London deserves better than Sadiq Khan

By any measure, Sadiq Khan deserves to lose the London mayoral election. Khan has been terrible for the capital, yet Londoners are stuck with him. Barring a near miraculous upset by the Tory candidate Susan Hall, Khan will almost certainly win re-election today. Surely one of the world’s great cities deserves better? 

Under Khan, London’s streets have become more dangerous and unpleasant. Knife crime is terrifyingly high. Shoplifting is rife. Traffic is dreadful. Pavements have become dumping grounds for unwanted bikes. Housing costs have soared. The ‘nighttime economy’ has collapsed. Jews are fearful about the future. Pro-Palestine protests have made Whitehall a no-go area at weekends. Gang violence has spilled out on the streets of central London. Even the suburbs don’t feel safe: knife crime in some outer areas of London has climbed dramatically. 

Khan has been busy during his four years in office, but too much of his energy has been spent spouting platitudes about Brexit, climate change and Gaza: things over which he has no control and shouldn’t be distracting him from the day job. 

Instead of going to war on the gangs that plague London’s streets, Khan has picked a softer target: the police. The mayor once said of stop and search – the police’s main weapon in the fight to get knives off the streets – that ‘I’d do everything in my power to bring it down further.’ In 2022, following the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer, Khan effectively forced out the Met Police commissioner Cressida Dick. Khan’s response to the Met’s recent handling of a pro-Palestinian protest suggests he is determined to make the Met’s current boss Mark Rowley his latest scapegoat. But the mayor cannot entirely dodge the blame for what has happened under his watch: more than one in five Londoners have been attacked or threatened in the past five years; 14,577 knife crime offences were recorded by the Met last year – equivalent to nearly 40 a day. Yes, the police could have done more to make London safer, but by blaming rather than supporting the Met, Khan has made the job of ordinary officers far harder.

Understandably, Khan doesn’t like to talk about crime. When the issue of ‘gangs running around with machetes’ arose during election hustings last week, the mayor told his Tory opponent she should ‘stop watching The Wire – we’re not living in Baltimore, USA, in the noughties.’ Instead, Khan prefers to chat about his flagship Ultra Low Emission Zone. But the rollout of Ulez to London’s outer boroughs has been cack-handed. Rather than try to properly make the case for why it’s needed – and attempt to win over opponents – he has chosen instead to slur those against the scheme as far right, Covid deniers and Tories.

The backlash to Ulez has been entirely predictable: cameras have been routinely vandalised and traffic lights cut down. Ulez’s opponents shouldn’t behave in this way, of course, but it’s hard not to think this acrimony might have been prevented if Khan had handled things differently and tried to aim for consensus. Instead, Khan chose to write a polemic on climate change: Breathe: Seven Ways to Win a Greener World. It’s a book that his voters will lap up but persuade no one to change their mind. 

Not all Londoners are worse off under Khan. The mayor’s ‘Night Czar’ Amy Lamé has seen her pay packet leap by around 40 per cent to almost £120,000 in the past year. Khan’s ten – yes, ten – deputy mayors are all doing very nicely for themselves, not least the vehemently anti-Brexit Seb Dance who earns £140,000 a year for encouraging people to walk and cycle. It’s a nice earner if you can get it.

Khan has plenty of cash to chuck around when it suits him: as well as paying his City Hall team huge salaries, London’s mayor has splurged on freezing transport fares and giving free school meals to kids. The latter is presented by Khan’s supporters as a vital lifeline to the most desperate Londoners in a cost-of-living crisis, but needy children get free school meals anyway. It’s more likely that Khan has extended the privilege of free food to the kids of middle-class parents who don’t need the help. 

The timing of handouts like this is convenient for Khan, coming as it has in the lead-up to the mayoral election. He probably could have saved the cash: Khan will be re-elected this week, but the bad news for him is that his life is about to get harder. When trouble looms, Khan’s approach is simple: find someone to blame, preferably a Conservative. A Tory government has made life easy for Khan. But if the polls are correct and Keir Starmer wins the general election, who will he blame then for London’s troubles?