Near the Greenwich pub where the mini-budget was born, Londoners share their fears
“All the worst ideas happen at the pub, don’t they?” said Brett Lucas as he sat on a park bench in Greenwich Park, south-east London with his girlfriend Becky Nolan, a 25-year-old nurse.
They are a few minutes walk away from the Richard the First pub, where the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and prime minister Liz Truss reportedly thrashed out the plan for a mini-budget that sparked turmoil on financial markets, and left a lot of ordinary people equally terrified.
“I’m pretty angry,” said Lucas, who works in telecoms sales. “I think they’ve completely lost touch with reality. They mentioned trickle-down economics but in reality I don’t think that’s going to work. They’re making the rich richer – it’s not like they’re going to invest it back into the bottom of society. I was saying to Becky earlier, it’s like walking past a homeless person, saying: ‘No, I’m going to post my £20 through a mansion instead because eventually it’ll trickle down to them.’ That’s how I’ve equated it.”
Like many others in the area, he is also concerned about how the government’s policies will affect his family. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it,” the 25-year-old who lives in Swiss Cottage, north-west London, said. “It’s my parents I worry about. Combined, they earn less than me and they’ve got a mortgage to pay. It’s going to have a real impact. My mum texted me to say: ‘It’s ridiculous and dangerous, they don’t care.’”
Meanwhile, Paula Nuttall, an art historian and lecturer at the V&A, said she is worried about her two daughters. She said we’re living in a “strange and scary time”, adding: “Up until now I’ve been thinking it’s not as bad as the calamitous 14th century when you had the Black Death … but now I’m beginning to think maybe it’s
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