More bad news for Brown

Adrian

I'm sorry Fraser but you are letting your propagandist heart run away with your head here. Like 50% of mortgage holders I am on a variable rate mortgage and like that 50% the rate will fall next month. The other half of mortgage holders on fixed rates will see now fall (the clue is in the name).

What is happening, though, is that rates being offered to new borrowers are rising. Not great, but new borrowers are a tiny proportion of the electorate.

Unsurprisingly, newspaper headlines reflect the commercial imperative to sell papers, not necessarily the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Dominic Fisher

Gordon can't change and it's too late anyway. The next election is going to be a bloodbath. I can barely keep up with the crises visited on us by this shower (I note that the drugs in prisons story looks like it has legs) but they address the man in the street with at best nonchalance and at worst contempt. On the doorstep, here in Birmingham, voters are almost pleading with us to turf this lot out. Watch out for carnage on May 1st perfectly timed in the days after the lowest paid see their tax bills double.

Not only that but there's a growing low level resistance. Alistair Darling banned from every pub, police marching on Parliament, the PM an object of scorn. The longer Brown delays the grislier it will be for his party. By the time the next election comes around being an open Labour supporter will be social suicide.

Richard Taylor

'Brownies' are even making the news in Australia where mortgage interest rates are 9%+. Gordon's mania for control and pathological need to disemble will be his downfall. Ironically I would argue Gordon Brown is acting very much like Australia's former Conservative leader John Howard, who lost in a landslide to Labour's Kevin Rudd!

Perry

Now, Fraser, . . be realistic!

How could anyone, in their Noo, reconstructed mind, doubt the Beloved Leader . . or his Foresight, Common Sense, - and Prudence?

David H

He claims credit for making the BoE independent and he also wants to claim that he can move interest rates up and down? Will this be like his boasting of abolishing boom and bust?

Tiberius

DF: are you able to tell us in which areas of Birmingham you have campaigned? Re-taking Edgbaston will be essential if the Tories are going to hold an overall majority after the GE.

John Lea

And yet Brown insists that most people are better off in 'real terms' (whatever that means). I would like to say to Gordon Brown what someone (can't remember who it was) once said to Tony Blair: 'There is nothing you could ever say to me now that i could ever believe.'

Fraser Nelson

Adrian, "firm but unfair" is The Spectator's motto - but I dont think I am exaggerating. Look at the graph on the FT's front page today - showing fixed rate mortgage rising as base rate falls. Yes, many (tho far less than 50%) are on variable mortgages tied to BoE base rates. But Most fixes last for 2 years. Some 2.75m mortgages come up for renewal this year in households containing some 4.4m voters. Think of their anxiety as they mull moving from a 4.5% fix to a 6.5% standard variable. Same goes for those whose mortgages are up for renewal next year. What The Times splash does so well is add to this petrol, the plunging pound, food prices - its a quadruple whammy. It's the sort of misery that turfs out governments.

Dominic Fisher

DF: are you able to tell us in which areas of Birmingham you have campaigned?

I am working in the following constituencies - Hall Green, Selly Oak, Edgbaston, Northfield and Erdington.

If things go as expected Edgbaston and Northfield will have 12 Conservative councillors out of 12 and in Selly Oak we will have 8 from 12 (with the Libs having 3 in the uni area). I expect us to pick up a couple of new councillors and outpoll Labour across Erdington constituency.

mart

The government trying to talk up its achievements (real or imagined) in a time of difficulty just adds insult to injury. Simple as that.

What we want to hear from them now is what they can do to help. They should begin by cancelling some big projects, and using the proceeds to pay off some national debt.

ChrisD

Fraser, I watched you and Michael Brown on the Skynews paper review last night.
The presenter seemed to think that you were both to biased towards the Conservatives, she obviously missed her colleague dealing with Kevin Maguire the night before.
You should have gentle pointed out to her that it was not a Tory conspiracy in the dead tree press, but rather just a string of very bad headlines for the Labour party and Gordon Brown.