Securonomics is the right plan. How should it be sold?

Most of us know what makes us secure (and what it doesn't). But what is the common factor?

This is the fortnightly paid version of my newsletter. It’s coming to you a bit early as I am in Rome for the weekend!

The price of this newsletter is now £5 per mont/£50 per year. However, many of you may know that I record a weekly podcast with Charlotte Henry who writes the brilliant and informative The Addition substack. We are now offering, via Patreon, the chance to subscribe to BOTH our newsletters and get extra podcast content for what amounts to around £60 a year. Your support for independent media is greatly appreciated. These projects take work and care and we really appreciate your support and recognition of that.

For those of you who just fancy buying me a little Christmas gift you can do so here!

Deck My Halls!

---

I’ve been thinking about security a lot recently.

In the last few years, the provider of my gas and electricity has changed hands twice without my having any say over it: from Green Energy to Shell and now to Octopus. Meanwhile, my bills have more than doubled (though when I got a smart meter installed, for the brief period that it worked, I was able to bring them down considerably. Amazingly enough, a single woman living alone really isn’t using as much energy as the average household).

I bought my leasehold flat almost exactly ten years ago and I love it. Nowhere else I have lived since childhood has ever felt as much like home. When I dream of home, those dreams have transferred from that childhood home to here - something that has never happened anywhere else.

But it is a leasehold and it is mortgaged. So I have been both hit by exorbitant charges from my service company for ‘works’ that have not yet happened and a rise in their standard service charges. The ground rent, thankfully is fixed and low, but that’s not how freeholders get you. It’s the service charges. Something over which I have no control and no say.

And the mortgage. Oh God, the mortgage. It’s not due for renewal until the end of next year. Thankfully, I took out a ten-year deal when interest rates were basically zero (on the assumption - rightly - that they couldn’t get lower. Though I now wish I had been able to renew a couple of years ago as we won’t get back to that place by the time I do).

What does this all matter to you, my dear readers?

Well, I am one of the lucky ones. I’m probably not going to lose the home I sort of own. As long as I keep up the regime of blankets and jumpers rather than doing anything excessive like turning the heating on for more than two hours a day, I’ll be able to just about afford my bills. And as such I am so much better off than so many.

But if I am now just about the median, think about how many people are so much worse off than me. How many people do feel even more insecure in this country.Not a little, as I do, but a great deal and all the time?

And think about how Labour can and should be talking to those like me and those worse off about what security means using language that evokes a deeper sense of understanding of security without veering off into wonkery or saying either too much or too little.

Because at the moment, the people who are largely being reassured by the language used around securonomics are those with a macro interest in the economy. The Markets and economists and interpreters of politics. But for this to work (and I think it should) it needs to be understood by householders and bill payers and renters and parents and people who just want it all to stop. People whose main desire from government is that they can check their banking app once a week not once an hour.

It is here I think that the narrative needs to be different. To put retail politics on the fiscal bones. To talk in images that resonate with voters on a bone deep level.