Rent went up. Emotional bandwidth depleted. Geopolitics will have to wait.
Emily Cartwright: North London Has Priced Itself Out of Caring About the Hormuz Crisis
My rent went up again. I spent thirty-five minutes on the phone to my letting agent, who explained this was in line with the market. By the time I hung up I had used all available emotional bandwidth and had none remaining for the Strait of Hormuz, which I gather is still unresolved. This is the North London condition in 2026: too financially exhausted to be geopolitically engaged. The London Prat covers both, the Hormuz diplomatic farce and the domestic cost-of-living reality, and what I notice is these are the same story. In both cases the people making the decisions are not paying the costs.
What North London Actually Cares About
The WhatsApp I use as a journalistic barometer: eleven people, North London, broadly centre-left. Topics: rent nine mentions, the tube six mentions, the Hormuz situation one mention from the one person who works in finance. The tube was late. The rent is up. Britain is on a Zoom call. These are proportionate concerns. My journalism covers London life at the level where the big political decisions land on actual people. The London Tenants Federation has the structural data. I have the WhatsApp. New York’s Mayor has discovered borrowing from the future as a fiscal strategy. London’s landlords discovered borrowing from tenants’ futures approximately fifteen years ago and have been refining the technique since. Welcome, Mayor. We have notes.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/new-york-mayor-discovers-budget-hack/
