London

How does Tower Hamlets spend my council tax? I’ve been shovelling cash at them for 19 years so I strolled along to the new town hall to find out where the money goes. The new town hall cost a packet, clearly. Carved out of the Royal London Hospital, the spacious lobby looks cool, stylish and reassuringly anonymous, like a private bank in Zurich. Glass doors swish apart and I enter the debating chamber where the councillors sit at a curved mono-desk opposite the public gallery. Everything is slick and hyper-modern. The pristine floor glows beneath the recessed lights. I had expected an ordinary meeting but I seem to have stumbled on an important debate.

I bought my first pint of bitter, in a pub in Slough, in 1972. It cost 12 pence. The Bank of England inflation calculator tells me that is the equivalent of £1.45 today. Yet a pint now sells for £10 in London. What went wrong? Many factors, of which the first was Britain’s entry into the EEC on January 1, 1973. We were eventually made to "harmonize" our alcohol duties with our partners, leading to a drop in the duty on wine and a rise in that on beer, to reflect French cultural preferences. The most recent shock has been Rachel Reeves’s attack on small businesses with employer NI rises, punitive workers’ rights, ever-higher minimum wage etc. In the 1970s, the price of a pint, like the cost of a packet of cigarettes, was a major issue of concern in each year’s Budget.

Claridge’s grew nine storeys in the last decade: it’s a metaphor. The ornamental 1897 castle on Brook Street has expanded to fit the available space. Though it grew by half, it never closed, and workmen dug out the basement by hand. In one room, Claridge’s was a building site: in another, a dream world. We are trekking through metaphors now. We are up to our necks. The children eating the Nutella, banana and whipped cream crêpes look deranged Hotels are like buses: they have infinite possibilities. That is what they are for. To not be home. Like Alec Guinness, who lived in the Connaught with his share of the profits of Star Wars, which shamed him (the Connaught is the anti-Tatooine), I would like to live in a hotel.

Tales from the City Sir: Simon Jenkins’s article on Liverpool Street Station (‘Horror storeys’, 9 May) is inaccurate, and an insult to every councillor on the City of London planning committee, whose professionalism I defend. Saying the committee was ‘clearly going to approve’ the application amounts to an allegation of predetermination. That is a serious charge against every councillor present. It is also untrue: 22 members heard the case and three voted against. Sir Simon writes that ‘both schemes were presented to a packed City planning committee’. This is also untrue. There was one planning application before the committee that day.

Flat broke Sir: John Power’s article on the property squeeze (‘Flatlined’, 18 April) identifies a symptom of a deeper problem, the overregulation of property. Buyers are deterred by spiralling service charges, which are themselves driven by layers of legislation, insurance premium hikes and rocketing labour costs. Those still willing to take the plunge are then hit by a tax system that actively discourages transactions. In the absence of buy-to-let demand, it is no surprise values are dropping. The solution is obvious. Stamp duty, with its crude cliff edges, freezes activity and distorts prices. A landlord or renovator can face £20,000 or more in tax on an entirely ordinary flat, a deterrent by design. This is not a plea for higher prices.

The public disturbances in south London, achieved by social media link-ups, have their precedents. “You can imagine what an exhilarating week this has been,” wrote Harold Nicolson in 1945, “the surrounding of Berlin; the link-up with the Russian armies.” Link-up, first recorded from 1945 by the Oxford English Dictionary, has since been applied chiefly to military connection and that of spacecraft. On the same day as the first Clapham disturbance, three “flash mobs” were honestly busy in Slough High Street, doing little dances and holding up placards calling for the place to be named UK Town of Culture 2028. This outbreak belonged to a slightly old-fashioned trend that began in 2003 for crowds suddenly to materialize to do something attention-seeking.

Last month, a new account called London Price Drop appeared on X. It has already gained more than 14,000 followers simply by posting screenshots from Rightmove, which illustrate how properties in the capital are falling sharply in value. One of these is a leasehold flat in Shepherd’s Bush purchased for £425,000 in 2017, before being re-listed for £395,000 in May 2024, and eventually sold for £325,000 last August. Adjusted for inflation, that represents a real terms loss of close to £250,000. The London Price Drop account is so popular because it contradicts an assumption that many in Britain hold dear. Young or old, owner or renter, almost all of us believe that buying property is the route to wealth, and that house prices, in the long run, always go up.

And there you have it. Britain is a country where a musician who says "Heil Hitler" gets to headline festivals while a musician who plays with a Jew from Israel gets canceled. Threaten to go "death con 3 on Jewish people" and you’ll be grand. Jam with a Jewish person and you’re toast. Selling T-shirts adorned with the swastika? No problem. Doing a duet with someone from the Jewish state? Don’t even think about it. In the eyes of the keffiyeh-smothered windbags of the cultural elite, praising the Nazi monster who exterminated millions of Jews is a more forgivable moral error than hanging out with a Jew from Israel That was my first thought upon reading that Kanye West will headline all three nights of the Wireless festival in London's Finsbury Park in July.