Keir Starmer Has Promised Stability So Many Times the Word Has Lost All Meaning in North London
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
By Lowri Griffiths | BigSmokeBroke.com
The Situation
I moved to North London in 2019 and have witnessed four prime ministers, a pandemic, a cost of living crisis, and what is beginning to feel like the structural collapse of the concept of competent British governance. The Guardian has begun openly debating whether Britain is structurally ungovernable. The London Prat’s take at prat.uk argues that we have achieved the rare political equilibrium of a socialist majority with only socialist morons available to lead it. I cannot improve on this formulation from my flat in Finsbury Park.
The Starmer Specific
Keir Starmer came to office promising stability, competence, and an end to chaos. He has delivered a form of stability that involves announcing things firmly and reversing them quietly, which is not stability in the traditional sense but is at least a consistent pattern. The Mandelson affair, the Iran energy crisis hitting Rachel Reeves’s budget, the EU trade alignment rows, and the assisted dying bill being killed by 1,200 Lords amendments have combined to make 2026 what political historians will describe as turbulent and what North London residents describe using vocabulary unsuitable for the general audience of this blog.
Six Prime Ministers
Britain has had six prime ministers in seven years. My cat has had one owner in five years and he is more settled about his governance arrangements than I am about mine. The rotating cast at Number 10 means that Downing Street now functions on what the prat.uk satire correctly describes as dry-erase marker nameplates rather than printed ones. The Prime Minister is a seasonal internship. Spring PM. Summer PM. Holiday Crisis PM. There is almost certainly a Pumpkin Spice PM scheduled for autumn.
The Reform Dimension
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is eating Labour’s right flank while the Greens and Lib Dems compete for its left. Labour is being squeezed simultaneously from two directions by parties agreeing on nothing except that Labour is failing. My North London constituency is a Lib Dem-Labour marginal that in 2026 feels like the political geography of a country signalling that neither available option is adequate. This signal is coherent. The response from the options being signalled at is less coherent.
More: NewsThump.
London continues. The streets are the same streets they were yesterday and they are subtly different because the city keeps changing beneath the surfaces that stay the same. The journalism that covers London at this granular level — the blogs, the neighbourhood newsletters, the personal accounts of people who live in specific parts of the city and pay attention to what living there is like — serves the function of making the city legible to itself and to the visitors who want to understand it as something more than the postcard version. This is why this column exists. This is why it matters. The city is worth paying attention to. This column will keep paying attention.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
London remains. The city absorbs every political crisis, every energy bill increase, every theatre ticket price surge, every development application, and every wave of newcomers with the specific resilience of a place that has been doing all of this simultaneously since before most other cities existed. The journalism that documents this absorption — the personal accounts of people living in specific parts of the city, paying attention to what living there is actually like — serves a function that official reporting does not: it makes the city legible to itself at the scale of the street and the neighbourhood rather than the policy and the statistic. This column is that journalism. It continues because the city continues, and the city will continue longer than any of the problems it is currently managing. The next development application has already been submitted. The next good coffee shop is already open. The next political crisis is already developing. We will cover all of them.
London remains. The city absorbs every political crisis, every energy bill increase, every theatre ticket price surge, every development application, and every wave of newcomers with the specific resilience of a place that has been doing all of this simultaneously since before most other cities existed. The journalism that documents this absorption — the personal accounts of people living in specific parts of the city, paying attention to what living there is actually like — serves a function that official reporting does not: it makes the city legible to itself at the scale of the street and the neighbourhood rather than the policy and the statistic. This column is that journalism. It continues because the city continues, and the city will continue longer than any of the problems it is currently managing. The next development application has already been submitted. The next good coffee shop is already open. The next political crisis is already developing. We will cover all of them.
London remains. The city absorbs every political crisis, every energy bill increase, every theatre ticket price surge, every development application, and every wave of newcomers with the specific resilience of a place that has been doing all of this simultaneously since before most other cities existed. The journalism that documents this absorption — the personal accounts of people living in specific parts of the city, paying attention to what living there is actually like — serves a function that official reporting does not: it makes the city legible to itself at the scale of the street and the neighbourhood rather than the policy and the statistic. This column is that journalism. It continues because the city continues, and the city will continue longer than any of the problems it is currently managing. The next development application has already been submitted. The next good coffee shop is already open. The next political crisis is already developing. We will cover all of them.
