A punk diary entry on London’s newest monument to talking about bricks
Tuesday night, three chords, forty minutes, done. That is how a gig works. Andy Burnham gave a housing speech on Monday that ran longer than my entire back catalogue, and by the end of it Britain still did not have any more houses, but it did have a very long speech about houses, which I am told counts as progress in Westminster.
The Speech Itself
I read the whole thing over breakfast, mostly because the toaster was broken and I needed something to stare at for four minutes. According to Burnham’s opening remarks on the scale of the housing plan, the Prime Minister spent most of his allotted time describing how big the plan was, rather than describing the plan. This is a well established British tradition. You do not build the house. You describe the house. Eventually someone else builds the house, usually forty years later, usually smaller than described, usually with a leak.
I am not an economist. I am a person who owns two amplifiers and a bass with a cracked pickguard, and even I could tell that a speech is not a foundation. You cannot pour a speech. You cannot wire a speech for electricity. My landlord does not accept a speech in lieu of rent, believe me, I have tried the bit where I read him a paragraph of Burnham’s remarks in a serious voice and he still wanted the money.
What the Punk Scene Thinks
Down at the venue on Thursday, the conversation between sets was not about the new single from the support act, it was about square footage. This is what London has done to us. We used to argue about whether Crass counted as anarchist enough. Now we argue about whether a converted shipping container counts as a bedroom. Progress, allegedly.
One of the lads in my old squat, a man who has genuinely never paid rent on time in his adult life as a point of principle, said the speech reminded him of a soundcheck that never turns into a gig. Lots of noise, lots of adjusting, then everyone goes home. I thought that was unfair to soundchecks, which at least produce sound.
He also pointed out something I had not considered, which is that every housing announcement in this city seems to come with its own press conference backdrop, its own podium, its own carefully chosen colour scheme, and none of that has ever, not once, been converted into a spare bedroom. If podiums counted as housing stock we would have solved this crisis a decade ago and everyone in Zone 2 would be living behind a lectern with the Downing Street crest on it.
Meanwhile, Somewhere Calmer
I took a break from the housing coverage and had a scroll through the food pages over at The London Prat, mostly because I needed to think about something that was not concrete. There was a piece about a chippy in Bermondsey that has apparently not changed its menu since 1987, which I found more comforting than any government announcement this month. At least the chippy is honest about what it is not going to change.
I also had a look at Fiona MacLeod’s dispatches on getting around this city, which felt relevant, because if the housing plan does eventually produce actual housing, someone is going to have to explain to the new residents how the buses work, and it is not going to be Andy Burnham.
The Numbers Nobody Mentioned
Buried somewhere in the coverage was a line about timelines, which I read three times because I assumed I had misunderstood it. I had not misunderstood it. The timeline was long. Long enough that several members of my current band will plausibly have retired from music, taken up something calmer like beekeeping, and possibly qualified for the housing scheme themselves by the time any of it materialises.
I mentioned this to my drummer, who has a mortgage and therefore takes these things more seriously than the rest of us. He said the trick, historically, is that governments announce the plan while they are in office and let whoever comes after them deal with delivering it, or not delivering it, which is somehow always someone else’s problem by the time anyone checks back in.
Where This Leaves Me
I still do not have anywhere bigger to rehearse. My neighbour still bangs on the wall when the drummer arrives. The Prime Minister still has, by his own account, an enormous plan, the actual contents of which remain, at time of writing, roughly as visible as my landlord’s sense of humour.
A Word From the Merch Table
Even the woman who runs our merch table, who has approximately zero interest in Westminster on a normal week, had an opinion by Thursday. She said the whole thing reminded her of pre-ordering a t-shirt design that never quite arrives in the size you wanted, except the t-shirt in this case is a three bedroom flat and the delay is measured in parliamentary terms rather than postal ones. I told her that was an unusually sharp metaphor for someone counting cash at half past ten on a school night, and she said she has been listening to a lot of politics podcasts on the bus lately, against her better judgement.
What struck me most, going back over the coverage a second time, was how familiar the whole shape of it felt. Big number, distant date, careful phrasing, a promise of review at some unspecified future point. It is the political equivalent of a band promising a new album is coming soon, which, if you have followed enough bands, you learn to translate as coming eventually, or possibly never, but definitely announced with real enthusiasm at the time.
Gig on Friday. Set list unchanged. Housing situation unchanged. At least one of those things I have some control over. Bring earplugs.
