The Week Unwrapped: Mortgages, noise complaints and fake films

published 9 December 2022

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days. With Guy Anker, Emma Smith and Suchandrika Chakrabarti.

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The spike in interest rates that followed Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget appears to be behind us, as mortgage costs fall back below 6%. But while they’re coming down, rates are still at much higher rates than we’ve got used to over the past decade. This poses many questions, for homeowners and would-be buyers alike: is now a good time to remortgage, or to buy – and what will higher rates do for house prices?

The Night and Day Cafe, one of Manchester’s most prominent live music venues, is being asked to turn down the volume following a noise complaint from a neighbour, who bought a flat adjoining the 30-year-old venue in 2020. The flats were built in 2000, when the night club was already almost a decade old. How should cases like these be resolved, and how can rules governing new residential property in city centres help to prevent such conflicts arising?

The chaos at Twitter has led a lot of people to review their use of social media – and some to decamp to other platforms. One of the beneficiaries appears to be Tumblr, where countless users have entertained themselves by inventing a “lost” Martin Scorsese film and fleshing out the details of its critical reception. Is this a harmless antidote to the darker side of social media – or just another example of misinformation?