As a teenager back in the early 1960s, on Friday afternoon I would head down to Soho after school with friends. Our sanctuary was Les Enfants Terrible in Dean Street, a heaving bar and dark basement dance floor. With luck, we found girls who came along later that evening to any of the dozen other Soho music clubs, not least Le Kilt or the 100 Club in Wardour Street. That was the beginning of the unforgettable Swinging Sixties. Fifty years later, Soho’s wonderful nightlife has been destroyed by Westminster Council, the Mayor of London and the Labour government.
Welcome to the Twilight Twenties. Proof of Labour’s deliberate destruction of London’s music scene was the recent publication of Westminster Council’s ‘Draft Westminster After Dark Strategy Summary’. Filled with meaningless guff, the Labour councillors’ malice is exposed in paragraph ED6. The old-minded men and women elected to govern the borough want to move all of Soho’s night life to The Strand and Victoria Street, that soulless jungle of glass and concrete.
Just why those fuddy-duddies want to effectively close Soho down has become obvious. Eighty vociferous residents keep complaining about the late-night noise. Just why they moved to Soho for a peaceful life is bewildering, but they are no different from people buying homes underneath the flight path to Heathrow and then protesting about the noise.
For the council, keeping Soho open and safe at night needs policemen and that costs money. Closing Soho’s pubs and clubs saves the hassle of paying the police to control the ubiquitous drunks and druggies. Private members’ clubs charging hefty fees is not a solution. Young Londoners and tourists are automatically excluded.
Despite London’s entertainment businesses employing thousands of people and attracting millions of pounds for London’s economy, especially from young tourists, licencing committee councillors routinely refuse applications to extend late night licences. Westminster Council recently insisted that, ‘We grant the vast majority of licence applications.’ The statistics prove the opposite. A recent Times survey ranked Britain’s top 12 cities by how many premises are still open at 2 a.m. Top of the list was Manchester. Bottom was London.
Not surprisingly, tourism to London has still not recovered from pe-pandemic levels. Young people are going elsewhere. Labour councils’ destruction of London’s economy and wellbeing has been seismic. Nearly a quarter of all London’s pubs have closed over the past 20 years and the rate is accelerating.
Westminster’s determination to destroy Soho night life was exposed by their decision last November to close down the Groucho club after an alleged rape in a lavatory. The request for its closure, said the council, came from the police. Instead of telling the police in central London to stop the plague of muggings, phone thefts and shoplifting, the councillors were thrilled to comply. After one month, the club was allowed to reopen with ludicrous conditions, including an attendant checking the lavatories every 30 minutes. Can anyone imagine Selfridges being closed down for one month after an allegation of rape?
At this stage, the culturally lacklustre Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan appeared. Invisible over the past decade in London’s theatres, concert halls, museums and night clubs, Khan’s political self-interest meant he saw an opportunity to attack Westminster Council over its ‘After Dark Strategy’.
The Labour mayor doesn’t really care about London’s nightlife, but his current obsession is his ludicrous proposal to pedestrianise Oxford Street, sending hundreds of busses into narrow parallel roads. This is opposed by Westminster Council (not least because Khan’s traffic regulations have successfully transformed London into Europe’s most congested city). To neutralise his Labour opponents and impose the pedestrianisation, the mayor has created a supreme Mayoral Development Corporation.
Like everything the Mayor touches, the MDC will end badly. Just as Khan’s appointment of Amy Lamé in 2016 as London’s night czar ended in ridicule. After eight years in office, she retired last year from her £130,000 a year job as an outright failure. After nearly ten years in office, Khan has overseen a shocking decline in London’s economy. And that will accelerate as Labour’s taxes bite and prices soar. London’s rich have fled abroad, young families have gone west to find good schools and increased tourism is doubtful. London’s declining night life – perpetuated across the city by most Labour councils – has become Khan’s problem.
In his third term, Khan has yet to produce a legacy. Unlike Boris Johnson’s many capital projects including the Elizabeth Line and the Silvertown Tunnel, Khan has not initiated a single major development in the capital. Which explains Labour’s latest nightlife wheeze. In partnership with the Mayor, the government wants to restore London’s nightlife and crush Westminster’s councillors. Unable to invent a catchy title for their improvised initiative, it is called ‘The British Night Out’. Excitingly, Khan and Rachel Reeves want to boost Soho with ‘alfresco dining’ to get ‘a real buzz on high streets’. The government plans to grant Khan powers to overrule Westminster councillors and impose club friendly licencing regulations. Not surprisingly, Soho’s beleaguered hospitality chiefs are not impressed with what one big cheese calls ‘a load of night time crap produced by in-fighting Labour politicians.’ Can anyone save London from the Twilight Twenties?
Comments