John Costello

Arsenal fan/season ticket holder. Living in Basildon,Essex. Sligo Rovers and Ballymote and Glasgow Celtic. Block 110

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and Greens: I demand you stand down in Clacton. I will be a unity candidate and pledge to build at least one affordable house.

Nigel Farage says he wants The People versus the Establishment. So be it.

Leave him to me.

[Premier League India @PLforIndia]

Gunners shining on the world stage 😎✨

@Arsenal

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

Glorious

[Guido Fawkes @GuidoFawkes]

Statement by Paul Dacre, Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers Limited, following Harry's loss in court today:

"Prince Harry wrote a sad book which boasted about his killing of 25 Taliban, his drug-taking and, in cringe-making detail, how he lost his virginity. There isn't a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family. For him, to complain about HIS privacy being invaded takes, not just the biscuit, but the whole tin. Poor Harry. I feel sorry for the way a confused and angry young man has been drawn into this case. The bitter irony is that his mother, Diana, liked the Mail. We were her paper. We took her side in her acrimonious break up with Charles. She and I would speak and meet. The Mail's superb royal reporter was her friend and confidante. The truth is that this trumped-up action - which has cost well over £50 million and wasted a huge amount of valuable court time - should never have been brought to trial. That it did, raises profoundly disturbing questions about the conduct of elements of the legal profession. Today's verdict is not just a victory for Associated's magnificent journalists - several of whom have had a terrible toll imposed on their health and lives - but a free press generally. Make no mistake. This was a conspiracy, supported by Hacked Off, to destroy a paper. Financed by the orgy-loving, racist Max Mosley and involving the actor Hugh Grant, it was also a sinister bid to resuscitate Leveson Two and impose statutory regulation on the press which, even now, is rearing its ugly head in Labour's Media Green Paper."

[Barrister's Horse @BarristersHorse]

The thing about Farage...

He doesn't hate the people who vote(d) for him,

and he's not afraid of them either.

Sadly, there are few politicians who can claim the same, which is why we're in such a mess.

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

Didn’t fancy it then?

[GB Politics @GBPolitcs]

🚨NEW: Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats are expected to stand down in the Clacton by-election, describing it as a "stunt"

The only confirmed candidates so far are Nigel Farage and Count Binface

[clifford grieve🇬🇧🇺🇸 @CliffordGr87959]

@GBPolitcs Just like Makerfield then lol 1 rule for loony lefties dont like it when its played back

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

@prodnose All the fashion then

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

@scoutingindoors There’s a block button
Nice and simple

[Kelvin MacKenzie @kelvmackenzie]

Knowing Starmer ‘s negotiating skills, if he tries to have Quansah’s red card lifted I imagine he’ll end up being banned for life.

[David McDonnell @DiscoMirror]

Haven’t England’s players suffered enough with the change in altitude?

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

@Betgolfworld Iconic moment

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

😂

[Ed Acteson @Ed_Acteson]

Deschamps has brashly taken all of his best players and fashioned them into the most lethal attacking unit in world football, sure.

But do they have the squad balance, leadership and cohesion provided by the likes of Dan Burn, Jordan Henderson and Anthony Gordon? I think not.

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

@YankeeGunner No
You are correct

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

@sometimesong Chelsea made Declan’s price what it was
Not the spammers or Declan
They paid silly money for Caicedo and set the bar that summer
Think we got the better deal

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

@priscabdrO It clearly isn’t

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

@SandyofSuffolk Oh we knew
We just weren’t asked

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

@CGeorgeGoodwin_ That is rank!

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Burnham says housing is wrecking the public finances. Correct. Watch him make it worse. Here is the arithmetic he managed to skip, line by line…

Build cost. Sticking up a three bed runs north of £220k (to £280k) before you buy a single square foot of land or book a penny of profit. That figure is set by things like bricklayers and the spot price of copper.

Sale price. Stack land, levies, finance and a margin that keeps the builder solvent on top, and your bog standard Bovis shitbox semi changes hands at £330k to £360k. Minimum.

Wages. Median full time pay is £39,300. Median household income lands at £36,700. Hold those two in your head, because everything below is measured against them.

Inflation. CPI is bullshit, inflation is not running at anything close to 2.8%. Treat that the way you would treat any figure a department gets to design its own basket to produce. Strip out the imported gadgets getting cheaper and the hedonic fiddle that pretends this year's phone counts as a pay rise, look only at what a family cannot dodge, rent, energy, food, childcare, council tax, insurance, and the real rate sits north of 6 or 7%. And I’m being nice. Pay rose against that by a rounding error. Sterling got debased. House prices in this range haven’t come down.

Groceries. Feeding a family of four runs roughly £8,000 a year (conservatively), and anyone who tells you it is done on £60 a week is either lying or living on tins of beans.

Energy. Price cap goes to £1,862 in July, and a family rattling around a three bed burns more than Ofgem's tidy typical household, so call it £2,000 gone before your new air con unit goes on / heating goes on in the winter.

Rent, after housing costs. A three bed outside London goes for about £1,450 a month, £17,400 a year, and every pound of it buys precisely nothing. Renters hand over a third of gross pay for the privilege of standing still. Again this is lowball. It’s closer to £1,600+ in Reading (a good proxy for non salubrious London commute).

Nursery. After the free hours a full time place in England is about £7,400 a year per child, so a family with two little ones still waves goodbye to the thick end of £15,000. Funded for 38 weeks only, with a taper that bites as you climb, and £13k to £16k a head in Scotland or Wales.

Deposit. 10% on a £350k home is £35k. Out in the real world the average first time buyer now stumps up £59,000 and does it at the age of 34, which tells you how long it takes to save that while renting.

Mortgage. Put ten per cent down and you carry a £315k loan. At a realistic high LTV rate of around 5.5% that is roughly £1,800 a month over thirty years, before service charge, insurance and council tax.

Now the part Burnham will not say from a podium in Manchester.

To service that loan on bog standard 4.5x lending you need a household pulling about £70k, or £57k if a lender stretches to 5.5x, with the deposit sitting in the bank on top. Barely a fifth of UK households clear even £65k gross. Fewer still clear the £70k this actually needs, and among the young it is thinner still.

Of the 25-35 yr old crowd this home is supposedly built for, ownership has fallen from more than half in the 1990s to roughly a quarter or a third today, and most who got there leaned on family money.
First time buyers bunch into the top two income brackets. From the bottom fifth, 4% manage it. Strip out the bank of mum and dad and the slice of that generation who could buy this house on their own earnings sits somewhere in the low teens.

None of which is useless. Building council homes and moving a waiting list is a decent day's work, and somebody stuck on it will sleep easier for it. Trouble is, not one brick of that lowers the open market for two people on normal wages, which is the very fire he stood up to put out.

He has in effect clocked the right problem and gone after it with a tool built for a different job. Because, like most of the Labour Party, he is totally illiterate.

Classic.

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

@DarrenArsenal1 @Whatsinaname81 That blows Bluecos model out the water in that case

[John Costello @Ciaras_Daddy]

@historyinmemes Just a fellah with hat and boots grabbing 40 winks