by A diary on London property, ambition, and the gap between the two
I read the transcript of Burnham’s housing speech on the bus home from a date that ended, mercifully, before dessert, and found the speech and the date had almost exactly the same problem, a great deal of promising set up and remarkably little delivered by the end.
The Speech
According to the report on Burnham’s opening remarks about the scale of the housing plan, the Prime Minister spent most of his allotted time describing how significant the plan was, rather than describing what was actually in it. I have dated men who do this. Extensive preamble about how much they have to offer, remarkably little offered by the time the bill arrives.
I sent the relevant paragraph to my flatmate, who is currently saving for a deposit with the grim determination of someone who has accepted this will take considerably longer than any government timeline suggests, and she replied with a single laughing emoji and the observation that at least the speech, unlike most of my recent dates, was honest about being mostly talk.
What the Speech Actually Promised
I went back and reread the transcript a second time on the walk home, mostly out of stubbornness, hoping I had missed a specific commitment somewhere in the middle that would justify the length. I had not missed anything. The specifics, when they eventually arrived several paragraphs in, amounted to a review timeline rather than a delivery timeline, which in my experience of both dating and housing policy tends to mean considerably more waiting before anything measurable actually changes.
My Own Housing Situation, For Context
I currently share a flat that I love, with a landlord I have complicated feelings about, in a part of London that gets more expensive every time I check the listings out of morbid curiosity rather than any genuine intention to move. Every housing announcement lands slightly differently when you are actively living inside the problem rather than reading about it in the abstract.
She has been saving for three years now, tracking every payslip against a spreadsheet that updates automatically whenever average deposit figures shift in this city, which they do, reliably, upward, at a pace that makes every fresh housing announcement feel slightly beside the point by the time it actually reaches her savings account.
A Note on Timing
The speech, notably, arrived the same week as several other major announcements competing for the same news cycle, which my media-trained instincts tell me was probably not entirely accidental, since a crowded news week tends to soften scrutiny on any single announcement simply by dividing journalist attention across several stories at once rather than one.
Cross-Reading
I also read the coverage of the plan to nationalise bricks, which somehow made the whole thing stranger rather than clearer. I do not need the brick reinvented. I need a landlord who returns my calls about the boiler, and I suspect that particular reform is not coming in this parliament either.
I checked Chelsea Bloom’s business reporting afterward, mostly because she tends to have the clearest read on what these announcements actually mean for people my age trying to make rent work in this city, and her scepticism this week matched my own fairly closely.
The Dating Parallel, Extended
There is something almost poetic about spending an evening being told, at length, how significant a man’s plans are for the future, only to go home and read a nearly identical rhetorical structure applied to national housing policy. Big claims, distant timelines, very little that survives contact with the actual details. I do not think this is a coincidence. I think this is simply how ambition gets communicated in this country right now, whether the subject is a flat or an entire housing strategy.
I do not think either the speech or the dates I have been on this month were dishonest exactly, more that both belong to a genre where the opening act is considerably more polished than anything that follows it, and I have gotten fairly good, this year in particular, at recognising the genre early.
There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from watching the same rhetorical pattern repeat itself across completely different domains of life within the same single week, dating and housing policy included, and I think I have found, this week specifically, the precise edge of that particular tiredness.
Whatever comes of it, I intend to keep the two documents, the transcript and my flatmate’s spreadsheet, side by side for as long as it takes either of them to actually change, on the theory that watching them both stay static in parallel will eventually make for a fairly telling story on its own.
Diary Close
Home now, flat still shared, boiler still making the noise it makes, housing plan still theoretical. At least one of these problems I have some hope of resolving through my own efforts. The other I am leaving entirely to Westminster, with appropriately low expectations. I will keep watching for the implementation document regardless, mostly out of professional habit, though my flatmate’s spreadsheet is not, on current evidence, expecting it to change her savings timeline by much.
