because they work so hard, usually balancing other commitments at the same time, to get their degree.

Anything I can do to help, OP, email in profile. Alternatively: http://www.open.ac.uk/contact and we’ll be very happy to answer your questions.

A couple of points worth thinking about re the cost:
Loans are available and you don’t have to start paying the money off until you’re above a certain earning threshold.
Levels of financial support available are different across England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland

The world still needs carpenters brickies and mechanics

Yes, but what skills do these jobs need? Look at my comment above about mechanics needing to be software engineers – that was from a guy at Jaguar Landrover.

Brickies – look at the stories coming through about an increase in the use of modern prefabs to try and resolve the housing crisis – the nature of all these kinds of work is changing fast…

I went to uni because I could really. My Dad has a PhD and whilst my mum has no more than o-levels, education is highly valued in my family so it just seemed like the normal state of affairs – GCSE, A-levels, Uni. All very middle-class expectation…

The days of uni being a middle-class privilege is over IMO – without a degree it’s getting increasingly hard to get a decent job. Partly, companies have adapted the work they offer to take advantage of the sheer numbers of graduates they’re being supplied with, and partly the old blue collar jobs are either being off-shored or replaced by automation (rather than being taken by immigrants). Hence Brexit as a protest vote by lower-paid workers – they’re screwed.

The research I’ve been reading (I work in Higher Education) suggests we’ll all need advanced analytical skills (information as well as data) and advanced soft-skills to be of value in the workplace – as the nature of work moves massively into knowledge work. This is making a degree more and more essential to get any kind of well-paid job and with the high cost of housing you’ve basically no chance of a decent standard of living without a well-paid job…

A guy I ride with who’s a car mechanic said it’s increasingly essential to be a software engineer in order to be a car mechanic – he hardly ever actually gets his hands dirty messing around with the mechanical parts of the car – lots of plugging in diagnostic software… he said he needs to retrain about twice a year to keep up with the new software releases it’s changing so fast.

That said, some people just aren’t that academic (my brother for e.g.) so the government is developing apprenticeships as an alternative for those jobs e.g. engineering, where practical skills are still important. They have the benefit of getting work experience and earnings whilst learning – making the apprentice more employable at an earlier age than a graduate, as well as a whole lot less debt…

my daughter wants to be a vet, she’s only 7 but now knows she’ll need to get a degree to become one; I’m already saving…

Early days yet but apprenticeships should be well-advanced by the time she needs to be making a decision. I’m not a subject-matter expert on specific jobs but I’d be surprised if apprencticeships don’t develop for veterinary work

+1 for Condor.

I have a non-disc Fratello as my winter bike – had it for 3 years now and no desire to ever buy anything else.

Best thing IMO about Condor is you get a free bike fit and get to build up the exact spec you want – so you don’t get upgraditis or find things wearing out after a year – so even though initial price isn’t cheap the net cost over a few years is way cheaper…

+ you’re supporting a properly independent LBS who put money back into the sport sponsoring their race team

can anybody suggest a good book for CBT?

A proper therapist is the gold standard solution

Genius idea – I doubt the MEP who proposed it is operating on his own… nicely undermines the Brexit stance – which is why Jayne whatserface is so angry – same as Farage threatening violence – they’re being well out-manoeuvred and they know it.
Interesting that Scottish and Welsh governments now making their voices heard.

On the two sides of the debate we now have:
1. A minority of Tory MPs
2. Possibly the PM (although possibly she’s a shill… time will tell)
3. A minority of the electorate
4. Nigel Farage and a few colleagues who have no higher power than members of Councils (+ the ex-Tory MP)
5. A few of the UK papers

On the other side we have:
1. Most MPs
2 House of Lords
3. Welsh and Scottish governments
4. Most of the electorate
5. Financial sector (have a LOT of soft power)
6. Big business – a lot of soft power
7. Big chunk of the media incl national broadcaster BBC – more soft power
8. USA – for now the most powerful country in the world and our ally
9. Most European Heads of State
10. The EU bureaucracy
11. Bank of England

In terms of power, resources, ability to influence it’s not really a fair contest. I suspect behind the scenes there’s a solid plan to undermine the entire Brexit campaign… there’s more than a few different strands which seem to be coming into play at the moment…

You are the source of most of your stress.

This.

I have problems with stress. I grew up in a stressful household and had a very stressful upbringing… so I essentially inherited it.

However, as an adult, the fact I still let it impact me comes primarily from my own inability to have properly dealt with those past events. Whilst it’s perfectly normal to fail to deal with past events, it’s not helpful.

The big lesson I learnt ten years ago when I mismanaged my stress to such a level that I pretty much had a breakdown was that it wasn’t the environment I was in so much as my inability to get a broader sense of perspective on my situation. That’s not denying that my situation wasn’t deeply unpleasant, but the fact it nearly broke me was my own response…

I would suggest CBT – it’ll really help you deal with the underlying issues as well as raise your awareness of how you think and how you talk to yourself and why you behave the way you do. It can be transformational if you go into it with an open mind, determined to deal with your issues… The fact you’ve posted on here suggests you are

Well apart from the ‘brexit means brexit’ sound bites, there not much evidence of enthusiasm for the whole shebang.

I’m hoping… that her whole approach of combining apparent incompetence with hard right dogma is a deliberate (whilst being plausibly deniable) strategy to get the more moderate ie most voters who voted Leave to reconsider.

We’re not a country that’s comfortable with extreme politics – we’re one of the few European countries that didn’t have a Fascist head of state (or collaboration in respect of France) in the 30s – Far Right politics just doesn’t sit comfortably with us.

So, dropping the economy into a recession, along with inflation, discouraging foreign investment with some anti-foreigner rhetoric, sling around a few Far Right words and let Farage get over-confident and start threatening violence… and hopefully you’ll see a big swing of regret come through, pressure for another referendum or general election from the very people who voted out… and there you have it. This last bit is really important – the failure to leave isn’t imposed on those who voted out – rather they choose to change their minds. Farage will rant and rave as is his temperament but he won’t actually be able to rabble rouse and do anything substantial as the reversal will be ‘the will of the people’…

A damn risky strategy which may or may not be controllable but although she had a rather autocratic reputation as Home Secretary I believe her reputation was one of competence… which seems entirely at odds with her current stance.

I know it sounds hopelessly optimistic but of the few people I know who voted out – my parents being the main ones – whilst they have their faults, they’re not people who show any signs of supporting the kind of rhetoric that’s been coming from May, Rudd and the nastier side of the British press and I don’t think they voted for what we’re seeing now… my Mum was showing some remorse even in the weeks after the vote, let alone before this week’s fun and games… therefore, if you make them think they’ve turned the country Fascist, they’ll be appalled at what they’ve done and change their minds.

Kind of feeling sorry for Nigel Farage – when he realised on that Andrew Marr piece that he wasn’t getting anywhere he just looked like a bit sad like he wanted his mummy…

And now he realises things aren’t going his way he’s making suggestive comments about violence (intelligently knowing he can use plausible deniability if anything actually happens).

Does he honestly thing people like my parents are going to take to the streets? They’re in their late 70s and can’t do anything much for very long before they need rest and want to sit down for a cup of tea and to read the paper :-) The only thing they’ve ever used a milk bottle for is to make the tea – not Molotov cocktails!

Desperate stuff on his part… and he wouldn’t be trying stuff like that if he thought he was winning.

A few people have asked where Spitting Image is these days but I’d like to see Monty Python or Ben Elton/Richard Curtis having a go – it’d be hilarious

Good spot OP.
I’m amazed this is even legal.
How did we let housing get so corrupt?

I know this is nothing to do with the OP, but just to drop it into the discussion… this is how so many people in the UK got ‘property rich’…

More than £170bn of UK property is now held overseas

The UK will get no help at all from the EU and the financial disaster is just unfolding.

More to the point, the EU will quite deliberately send us into a recession ‘pour encourager les autres’

Worth also remembering that all the elements in the UK who have the real power and run the country (big business, financial sector, landowners, press, MPs, central bank) wanted us to remain… and if a minority of (largely disempowered) voters think they can get something like this to happen against the wishes of that set of opponents then they’re truely naive.

I suspect it’ll never actually happen. We’ll get squeezed so tightly or the process managed so incompetently that we scream for mercy and beg for another referendum… My worry is that the Brexit camp is so obstinate that we’ll have to be suffering really quite badly before they’re prepared to accept defeat.

My parents voted out (they’re typical hardline Tory loyalists) and they’ve spent their lifetimes cutting off their noses to spite their faces ‘on a matter of principle’ – they’re absolute experts at it and even massive harm to others washes over them as being of no concern… they’re not likely to change this habit with brexit IMO

some filthy degenerate scumbags in the government decided that as of May this year if we wanted to buy a second home the stamp duty would be more like 5%

You need to get yourself a better understanding of economics, the (negative) impact on society of wealth inequality, and maybe a little bit of empathy for people younger/poorer than you…

The stamp duty change was to try and get house prices back under control as they’re currently breaking the economy by taking up such a massive % of income.. you may have noticed that interest rates are still at emergency levels because the economy is essentially as bad a state as it was in 2008 (in terms of debt levels, it’s actually worse).

I don’t understand this desire to make the most expensive thing we ever buy as expensive as possible, to the detriment of the rest of the economy, our kids, and broader standard of living… We have one of the lowest rates of outright home ownership in the EU – far behind Lithuania, Bulgaria and Romania as it happens…

There’s plenty more policies in the pipeline following on from the stamp duty increase too…

up – try telling our friends that – the ones with a lovely big house yet are still planning on getting something bigger, have four cars despite only two drivers, just been on holiday (to Dubai 5 star) which was their third foreign holiday of the year yet an interest only mortgage and no repayment vehicle.

Out of interest, as and when the endgame plays out and they end up in the bankruptcy courts or homeless, who do you think they’ll see as being mainly at at fault? Themselves, the bank, ‘marketing’…

ie: are they knowingly playing fast and loose with debt and hoping to get away with it or are they being deluded into thinking they’re wealthy and their lifestyle is sustainable from now until they die?

It’s thoroughly depressing watching the UK economy break like it did in 2008, seeing all the negative social and political impacts that have resulted and nearly a decade later we’re continuing with the very behaviours that created that crisis without actually wondering just where it will end…

Some have this idea that can just realise the capital in the property at some later point and move into a cheaper place – a smaller one or in a cheaper area perhaps. This kinda works but is a little risky as relies in decent capital growth over the mortgage period.

Also forgets that a whole generation has the same idea and when they all try and sell at the same time to downsize, the whole ‘supply/demand’balance will shift and they may not just find lack of ‘decent capital growth’ but rather, no capital growth or even loss…

The case study above in the R4 prog is a woman in Liverpool who bought mid-noughties and has seen zero capital growth – and having done NOTHING to pay off the money she’s borrowed she’s now facing homelessness…

Ignore the asking price… it’s just an arbitrary figure usually invented by someone who thinks a house is a way to make ‘a profit’ rather than somewhere to live.
Do your research on prices using Rightmove and in particular PropertyBee and Land Registry data – see how much supply is increasing in your area, see how long places take to sell, see how many times prices are being reduced before they sell, keep an eye out for properties which fail to sell with one agent and come back on the market with another agent with a new ‘listed on’ date.
I saw a place in July which has failed to sell and has now come up with a new agent suggesting it’s new to market – which is a total lie. A place in SE London where I used to live has been on the market for over 2 years but the latest listing says new to market last week…
Don’t believe a single word the estate agent says, and assume the photos on Rightmove are tantamount to mis-selling – the use god knows what kind of wide-angle lens and photoshop to make small, tatty places look like new build…

If you’re in London and SE and you can then wait a few months – big announcements due on housebuilding in the autumn statement, interest rates due to go up early next year, BTL yax changes come in next April – plenty of BTL properties coming on the market right now as landlords beginning to realise they’re going to lose money.. this’ll change the balance of supply and demand at the bottom end which no doubt will feed through into chains…

IANA financial adviser but if you have an interest-only mortgage and no clear, proper plan to pay off the capital (the actual money you’ve borrowed) then you could well be in serious trouble.

As referenced above, IO mortgages are setting up to be the next big debt problem coming through – IIRC around 25% of people with them have no way of paying off the money borrowed and as and when the bank ask for the money back will end up homeless… listen to the case study in the programme below…

Listen to this episode of Moneybox on Radio 4 from the weekend and get yourself down to a financial adviser as a matter of urgency…

Radio 4 Money Box – Interest Only Mortgages

In 2014, excluding buy-to-let, there were around 2.8 million interest-only mortgages outstanding within the UK. Borrowers pay interest on the loan, then the capital has to be paid back when the mortgage term ends.

The popularity of that type of mortgage has fallen significantly over the years, however most lenders will have borrowers still on those deals. Some of those customers may find themselves in a situation where they don’t have a plan in place to repay the outstanding capital. We hear from Christine who is facing a £150,000 repayment after her interest-only deal with Santander expired. Dean Mirfin, Group and Technical Director with Key Retirement discusses the wider issues around interest-only mortgages and potential options that may be available for people who are unable to repay.

Housing and mortgage debt are not our proudest moment in the UK – we’ve been conned into believing a mortgage is somehow an asset rather than the biggest debt we’ll ever take on…

Ride to work as often as you can… fresh air, exercise, keeps you away from ill people…

First sign of anything I start going to bed early, avoid eating rubbish and eat really healthily, avoid over-exercising and take echinacea for a few days. Seemed to work earlier this year when everyone else went down with a cold

We seem to be at a turning point right now br IME

Carney was so quick to lower rates (before any data suggesting a negative impact from the vote) that I assumed he did it purely to give himself some room to put them right back up again once the inevitable inflation hit, but without causing too much damage as ANY move whatsoever towards normalising rates will see the debt crisis become very real indeed…

There’s also the small matter of US data suggesting another rate rise before Xmas…

It really feels like the calm before the storm at the moment…

A lot of drivers really are not thinking when driving and assuming everything will be alright

50m club run last week – lots of traffic waiting before overtaking but lots not. Specifically, plenty overtaking round blind bends. I counted the seconds after they passed us before something came the other way – three times I got to 2 seconds. Thats two seconds from a head-on collision which would’ve been 80+ mph closing speed and no doubt taking out the front riders from our group as well as the people in the cars…

Of course, these were all near misses, no damage was done, but clearly the drivers weren’t thinking and assessing the risk in any way at all… a two second margin from serious injury and death for at least 4 people…

1. Do the online thing – you buy a lot less stuff you never even wanted in the first place. I think it’s supermarket.com allows you to pick what you want and it tells you which supermarket is cheapest for that basket – can save you 10%+ straight off

2. Meal plan for the week – turn it into a list and shop with that list – ignore all the offers and buy just the stuff you need

3. Never, ever shop hungry. Eat before you go out.

4. Go shopping on your own so it’s a functional errand

5. Reduce your meat intake – replace with fish or beans. From a health point of view we eat way too much anyway – look at our obesity rates.

6. Don’t buy a Porsche Macan or Mini Cooper or fancy VW camper – with the tens of thousands of pounds you save you can eat like a king for years :-)

People have to have somewhere to live though.

Which is why we need to get the madness stopped as a matter of urgency – we’re reducing our standards of living at a scary rate and killing our most economically productive region (London and SE), and the economy as a whole by paying such a massive % of our post-tax incomes in ever-greater amounts of debt to the banks… let alone that it’s leading to couples giving up having kids and widening inequality…

My solution in the end, and that of a few other people I know, has been (with very deep regret and more than a little bit of anger) to leave my home and my friends and bail out of London. It really stinks but if you push prices this high, that’s what happens…

Of course this is happening worldwide – Vancouver, NZ, Australia, San Francisco…

OP: good on you for taking the more thoughtful approach but I would make the buyer pay the costs you’re facing as a result of their change of mind (although if they’re in a chain this may have been forced on them by someone else of course)…

I’m confused.

Her speech was largely received as a play for the centre ground – even sounding a lot like Milliband around the role for a bigger state, but within the same speech there’s comments like this, which sound horribly parochial and anti-foreign and Amber Rudd sounding like she’s considering a policy which an awful lot of people thought sounded like Nazi policy…

So what’s her position exactly? Is she confused, or is confusion of the electorate the point?

Far Right and Far Left eventually come back to meet each other… but even the most paranoid observer surely wouldn’t consider the UK is heading to either the left or the right extremes – we’ve absolutely no history of extremism – even at the height of both communism and fascism in the 1930s we laughed at Mosely just as we laugh at Farage and he got no real power and I don’t believe our fundamental values or national character have changed that much…

So I’m confused. And more than a little bit horrified at Amber Rudd

Anyone drafting me today would’ve ended up in the ditch today – a deer ran out from the right hand hedge. Emergency stop from me so I didn’t hit it. Then its partner went too, a couple of seconds behind…

On a club run I’dve been shouting a warning as I know the carnage an emergency stop would cause but if there was a random stranger who’d arrived without telling me, I wouldn’t know to warn them and they’d have been a mess. This was Ivinghoe Beacon – on a relatively fast bit of road.

OP – you need to think a bit more about these scenarios before slagging off people

Deutsche Bank

Or possibly not so lovely if the German government do a Lehmans!

OP – you appear to be making a massive assumption that the guy in front was braking to annoy you rather than braking because something else was going on e.g. driver coming close in the other direction, other riders, wildlife running towards the road, litter blowing into the road etc etc. There’s plenty of hazards in Richmond Park…

You may want to check out the facts before judging him!

Either way – you put yourself in this situation – so if you don’t want to upset people by drafting them unannounced (which is generally frowned upon for all the reasons expressed elsewhere in this thread), then don’t do it!

You might find all the roadie rules and codes of behaviour a bit odd, but they’re mainly there for reasons of safety – try and spend some time learning them rather than doing your own sweet thing and then judging others when they do something you dont like or understand…

Chalk Pit for me
Hogtrough, Sundridge and Braestead are steep but relatively short.
Chalk Pit is super steep at the bottom but only lets up slightly as it drags to the top – I can only get up it on my summer bike (53/23) by contouring across the road!
I wouldn’t call Beddlestead super steep but you frequently see people underestimate it’s double/triple kick and shoot up the first part only to fall apart half way up… so it’s still a pretty good test of hill climbing ability

Keep a diary of all correspondence with the LL or their ‘agents’ – whether written or verbal communications – you may need it – as they sound dodgy…

If it were me I’d be starting to look for somewhere else already and planning to move out the day the tenancy ends or the break clause allows you to get out

I don’t understand this ‘it’s not worth saving cos interest rates are so low’ – it’s utterly foolish… you save so you have some cash aside for emergencies or so you can eat if you lose your job – you don’t save so you can earn interest!

In the days when banking worked properly, you were given interest to encourage you to save, as it was those deposits that the bank then gave out as loans and mortgages – which happily prevented banks lending out too much – so back then houses were affordable, we weren’t in a debt crisis and we lived within our means and steady economic growth was a realistic expectation… but we decided against that and decided a debt binge on shiny stuff was a better idea!

The big problem with bailing the banks out in 2008 was that it bailed us out too – not calling in all the debts, and keeping interest rates on the floor to stop mass bankruptcies has saved us from our own foolish behaviour and we’ve just carried on getting into more debt.

As and when the next recession hits (which it will soon enough, they’re a regular feature of capitalism) and people lose their jobs I really dread to think how people will cope – if people don’t have £100 and they lose their jobs then they’ll be unable to pay for food within a couple of weeks…hard to see how we’re going to get ourselves out of this mess…

I don’t understand this ‘it’s not worth saving cos interest rates are so low’ – it’s utterly foolish… you save so you have some cash aside for emergencies or so you can eat if you lose your job – you don’t save so you can earn interest!

In the days when banking worked properly, you were given interest to encourage you to save, as it was those deposits that the bank then gave out as loans and mortgages – which happily prevented banks lending out too much – so back then houses were affordable, we weren’t in a debt crisis and we lived within our means and steady economic growth was a realistic expectation… but we decided against that and decided a debt binge on shiny stuff was a better idea!

The big problem with bailing the banks out in 2008 was that it bailed us out too – not calling in all the debts, and keeping interest rates on the floor to stop mass bankruptcies has saved us from our own foolish behaviour and we’ve just carried on getting into more debt.

As and when the next recession hits (which it will soon enough, they’re a regular feature of capitalism) and people lose their jobs I really dread to think how people will cope – if people don’t have £100 and they lose their jobs then they’ll be unable to pay for food within a couple of weeks…hard to see how we’re going to get ourselves out of this mess…

Meditation
Yoga
Cycling – the ‘just going for a ride’ type – no GPS, no Strava etc, just go out and pootle for as long as you fancy, and then come home.

FWIW, Paul Dolan (Happiness By Design) is a very well respected academic – he’s a professor at LSE and previously worked in the Nudge Unit in Downing St when Behavioural Economics first started getting popular

Condor – try LGFSS for a used one if you can’t/don’t want to pay for a new one.
Pista is the classic but doesn’t take proper guards, Tempo is a beautiful ride, takes guards and has sensible angles. Proper London bikes.
I also took my Tempo for a 35 mile road ride on Sunday and enjoyed every moment of it…

IANAL but I wouldn’t withhold rent or move out without notice or anything else which breaches your tenancy agreement – it allows the LL (who you already think is being dishonest) to justifiably position you as a guilty party… Don’t put yourself in breach of contract…

Get hold of the council and also think about taking legal advice, and then find a new place…

Dunno – the speed differential is usually too much to catch what’s being said – I think the shouters are usually too stupid to realise this…

Very sad all round…

Kids copy their parents, surely? Hard to blame them for the culture of consumerism when they’re not even in the workforce yet, making the commercial and legislative decisions that frame the choices we all have…

It’s us that’s created the world they’re living in.

I firmly beleive fast cars are safer,

Dunno about that – it’s only true if combined with good judgement and maturity and skill… which appear to be in very short supply atm…

I saw a very near head-on yesterday when a guy in a fast Golf overtook coming off a roundabout into a single lane exit road – probably about 50m, probably less from the oncoming car – he was very very close to a high speed crash.

In a slower car I doubt he’d have even tried the move…

A lot of people are relying on their main asset to fund their retirement as pensions have taken a massive hit.

That’s extremely dangerous thinking. People forget that when they find some ‘sure fire easy way to make money’ like this, that loads of other people have had the same idea, at around the same time…

So what’s going to happen is a whole generation will start selling their houses (whether first homes or their ‘BTL portfolio’ and expect to get current prices. They’re forgetting two things:
1. No buyers at those prices as no-one younger than them will have any equity as they’ve been renting as buying has been unaffordable for so long
2. Loads of other people will be selling up at the same time – massive reversal of the whole ‘supply/demand’ thing… and what happens when supply exceeds demand? Prices fall…

I was hoping to buy a house this year but everything I read in the financial papers and thinking about stuff like this and the demographic changes as all the boomers go into care/die off and sell their houses…. well I think I’ll be buying at the very peak of the bubble and will spend 25 years paying interest on a massive debt, watching the ‘value’ of the asset steadily drop year on year – tens of thousands of pounds down the drain…

Anyone who thinks the current state of the economy is ok, healthy or sustainable is being extraordinarily naive. Emergency low interest rates set in 2009 to try and prevent collapse of the financial system have stayed that way until a couple of months ago, when they were lowered again… it’s hardly a good sign is it? If anything it suggests we’re even weaker… We’re essentially on life support whilst the central banks and governments try and think up a way out of the mess, which clearly they haven’t yet.

As said above, we may be materially wealthy but the essentials are historically unaffordable, hence we’ve killed our economy with an overload of debt.

To be honest I think we’d be in a better place if we’d had a bigger bust in 2008, instead we’ve largely been saved from the results of our short term consumerism and appetite to debt and so have learned nothing, not changed our behaviour and just dug an even deeper hole for ourselves…

Whilst not everyone shares this bearish view, if you read the financial media (Bloomberg, FT, Economist) you’ll recognise there are very serious problems underlying our current period of calm. Not just UK, but Australia, Canada (also facing housing crises and they’re not ‘small crowded islands’), US, and across Europe… Russia, Brazil, China also in either major recession or have a huge bubble of debt…

The rise of Trump, Front Nationale, UKIP, Brexit vote suggest that even if the strict financial dynamics aren’t understood by the population at large, they are increasingly angry and wanting major change.

It may end without some kind of major upset (economic bust or war) but right now I don’t think central banks or governments know how to find a route out of the mess. Let’s hope they do…

It’s pretty nasty IMO to blame the younger generation for buying shiny toys, getting depressed and not voting – they hardly had a part to play in creating the situation did they? It’s been building ever since we started bingeing on debt and shopping in the late 80s… the world they face is the one we (I’m aged 43) and our parents created for them…

I have as much right to use the road as the next road user.

You have more right to cycle than you do to drive – you have no right to drive unless you hold a licence and insurance… You have a natural entitlement to cycle :-)

“Should” = ride on the main carriageway – the lane was coned off for a reason and all cyclists should adhere to the rules of the road just as much as drivers…

“Would” – as driving brings out the inner moron in so many people, I’d ride in the coned off area for as long as it looks safe to do so…

Funny how so many people think the rules of the road should only apply to cyclists when they’re looking for an excuse to criticise, but when those rules mean they have to act like grown ups and just wait (or at least slow down) then those rules appear to no longer apply.

We’ve turned into a country of man-babies…