A Londoner abroad on pounds, premiums and policy, with a reading list for anyone who wonders what a budget does to a barn
Monday, a Budget Seen from the Wrong Side of the Atlantic
When a London Budget lands, I read it in Portland, Oregon, at breakfast time, with a mug of tea that tastes slightly wrong in the American water. I wrote my reaction as a UK Budget reaction from Portland: a letter to the 29 bus, addressed to a route I used to ride in North London. The 29 is a bus that knows everything about the capital’s mood, and I figured it deserved a correspondent.
The distance helps. From eight time zones away you read a Chancellor’s speech the way you read a sports result: the score first, then the reasons. My own perspective sits on the left, which means I tend to look first at who gains, who pays and who is left holding the receipt. I try to make that visible, so readers can discount for it. A diary is a point of view with its working shown.
A Fair Hearing for the Other Side
I also try to be honest about the best case for people who disagree with me. Supporters of tighter budgets argue that debt costs money, that interest payments crowd out services and that a government has to live within its means just as a household does. Supporters of more spending argue that cutting in a weak economy makes things worse and that investment pays for itself. Both claims contain truth. The argument is about how much, how fast and for whom, and it will continue long after this column.
What I ask of any Budget, in either country, is that someone explains it to a person on a bus. If the explanation needs three footnotes, it has not been finished.
Tuesday, Open Enrollment and the Open Wallet
In the United States, November brings open enrollment, the season when millions of people choose a health plan. I wrote about it in open enrollment in Portland: premiums up 13 percent, hope down. Opening the letter from my insurer was like opening an envelope from a landlord who also feels entitled to your pulse. The premium rose, the deductible rose and the list of covered clinics shrank.
A Londoner finds the whole performance mystifying. Where I grew up, you registered with a surgery and that was that. I do not romanticise the old system, which had waiting lists and a good deal of grumbling. But the idea that choosing a health plan is a seasonal consumer decision, like picking a sofa, still strikes me as odd. The best I can say is that the choice is real, the information is murky and the stakes are high.
The Reading List for the Land
The people who feed us face their own versions of premiums and deductibles, and I keep a short reading list for city readers. For milk, dairyherd.org. For beef, ranchbeefcattle.org. For the machinery on which the whole business depends, tractorequipment.org. For the unforgiving calendar of the growing year, cropcalendar.org.
The money side lives at farmmoney.org and smallfarminfo.org. Rural work is listed at agjobscareers.org. The fair season is at fairandrodeo.org. For the broader picture and a necessary safety reminder, ruralfarm.org and farmssafety.org. A person who thinks about labour, as I do, has to think about farm labour, which is some of the hardest and least secure work there is.
Rent, Boilers and Solidarity
The London Prat captured a generational joke in First-Time Buyers Swap Rent for Boiler Repairs. The details differ across the ocean, but the shape is the same: young people paying more for less and being told to be grateful. I have a collection of such headlines. Some are jokes. Some are budget analyses with the numbers removed.
Solidarity, in my view, begins with noticing that the problem is shared. The tenant in Portland, the tenant in Peckham and the farmhand in Fresno are each doing sums at a kitchen table, and the sums rhyme. Whether you think the answer is more regulation, more building or more wages, the first step is to agree on the question.
Wednesday, Tea and the 29
I ended the week with a cup of tea and a long look out of the window at the rain. The rain in Portland is softer than London rain, patient and inclined to drizzle. A bus went past with a light on in the front and three passengers staring at their phones. I thought of the 29 trundling through Camden, full of people who all had somewhere to be and a reason to complain.
That is the thing about homesickness: it attaches itself to public transport. I do not miss the weather or the prices. I miss the sense that a whole city is in the same lurching vehicle, and the occasional stranger who looks up and shares a raised eyebrow.
A Note on Tea
American tea, I should report, is a different substance. It comes in a mug with a bag on a string and the water is never quite hot enough. I have taken to carrying my own kettle in my bag, like a missionary. It is a small, sturdy act of resistance.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, The Daily Mash keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/