Khan’s failed with London as Labour would with nation

LIKE SIR Keir Starmer, the London Mayor Sadiq Khan is a former lawyer of limited vision and communication skills, whose political enthusiasm for bureaucratic tinkering frequently serves as a substitute for real action.

That is why officialdom has expanded so much under his leadership, with more than 1,100 staffers at City Hall on salaries above £100,000. So often his answer to any problem is to form another public body, launch another initiative.

Concerned about affordable housing in the capital? The Mayor’s set up a new Homes for London agency. Anxious about street crime? He’s established a Violence Reduction Unit. Worried about homelessness? He has created a No Nights Sleeping Rough taskforce. Want to reform the Metropolitan Police? He’s introduced a London Policing Board.

But our capital is hardly thriving. Knife crime, local taxes and welfare dependency are all up, while the war on motorists, typified by the Ultra Low Emissions Zone, has done nothing to ease congestion. His remains the slowest city in the world for traffic.

In all his gimmickry, expensive cronyism, fixation with wokery, appeasement of the unions and extravagant waste, Khan provides a warning of things to come under a Labour government.

■ THE NHS desperately needs change. Created in 1948 on a wave of socialist zeal, the service survives only on sentimentality and ever larger budgets. But even with public goodwill and extra cash, the system is failing on so many fronts.

Only this week, it was revealed that long waiting times at A&E could be killing more than 250 people a week. The crisis has prompted the think tank Reform to advocate a new decentralised approach, with local authorities taking a more prominent role.

Interestingly, that was the kind of structure envisaged by the Tory health minister Sir Henry Willink when he proposed the creation of a national health service in 1943.

But his post-war successor, Aneurin Bevan, wanted command to be exercised from the centre to ensure consistent standards.

Referring to his own Welsh mining constituency, he reportedly said that “a bedpan dropped in Tredegar should echo in the corridors of Whitehall”. But such top-heavy control-freakery has never worked, and is now a real danger to patient care.