Times columnist Giles Coren on a roll

On yer bikes, you whining first-time buyers

Can I just quickly write about the property crisis? It’s massively boring and you must feel free to skip me this week, but I think I have seen to the heart of the matter and arrived at a solution. Although there is a danger I could be wrong, because it is about house prices and mortgages and debt and first-time buyers, and that is all very tedious stuff to which I generally pay no attention and about which I thus know very little.

So correct me if I’ve misunderstood, but isn’t it the case that property prices are now so high that first-time buyers are dying out as a significant market sector? I think that’s what I read. I think it is because they cannot save for the deposits. And so, after a long period of reluctance to lend, banks and building societies are now offering massive percentages again to first-timers who have to dig behind the sofa for 20p pieces and sell their second pair of shoes to raise any sort of capital.

I see, for example, that the Coventry Building Society (who knew Coventry had its own building society?) announced a 90 per cent loan-to-value mortgage this week, and that at least 48 lenders were offering such a thing in May 2011, which is a 60 per cent rise from the 30 lenders who were doing so in 2010.

Furthermore, the Government recently outlined plans to work in conjunction with new homebuilders to offer mortgages to buyers who can raise only a 5 per cent deposit. Five per cent. Loosely translatable as NOTHING. Houses for people with no money at all. Hurrah!
But of course a lot of personal finance experts are saying this is bad, that it puts borrowers in danger of becoming victims of negative equity, losing all their money and generating another crash, like the sub-prime thing in America that nobody understood at all, not even Warren Buffett or Carol Vorderman.

And at the same time, at the same time mark you, as all this is going on, I’m reading that UK house prices are falling everywhere apart from London. The average national house price is now down to £160,519, and in such unfashionable places as, for example, Stoke-on-Trent, the average is £73,000. In Merthyr Tydfil it’s even less: £69k. And that’s an average. So there will be houses there for £30k if you look hard enough. Borrow 95 per cent and you need only find fifteen hundred quid for a down-payment. That’s less than a decent meal in London. So what’s all the fuss?

Oh, you don’t want to live in Merthyr Tydfil? Can’t even point to it on a map? Sure you can. Give it a go.

Nice try, but that’s Belgium. And you really don’t want to live there.

So then what about Stoke? It may be so grim that it doesn’t even have a Pizza Express (on the basis of which staggering fact alone it could legitimately be twinned with the Moon) but if you can’t afford to buy a house in London, you have to be realistic.

The endless expansion of London into some sort of world supercity where just about everybody lives is not a good thing. Nobody benefits by it. We don’t want you here. You don’t like it here. And you can’t afford it anyway. But still you come. All of you.

You finish your education, say goodbye to modder and farder, load your stuff into a hanky on a stick, arrive in the middle of the night and immediately start complaining about how expensive everything is and how the beer isn’t as good as wherever you’ve come from. But you stay. You rent. You complain about this and about that, and bang endlessly on about your boring northern childhood and how you hate us all for being fairy ponces who eat our meals sitting down at a table and don’t know the value of a farthing. But most of all you complain that you can’t afford to buy a house here. As if it were our fault.

But prohibitive pricing is not imposed from above, it is generated internally by a shortage of supply and works automatically as a population control. That’s what a market is (although, yes, fair point, it is also the thing in the town square you used to drive the chickens to with Mam on Saturdays). And if you can’t afford to live here, go somewhere you can.

All the trendy thinking now is anti-London. We’re supposed to be pretending that Britain, like France, Italy, Spain, Germany, America, is a country of many capitals. That cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and that other one, I forget its name, are just as important as London. Scotland now thinks it can get along entirely on its own.

The Prime Minister is constantly having to pretend he’s interested in the regions. The BBC is moving to Salford, for heaven’s sake. And I am constantly badgered to review restaurants out of London by readers who seem to think I haven’t noticed there are other cities in Britain, rather than that I just don’t like them. And now this stupid Olympic torch is going all over the country to be gawped at by grockles who take it as a huge source of pride that a giant cigarette lighter is being schlepped their way by a former bronze medallist in the octathlon, but dumbly accept that if they want to see any actual sport they will have to come to London.

It is one of the principal missions of the modern Left, a keynote democratic ambition, to spread money, media, government and business out of London to the boondocks. So this glorious capitalist crisis of unaffordable housing ought to be celebrated, and the opportunity it presents to spread young, vibrant talent around the country instead of concentrating it all in the grotty old Smoke should be pounced on.

If you can’t afford to buy a house in London, go and buy one in Salford (there are plenty for under a hundred grand, I just checked) and get a job at the BBC. Or buy one in Warrington or Pontefract or Derby. Or in the tragically depopulated countryside where only old people now live because the young ’uns all went to London, and it is as rare to see a nine-year-old as it is to see a foxhunt or a hedgerow.

With a couple of grand for a down payment and an interest-only mortgage you can live practically anywhere apart from the greatest city on Earth. So stop grumbling and go and start something. Where you go, Pizza Express will surely follow. You can’t afford to live in London, so move to Stoke and make it nicer.

• NB: if that’s all just stupid then I draw your attention to research published this week which appears to prove that left-handed people, such as myself, are much thicker than was previously thought. Revealing his findings at Flinders University in Adelaide, Professor Mike Nicholls said that the “reduced cognitive ability” of left-handers is not huge but is similar to the “negative outcome” of being born prematurely.

This comes as a great blow to me because my three massive natural handicaps — being born left-handed, short-sighted and Jewish — have always, I thought, had the tiny upside of at least traditionally connoting a bit of creativity, a bit of reading ability, a dash of low cunning. Now it seems I’m as dim as everyone else. Dimmer. No wonder I never really understand anything.