Labour’s first extended term since 2010 produces results that the party’s supporters describe with careful calibration

Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

Lowri Griffiths writes from North London on UK politics and what Starmer has and has not done.

The 18 Months

Eighteen months into the Starmer government, it is possible to produce an assessment of what has been delivered, what has been delayed, and what has quietly been dropped from the list of things that will be delivered. The delivered list includes: the establishment of the National Wealth Fund, some NHS waiting list reductions, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill moving through Parliament, the energy company reform beginning, and various regulatory adjustments that do not make headlines but constitute governance. The delayed list is longer. The dropped list is not acknowledged as such.

The North London Emotional State

North London — or at least the North London that reads and argues about politics, which is a specific subset of North London that includes me and my social circle — has moved through the standard emotional phases of Labour government in the 18 months since July 2025: initial relief, followed by cautious optimism, followed by the specific frustration of a government that is doing the correct things at the incorrect pace, followed by the resigned realism of people who voted Labour knowing it would be this.

The Conservative Response

Kemi Badenoch’s response to 18 months of Labour government has been to point at the things the government has not done and to articulate what the Conservatives would do differently, which is the opposition’s job and which she does with the specific energy of a leader who believes the government is failing by the metrics the government set for itself. Some of the metrics confirm her case. Some do not. The North London assessment is mixed. The UK Government publishes the official record of the Starmer administration’s policy delivery. The Guardian Politics covers the Labour government’s delivery record from the perspective closest to North London’s political outlook. Both confirm the observation.

Read more from Lowri Griffiths at The London Prat.

The Column and Its Reason

This column exists because North London produces the specific combination of political awareness, housing anxiety, transit frustration, and cultural life that requires documentation from the inside. The inside is where Lowri Griffiths writes from: not as an observer of North London but as a participant in it, which means the housing market is not an abstraction but the context in which the column is written, the transit system is not a statistic but the commute taken to reach the places the column covers, and the politics are not background noise but the conversation that happens at the dinner tables to which the column provides context.

The blog at The London Prat continues weekly with the same commitment to the specific and the honest. North London continues providing the material. London continues being London, which is the condition that guarantees the material will continue arriving faster than any column can document it. The column makes its selection each week. The selection is the contribution. The contribution continues.

The Guardian UK covers the national picture. The blog covers the North London street-level experience. Both are necessary. The blog returns next week.

The blog returns because the subject returns. London is not a subject that exhausts itself: the housing market is not a one-week story; the monarchy is not a one-month story; the Shoreditch transformation is not a one-year story. All three are generational stories that produce weekly instalments, and the blog documents the weekly instalments with the knowledge that the generational story is the context and the weekly instalment is the evidence. The evidence accumulates. The context deepens. The documentation grows. The blog continues with the same commitment to the specific over the abstract, the observed over the theorised, and the North London, Central London, and East London perspective over the perspective that any national newspaper provides from a building in Midtown. This is local journalism at the scale of a city that contains multitudes. The blog is the contribution. The contribution continues weekly.

London is the city that keeps producing the material. The blog is the column that keeps processing the material. The processing produces the column. The column produces the reader. The reader produces the reason to continue. The reason to continue produces the next column. The next column returns next week with the same city in its next specific state, which is always somewhat different from this week and always recognisably the same city — the city that is simultaneously the most documented and the least fully documented place in the English-speaking world, because its scale and its rate of change outpace any single column and require the accumulation of many columns over many weeks to approach something like a complete account. This blog is one contribution to the accumulation. The accumulation continues. The blog continues with it. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing.

More at https://www.thedailymash.co.uk.

SOURCE: Satirical Journalism