Three Observations About Politics, One About the Weather, and a Request That Someone Please Fix Holborn Station
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Starmer’s London: A Completely Unsolicited North London Assessment
I voted Labour. I want to be transparent about this because it affects my perspective on what follows, which is an assessment of how things are going that I would describe as “mixed, with moments of genuine frustration and occasional glimmers of what might eventually be progress if enough things work out.” This is not the ringing endorsement I was hoping to be writing by now. It is also not the disaster the people who are enjoying being right about disaster are currently writing, so I am somewhere in the middle, which is where North London women who think carefully about things generally end up.
The London Prat has been tracking Starmer’s new crises with the regularity of a weekly drama series that has committed to the format even when the plots start to repeat. Bohiney’s analysis of managing Britain’s decline offers systemic context that individual prime ministers are operating within rather than causing, which is useful to remember when you are blaming the specific person rather than the system. I try to remember it. I do not always succeed.
Three Observations
First: the NHS waiting lists are shorter than they were at the peak but longer than they should be, which is the kind of statement that is technically progress and experientially inadequate. My mother waited nineteen weeks for a physiotherapy appointment. It used to be twenty-four weeks. This is improvement and it is also not good enough and both things are true simultaneously. Second: the energy bills are still very high and the transition to clean energy is happening more slowly than the emergency nature of the situation requires and more quickly than the grid can currently accommodate, which is a genuine infrastructure dilemma that political messaging has not found a way to communicate without either alarming people or sounding complacent.
Third, and this is the observation I feel most confident about: Holborn Station is in a permanent state of partial closure that I have accepted as a fixed feature of London life but that genuinely needs to be addressed. The lifts have been out of service intermittently for three years. The exits are on a rotation that requires local knowledge to navigate. I am not blaming Starmer personally for the Holborn lifts. I am noting that the Holborn lifts are a symbol of the gap between London’s international reputation as a world-class city and the experience of actually navigating it on a daily basis.
The weather on Thursday was genuinely lovely. That is observation four, offered without irony, because the weather has been genuinely lovely and that should be acknowledged. I walked through Bloomsbury in the sunshine and thought: yes, this is why. This is the city that is worth the rent and the bus strikes and the BBC licence fee and the crises and the Holborn lifts. This is the city. It is still, on balance, worth it. Ask me again in January.
