Sadiq Khan and the decline of London

Benjamin Disraeli observed that London was “a nation, not a city”. Today, 150 years later, many people in Britain feel like foreigners in their own capital. Londoners live in fear in a condemned city that is no longer theirs.

The marches for Palestine that have taken place every Saturday since the Hamas pogrom on October 7 have turned central London into a no-go area at weekends, especially for Jewish families but also for many others.

These marches are accompanied by anti-Semitic chants and placards, bloodcurdling war cries, intimidation and violence. To millions of Londoners, they feel more like a bid to take over the streets than a genuine protest.

In a similar way, environmental activists have mounted innumerable protests in the capital that threaten the leisure and livelihoods of ordinary people.

From the desecration of great works of art by Van Gogh and Velazquez in the National Gallery to shutting customers out of their local banks or impeding emergency services by stopping traffic, the likes of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion exult in wreaking havoc on everyday life in the capital.

Not only are levels of deliberate disruption and public disorder becoming intolerable, but to most visitors London seems manifestly in decline. The only person with the power to halt that decline is the Mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Susan Hall, the Mayor’s Tory challenger, sees “the night-time economy crumbling before our very eyes”. “Most Londoners don’t feel safe. Certainly most women don’t feel safe at night.”

Susan Hall argues that crime is the result of the Mayor’s failure to build affordable homes to create law-abiding communities: “If you grow your business you need more staff, and it is a problem if you cannot get them into London because of the transport offer and they cannot easily live here because of the housing offer.”

While residential areas are increasingly unaffordable even for the middle classes, the office districts are being hollowed out by working from home.

Up to half of private and especially public employees are still only coming into the office part-time, if at all. London shops, cafés, restaurants, pubs and other businesses that depend on their custom are hard-hit. Mondays and Fridays, once the busiest days of the week, are now blighted by “WFH” — hence far quieter than before the pandemic.

Trading figures from Pret A Manger show that since just before Covid, the City of London has suffered a fall of 7 per cent and the West End has risen by just 1 per cent, while Manchester has seen a rise of 22 per cent and Yorkshire 27 per cent.

Last month, the Government issued official guidance to the civil service, demanding that senior staff come into the office most of the time. But a survey by the unions claims that 40 per cent of staff would rather quit than commute.

WFH has indirect effects, too. On productivity, the key to prosperity, London is falling behind. It grew by an average of just 0.2 per cent per annum between 2010 and 2019, compared to New York’s 1.4 per cent and Paris’s 0.9 per cent in the same period. There are signs that this sluggish record of productivity has only worsened since working from home became the norm in London.

As a result of this mass exodus from the inner city, whole districts remain ghost towns. Tourists who still come to London but they find there is less of a buzz than five years ago.

What is deterring overseas visitors, at any rate from spending their money here, is the “tourist tax” — the abolition of VAT-free shopping.

It was in 2021 as Chancellor of the Exchequer that Rishi Sunak scrapped the refund, so few expect him to reinstate it as Prime Minister. But there is no doubt that in the highly competitive international tourist market, London is losing out to rival European cities such as Paris where VAT refunds still apply.

Oxford Economics predicted that reinstating the tax break would bring 1.6 million tourists to Britain, while the New West End Company claims that London is back to 2019 levels of US, Chinese and Gulf visitors, but that some of its Continental rivals have doubled their numbers.

The neglect of the urban environment is shocking: shabby, litter-strewn, vermin-infested streets where passers-by are accosted by beggars and preyed on by thieves. In what used to be grand boulevards for shoppers, such as Oxford Street, hideous tourist traps and black market retailers, such as the dreaded “candy stores”, have replaced normal shops.

While crime overall, and violent crime in particular, have halved across the UK since 2010, in London both have risen.

Since 2016, when Sadiq Khan became Mayor, violent crime in the capital has risen by some 30 per cent. Particularly alarming has been the rising level of knife crime, which rose by 21 per cent in London during the year to June 2023.

ONS figures show that stabbings in the capital fell slightly in the year to March 2023, from 76 to 63. But the overall picture is deteriorating, with London accounting for 12,786 knife crimes, more than a quarter of all such offences in England and Wales.

The dance with death of London youth is now exacerbated by the use of social media by gangs, who use TikTok to recruit and control teenagers.

So-called “TikTok gangs” have used the Chinese platform to spread their notoriety, boast of their exploits and incite violence. One case last summer saw the time and place of a robbery in Oxford Street flagged in advance on TikTok, leading to chaotic scenes at the heart of London’s retail market.

Susan Hall warns that shopping is no longer safe: “If you have kids marauding through the streets with machetes, it is going to turn people off.”

It is extraordinary that Sadiq Khan has succeeded so far in avoiding responsibility for his failure to enforce law and order across the capital. He was quick to blame the former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, and forced out the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick.

But the Mayor, who hopes to be re-elected for an unprecedented third term next May, is running out of excuses for his lamentable record on crime. As Susan Hall points out, “trust and confidence in the police since 2017 has plummeted. I don’t think that is helped by Sadiq Khan because he does not support the police.”

She adds: “I have found £200 million within Khan’s budget that I would put into policing straight away. If you could recruit more [clerical] staff into the police you could release more warranted officers onto the front line.”

Ask any London taxi driver about Sadiq Khan and they will bring up ULEZ — the Ultra Low Emission Zone. On this, the Mayor has ignored the plight of drivers of older vehicles in outer boroughs, hit by a daily charge of £12.50.

Even the failure of Labour to win the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election has not, it seems, caused Khan to rethink his determination to penalise those who depend on their vehicles to make a living. Rather than listen to the voices of real people here and now, he cites notional benefits in the future.

“I would stop the ULEZ expansion on day one,” Susan Hall promises. “That has affected the poorest most — they are very often shift workers who need their cars to get into work. And if you work overnight, you get hammered by the £12.50 charge twice.”

A more imaginative mayor would have taken on board the unfairness of this tax on poorer members of the community and proposed measures to mitigate its effects, such as a scrappage scheme for vehicles that do not meet the ULEZ requirements. But not this Mayor, whose boast of being the son of a Pakistani-born bus driver is the best-known fact about him.

The public transport system, for which Khan shares responsibility with TfL, has also suffered from his refusal to intervene on behalf of the “little people”. So when tubes were disrupted by Green activists, or mainline stations were occupied by Gaza marchers, the Mayor kept his head down.

On Remembrance Day, a screaming mob took over Victoria Station. They set upon Michael Gove, who had to be rescued by police. Any halfway decent municipal official with a legal responsibility for security on London’s railway system would have apologised to the Levelling-Up Secretary for this lapse.

Not Mayor Khan. His indifference to Gove’s personal safety could not possibly have had anything to do with the minister’s earlier jibe on GBNews at his ULEZ expansion as “Sadiq Khan’s unfair, cash-grabbing, anti-Tory, anti-hard work, scarcely makes any difference to the environment at all, scam” — which went viral on YouTube.

Most recently Gove and Khan clashed on the proposed MSG Sphere, a giant pleasure dome next to the Olympic Park in East London. This 21,500 seat concert venue on a brownfield site was blocked by Khan earlier this month, but Gove used his powers to overrule the Mayor.

The plans will now be scrutinised again. But the American entrepreneur behind the scheme, James Dolan, warns that he may not wait before taking his Sphere elsewhere: “This really is the end of the line for London. Why doesn’t London want the greatest show on earth?”

Dolan’s comment illustrates the deeper challenge that London faces: how to maintain its status as the greatest financial centre on the planet?

The City certainly needs the Mayor to be, as Susan Hall puts it, “going out there and bigging London up”. She worries that Sadiq Khan has “taken his eye off the ball. He doesn’t seem to care.”

This year the City Corporation no longer ranked London as primus inter pares among global financial centres, but only joint first with New York.

That might still sound pretty good. Indeed, last week a KCL Policy Institute report described London’s economic performance as “impressively resilient”, noting that foreign investment since 2019 had risen by 25 per cent. The Spanish bank Alantra, for example, has just decided to move its headquarters from Madrid to London.

So much for Brexit having scuppered the City. But other figures from EY suggest that digital projects in London almost halved from 194 in 2021 to 107 in 2022 and that foreign direct investments in London fell by 24 per cent.

So the investment story in London is at best mixed, while publicly listed companies have declined by 40 per cent since 2008, allowing Amsterdam to overtake London as a share trading venue.

Of course, London is still much richer than the rest of the UK. KCL reckon that in 2030 the capital will still generate 26 per cent of UK output and 18.5 per cent of employment.

The AI giants Andreessen Horowitz and Open AI (which makes Chat GPT) have just chosen London for their international offices. So far, so prestigious.

But London, like the rest of the UK economy, actually depends far more on cheap labour than on robots. There are only 100 robots per 100,000 workers here, a density that puts Britain on a par with Slovakia and Slovenia.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting sanctions against Russia have knocked out a significant source of revenue for London. And the present cost of living crisis has ensured that Britain remains as dependent as ever on London as its cash cow.

The capital has its own intractable socio-economic problems, of course. These were highlighted this week by Mayor Khan at the Covid Inquiry, where  he made the preposterous claim that if only he had been invited to Cobra meetings during the pandemic, “Lives could have been saved.”

The people’s Sadiq (as the ULEZ zealot had suddenly become) tried to justify himself by asking whether the Cobra boffins had known that “most people in London travel by bus or Tube”? Did they know about the importance of the “gig economy” in the capital? “How many around Cobra knew issues around diversity, comorbidity, intergenerational households, overcrowded population?”

Well, yes, they probably did, given that Cobra meets in Whitehall, whose officials are no less London-based than those in City Hall. But the Covid rules and guidance that emerged from Downing Street were necessarily designed for the whole country, not just for its capital. It’s unclear how the presence of the London Mayor would have “saved lives”.

Perhaps Khan thinks he would have persuaded ministers to lock down for longer. Whether that would have saved lives is moot, but what is certain is that the ultimate bill would have been even higher than the £400 billion with which the nation is now saddled. Who is now paying the lion’s share of taxes to discharge that debt? Why, Londoners, of course.

The city has survived epidemics before — read Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year — including cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, influenza and polio. It cleaned up the Thames after the Great Stink of 1858 and the atmosphere after the Great Smog of 1952. And so it has recovered after Covid.

Despite the unmistakable signs of incipient decline, London remains the greatest city on earth. But even the most resilient metropolis cannot thrive if it succumbs to tribal conflict and the persecution of a minority rendered all the more vulnerable by its unique record of achievement.

Few Londoners have been more productive or done more to add to the lustre of the capital than its Jewish community. Expelled under Edward I, reinstated under Oliver Cromwell, for centuries the Jews of London have played an outstanding role in the arts and sciences, in politics and commerce, in every aspect of public and private life.

The death of Henry Kissinger, who fled Nazi Germany as a boy in 1938, is a reminder that London was then a safe haven for Jewish refugees from occupied Europe. They and their descendants have repaid that hospitality with their ingenuity and their industry. No less than New York and Los Angeles, or even Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, London owes an incalculable debt to the fact that Jews feel entirely at home here.

Yet now that sense of belonging is now in doubt. Anthony Julius, who knows about the “trials of the diaspora” in England both as an historian and as a lawyer, says that Jews are now living through an “anti-Semitic moment”. And they have just learned that British institutions cannot be trusted to defend them against those who wish them harm: “Unless this current moment abates, the great Anglo-Jewish compact, which has endured for nearly 400 years, will fracture.”

Mayor Khan has turned a blind eye to this unprecedented threat to Jewish life in London over the past two months. He prefers to appease the Corbynite far-Left and the hardline Islamists, rather than attempt to reassure some 150,000 Jewish Londoners.

In London, pro-Palestinian Saturday marchers have targeted Jews as they leave Sabbath services at their synagogues. Adults and children are warned not to wear anything that identifies them as Jewish.

To give a flavour of the torrent of abuse and hatred unleashed in the name of “anti-Zionism”, one Jewish community organisation was told by a caller: “Hitler did not kill enough Jews.”

In the face of such naked hostility, the March against Antisemitism last Sunday was a successful attempt by both Jews and non-Jews to stand up and be counted.

I was one of more than 100,000 people who marched through central London, quietly and almost without incident. Police were there to protect us, not to protect the law-abiding from us.

We were joined by a number of actors and other celebrities, as well as several serving ministers representing the Government as well as the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson — who, like tens of thousands of those who marched, is not Jewish.

Nor is Susan Hall, but she was there: “We must put a stop to the horrific rise in hate crimes against the Jewish community.”

Susan Hall is correct. By November 22 the Community Security Trust, which protects Jewish schools, synagogues and other institutions, had reported 881 anti-Semitic incidents in London, more than half of the national total of 1563, which included 70 assaults.

But the absences from the March against Antisemitism were no less significant. The most notable no shows were the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, and the Mayor, Sadiq Khan. In fact, not a single senior Opposition politician turned up to what was supposed to be a cross-party demonstration of solidarity against the deadly virus of anti-Semitism.

London, in other words, has been divided by Hamas, the killers and kidnappers of babies and grandparents. While Starmer himself has been supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself, he was not prepared to march in solidarity with the Jewish community. And Khan has been far worse.

I am writing these words in the Palace of Westminster, seat of the mother of parliaments. No city in the world can compare to London, not only in the grandeur of its buildings and monuments, but in their significance as symbols of law, liberty and democracy.

As the centre of gravity of the English-speaking peoples, London sets an unsurpassed standard of tolerance and inclusion. There is a reason why humanity still comes here, to gaze in awe at the true capital of the world.

Yet we live in a time when the capital’s allure is being put at risk by a fatal combination of public disorder and political vandalism, urban hollowing out and working from home, rising crime and antisocial conduct, low productivity and the tourist tax, ruinously expensive housing and childcare.

Above all, London is at the mercy of a Mayor who cares more about his tribal allegiances than the welfare and harmony of his citizens. On ULEZ, his own impact assessment belies his claim that it will genuinely improve air quality. He blames the Metropolitan Police for rising crime, while failing to give the Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, the cash and moral support he needs.

It is not too late for Londoners to wake up and evict Sadiq Khan from City Hall next May. Susan Hall, his Tory opponent, is much more in tune with what London needs. She says she would scrap the ULEZ expansion, put £200 million into policing, build high density homes, support nightlife and resist divisive identity politics.

“When you have got an utter disaster, which some would say London is heading into, you know you can make such a difference, that you can reverse things,” she says. “That is exciting.”

This essay began with Disraeli, still our only Jewish Prime Minister. In 1835, at a time when Catholics had only just been given civil rights and Jews still awaited full emancipation, the Irish MP Daniel O’Connell disgracefully denounced Disraeli in the Commons as “the worst kind of Jew” — language which would now be deemed unparliamentary, but mild compared to what has been heard on London streets since October 7.

Unperturbed by O’Connell’s invective, the young Disraeli replied: “Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the Right Honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”

Though partly descended from Irish Catholics, I side with Disraeli rather than O’Connell. I am proud of London’s inclusiveness, but that depends on defending minorities when they are endangered. There was a time when Catholics were targeted in the 1780 Gordon Riots, depicted by Dickens in Barnaby Rudge. Now Jews are the targets and we must stand up for them.

A shorter version of this essay appeared in today’s Sunday Telegraph.

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