Sadiq Khan has led from behind on violent crime. And it could cost him the mayoralty.
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On Sunday, police arrested two men after a man, believed to be 22, died following a stabbing shortly after midday in Anerley, south-east London. On Friday, 17-year-old Malcolm Mide-Madariola died after being stabbed outside Clapham South tube station. The day before Jay Hughes, 15, was fatally stabbed near a chicken shop in Bellingham, south-east London.
The spate of weekend killings brings the total number of murders in London since January up to a staggering 116, and it’s now widely believed that 2018 will end up being the most violent year since 2009.
The mood in the capital is dark and desperate. As reports of daylight attacks and violence against children as young as 13 come flooding in, low level worry is morphing into full blown panic. This week, parents from all walks of life have taken to social media in their droves, begging for urgent action to be taken before their children become the next victims.
In response, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has done a round of media interviews explaining that the causes of violent crime “are complex” and reassuring the public that his new “Violence Reduction Unit” will build on the “public health approach” to tackling the scourge, although he warns that the programme may not yield results for “a generation”. On Twitter, he has released a video telling his one million followers that his “heart goes out” to the families of the victims.
Khan is right that the causes of violent crime are complex – and it would be wrong to lay the blame for the sudden spike in violence entirely at his door. As his colleagues are at pains to point out, the teenagers who are now joining gangs were growing up during the coalition years and may well have been affected by cuts to youth services, and, as we keep hearing, Conservative cuts to policing have made the mayor’s job harder.
But excuses – valid or otherwise – have a time and a place. It is not now. Londoners are feeling frantic, and are crying out for bold, calm leadership, and a clear, workable strategy.
And Khan simply isn’t delivering.
In his desperation to please everyone, the silver-tongued mayor has spent the last two years trying on – and then shrugging off – a whole array of different identities, all, seemingly, with very different ideas about tackling violent crime.
In 2016 he was the worthy mayor who would bring communities together – and spent a lot of time doing earnest interviews in which he promised to do “everything in [his] power to drive down divisive stop and search in the capital”. A year later, he transformed into the no-nonsense-but-compassionate mayor, who promised “to reverse seven years of cuts to youth and education services and prisons to help tackle the root causes of rising violent crime across the UK”. Now, he has gone for the straight-talking, traditional tack, staunchly advocating stop and search and promising more bobbies on the beat.
As a result, no one quite knows who Sadiq Khan is or what he stands for when it comes to violent crime, and he spends a lot of time buffeted between interviews defending decisions he should be championing – on the back foot instead of the front.
Khan, who flattened Zac Goldsmith by calling him “divisive” at a time when Londoners felt bruised by the divisive referendum campaign, has always been famed for his keen political eye. He was trusted to take on London because he seemed like the sort of person who would sniff out a crisis a mile off and take the lead in tackling it.
But on violent crime – one of the biggest problems in the capital today – he has flip-flopped, evaded, and passed the buck. This week, at last, he is beginning to talk tough, but too many of his speeches are still riddled with jargon and platitudes, making it clear he still hasn’t quite grasped the urgency of the situation – or the depth of Londoners’ alarm.
A few months ago, it seemed completely certain that smooth-talking Khan – the darling of the London-based ‘People’s Vote’ movement – would sail to a second victory. Now, Shaun Bailey, the gritty and candid Conservative candidate who has put tackling violent crime at the heart of his campaign, is looking like serious competition.
