Bank of England’s staggering complacency and failures has caused mortgage crisis

Loans agony

THE grim truth about rising mortgage rates is that there is little anyone can do.

Too much damage has been done by Covid and war, plus a shameful decade of Bank of England failure.

Labour is trying to brand all this the “Tory mortgage premium”.

That is ­typically juvenile politics.

Rates are higher in America, Canada and New Zealand and about the same in Australia.

Borrowers there are ­suffering the same pain.

The root cause is rampant inflation triggered by the pandemic and Putin’s madness.

The difference here is that ours remains more stubbornly high.

That is partly down to the staggering complacency of Bank of England ­Governor Andrew Bailey, failing to act decisively on interest rates when inflation first rose.

But his smooth-talking predecessor Mark Carney did immense long-term harm too.

Under him “quantitative easing”, the vast money-printing programme which stabilised our economy after the 2008 global crash, carried on years too long.

That kept interest rates artificially low, sent house prices into orbit and fuelled inflation . . . facts which ultra-Remainer Carney conveniently forgets as he vacuously blames “Brexit”.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is right to urge lenders to find ways to ease the pain, but that is about all he can do.

We have only sympathy for those ­crippled by a soaring home loan.

But a Covid-style bailout from taxpayers would not just be inflationary, as Mr Hunt says, it would be wrong in principle.

The public cannot pay people’s mortgages. It would be grotesquely unfair, not least on skint renters who cannot themselves get on the housing ladder.

There is no guarantee higher mortgages will cut inflation, since more properties are now owned outright than via loans.

But, thanks to its own incompetence, this is the mess the Bank finds itself in.

Class clowns

A GENERATION of left-wing teachers driven to woke extremes by social media is now aggressively indoctrinating kids to believe their lunacy.

It must be stopped.

One school lists 42 pronouns pupils can use. Not just he or she but “zie”, “ve”, “tey” or “e”, whatever they denote.

Thousands of other schools do the same, it claims. That’s what worries us.

We don’t see a pronoun for a cat, though.

An odd oversight, given that another school lets a girl identify as a moggie while her teacher abusively defends her fictitious furry rights against her classmates’ blunt sanity.

Those kids are right. The grown-ups are wrong . . . and negligent.

It is not “inclusive” to let a pupil identify as a cat.

Or to tell girls who sensibly believe biology defines male and female that they are no longer welcome.

When will this teacher be disciplined?

And when will our Tory Government douse this wildfire of derangement in schools?