I'm John Batch who with my colleague Joseph Sternberg of the member of the

editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. He writes political economics

column he's based in London and London is the city I've

visited several times in my life and I've admired from a distance ever since.

Why? Because it has all these old associations with clubs and relationships and moving around town and it has

these romantic names and palaces now and again you surprised to find a palace like Buckingham right out there in the middle of the green.

However, at the same time, it is an expensive city, and I come to Joe for life in London right now,

because it's impossible to tell from this distance

whether London is struggling or not. It's certainly a better shape than it was

during the pandemic and there's no war that you can see there have been demonstrations

over Gaza but those are on the weekends so it comes down to the cost of living and

is it comfortable to live in a city where it's unclear what happens next?

Joe, how is life in London these days? Let's start with prices, the cost of living.

I think people are very stressed about this and I mean, you know, the conversation we were

just having about politics, you can't underestimate the extent to which the cost of living is part of that.

I mean, it even enters into discussions about the weather,

which is one of the favorite topics of conversation in this country, because the UK has just had an unusually long cold snap that lasted for a week or more of

you know what for this part of the world are very cold temperatures below freezing.

And the first thing that pops into people's minds now is the cost of heating your home when

it's that cold outside.

So I think that this is creating enormous stress for people on top of the food price inflation that hasn't really abated.

I mean the official data suggests that the inflation rate is slowing a bit, but people don't necessarily see that in their daily lives.

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