Sadiq Khan’s London has become a GRISLY REMINDER New York’s bad old days
Knifings, feral gangs, rampant fare-dodging and rarely a police officer in sight, the Mail’s U.S. correspondent TOM LEONARD says:
WITH more than 100 rides and attractions, hyde Park Winter Wonderland in Central London is billed as the ‘world’s best destination for festive fun’. But this year, outside the royal park gates, the ‘fun’ quickly turned to horror as thuggish revellers went on a rampage.
A disgusted member of staff at the nearby hyde Park Corner Underground station has provided an insight into what happened during closing time one night last month at the site amid an anarchic spree of shameless law- breaking by thousands of people. transport workers who dared intervene were threatened with violence. to make matters worse, it was claimed that some police
‘Staggering levels of criminal and anti-social behaviour’
officers summoned in desperation to help deserted the scene after witnessing the scale of violence.
Even though i live in New York as the Mail’s correspondent and have been a seasoned traveller for nearly 20 years on the U.S. city’s subway — a network notorious for attacks by disturbed and violent homeless people — i was deeply shocked to read that account by a tube worker of what happened.
His testimony was posted as an ‘alert’ to colleagues on transport for London’s (TFL) intranet but then leaked by someone who, rightly, felt it needed a wider audience.
It bears reporting at length as the description of what the tube employee called ‘the staggering levels of criminal and anti- social behaviour’ will surely strike a chord with many who travel by public transport in the capital.
‘ I cannot stress enough how horrible this was for anyone working on the station,’ he wrote.
‘We were aware that weekend would be very busy. however, we weren’t prepared to have a frankly inadequate service, which made the whole situation [go] from difficult but somehow manageable to a nightmare.
‘Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, was the staggering level of criminal and anti- social behaviour. the number of fareevaders was in the many thousands. We had to watch groups of dozens of people just busting through the gates and there was nothing we could do to stop that.
‘Youngsters jumping over the gates, crawling under the gates and storming through the [temporary] gates we had in place for the one- way system was common practice.’
He went on to describe the number of people illegally vaping in the ticket hall and on the platform, adding: ‘i’ve lost count of the number of times i had to make a polite remark to [ask] them to stop.
‘What made it worse was the fact [ that] after asking these people to stop behaving obnoxiously, they would laugh in your face, start swearing and threaten to assault you.’
The yobs, he said, were in the main ‘the usual suspects’ who exploited the congestion created by crowds at Winter Wonderland ‘as an excuse to behave in an utterly despicable and primitive way’.
He added: ‘if this was a case of only a few individuals, that would be one thing, but when we’re talking about thousands of people, the issue is definitely more serious, especially when there are no repercussions.
‘ It was a pure miracle that nobody got injured,’ added the understandably anonymous TFL worker, who asked why there were no anti- fare- dodging officers around on a ‘brutally busy day’ with an ‘outrageous’ amount of anti-social behaviour.
Where were the police? Where, indeed. ‘ the BTP ( British transport Police) were called at one point,’ he noted. ‘they came and promised to bring some assistance and left immediately afterwards. None of that promised help arrived and we were entirely on our own.
‘ I cannot express how frustrated, demoralised, stressed and agitated
I felt. if this is the “world class” service we’re providing, we need a good reality check because what we experienced was neither reliable nor safe for anyone.’
This account offers a deeply depressing insight into how parts of inner-city Britain have become no-go zones and where feral youths seem able to break the law with impunity as neutered law and order authorities look on.
And to New Yorkers, there are grim parallels with the subway’s descent into anarchy in the 1970s and 80s, when similarly rampant fare-dodging, graffiti and violence made many residents too terrified to travel on the trains at all.
the state of London’s Underground network provides a comprehensive and damning indictment of the tenure of London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan that no amount of selfpreening or army of image masseurs (there are reportedly 30 staff in the mayor’s Press Office) can brush away.
Indeed, commuters probably don’t need to be told that the latest annual figures for crime on London’s tube system showed a shocking 56 per cent increase. these include an 83 per cent rise in the number of thefts, including pick-pocketing and a 107 per cent increase in robberies. (Crime has also risen on the buses, but less dramatically).
Significantly, the figures also showed seven per cent of Londoners actively avoid public transport because they fear getting attacked.
And nor will passengers need to be told that the man ultimately responsible for this horror story is Sadiq Khan — last seen putting his name up in giant lights, claiming credit across the night sky during the New Year fireworks, and swooning in a weekend newspaper about his love of taylor
‘Number of fare evaders was in the thousands’
Swift, and, ironically, a TV series about drug- dealing and gang violence in London.
There were 12,786 knife offences in the capital in the 12 months to the end of last March (a 40 per cent rise on the equivalent 1 2 - month period to the end of March 2016).
What’s more, Khan is boss of TfL, whose proposals to deal with staff pay claims were deemed unacceptable and triggered this week’s threatened walkouts, called off only at the eleventh hour.
His rivals in May’s mayoral election are united in arguing that Khan is squarely to blame for the transport and policing crisis.
Although both transport and crime are his two chief responsibilities, they say Khan has shown weak leadership and seems obsessed with self- promotion, which has led to a profusion of virtue- signalling posters with vapid messages such as ‘Be Kind’ and ‘We All Make London’.
No wonder Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister and Khan’s predecessor as London mayor, expressed concern about the ‘worrying politicisation’ of the
Metropolitan Police after officers appealed for information about war crimes from people returning from Israel and Gaza. He said the Met would be better off fighting knife crime in the capital.
And last month a leaked letter revealed the policing minister Chris Philp had blamed Khan for a ‘missed opportunity for the people of London’ by failing to recruit more police officers, potentially leaving the force 2,000 officers short by the end of March. It was, said Mr Philp, the only force in the UK to fail to reach its target.
Meanwhile, it’s estimated that one in 25 journeys on the Tube is fare-evaded.
Managers complain that they don’t have enough staff — or more precisely the right kind of staff, trained in the potentially dangerous task of tackling dodgers.
Whatever the reason, say experts, research shows that fare dodgers are invariably the same people who commit more serious crimes on trains and buses.
Over the past few weeks, there have been reports of a man apparently smoking crack cocaine in a Tube carriage, a member of staff suffering a fractured skull after being punched in the face by a fare dodger, a passenger stabbed in the neck, and a man allegedly groping women when the lights went out on trains on the Elizabeth Line. (The last suspect was arrested but released ‘pending inquiries’.)
Also, there’s the growing trend, as the weather gets colder, of passengers being violently robbed of Canada Goose jackets, sometimes worth £1,700.
The lawlessness, anti- social behaviour and sense of helplessness in a world in which bystanders just get out their phone cameras to record crime rather than intervene, sounds all too familiar to someone like me who lives in New York, where a nervous tension hangs in the dank air of the Big Apple’s creaking subway system.
America’s biggest underground transport network has become a permanent squat for thousands of homeless people, many mentally disturbed, who might at any moment burst on to a carriage and threaten violence or carry it out.
They’re also usually to blame for incidents in which innocent bystanders have been thrown on to the tracks for no reason, sometimes with fatal consequences. (There’s been a big upsurge in mentally ill people on the streets of London, too, which has inevitably spilled over into the Underground and on buses.)
New York’s City Hall announced in 2022 it would remove any homeless people who behaved in an ‘unsafe’ manner from the subway, but then reportedly dropped the plan because the shelters where it planned to house them were full of asylum-seekers.
Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s Leftwing District Attorney, admitted last year that ‘when one of my family members gets on the train, I, too, get a knot in my stomach’.
And yet the New York subway doesn’t appear to have anything like London’s problem with police shortages.
So who’s to blame for the dire situation in London?
Tory and Labour politicians who bicker over whether transport funding cuts by Whitehall are responsible? Or Sadiq Khan’s ineffectual administration?
Rob Blackie, the Lib Dem candidate for London mayor, says Khan, being in charge of both transport and crime, deserves the lion’s share of the blame.
Certainly, there’s a shortage of police that Khan exacerbated by missing a recruitment target, which meant he had to give back at least £16 million to central government. But there is also the problem,
‘It was neither reliable nor safe for anyone’
‘ These louts are not frightened of the police’
says Blackie, that too many officers are doing back-office jobs rather than being out on the frontline enforcing the law.
Khan has another critical weakness that’s entirely down to his own ego, says his Lib Dem challenger — he only appoints deputy mayors who are ‘reliably Labour’, rather than people bestsuited to running the police or Transport for London. Mr Blackie describes them as ‘ cronies’ who ‘get into lots of nice- looking photo- ops but aren’t necessarily good at managing really big, complex organisations’.
For her part, Susan Hall, the Tory candidate for London mayor, agrees lawlessness is getting worse on the Tube and buses and says it is ‘spilling over from the streets’. She said: ‘ These louts are not frightened of the police any more. So they do whatever they like.’
Meanwhile, the increasingly pervasive fear that thugs are carrying knives deters anyone from confronting them. And that, says Ms Hall, includes Tube staff.
If elected mayor in May, Ms Hall has vowed to invest £200 million in policing and ‘ get CCTV up and running across the Tube’.
Meanwhile, Londoners say that apart from the cost of living, crime is their biggest concern. But that’s not a message their self-aggrandising Labour mayor will be spelling out in lights any time soon.