Spineless mayor Khan makes me yearn for Boris and his water cannon mentality

WHAT kind of a world do we live in where an 87-year-old man is stabbed to death on his mobility scooter in broad daylight on a West London street?

thomas O’halloran was a wellknown and much-loved character in his Greenford neighbourhood.

For some years, his life had been constrained by old age and infirmity, but he still used his time productively and selflessly — playing his accordion to raise money for victims of the war in Ukraine and encouraging everyone to donate into his ever-present collection box.

Mr O’halloran was trapped in what amounts to a motorised wheelchair. he would have had no ability to fight back, or flee or give chase. he was as defenceless as a newborn, as threatening as a buttercup.

Yet still he was attacked with a knife by at least one person and he died of his injuries after begging for help from passers-by. It makes one despair for the future of humanity. a man was caught on CCTV walking away from the crime scene; he was wearing white gloves stained with blood and carrying a knife. a suspect was arrested early yesterday morning.

Not so long ago, the entire country would have been shocked and convulsed with revulsion at such a death. Now? Only one major newspaper — this one — made thomas O’halloran’s fate its main front-page story.

this is the sixth killing in four days in the capital and many are wondering what London Mayor Sadiq Khan will do about it.

apparently, Khan is ‘devastated’, but earlier this week he warned of a rise in shootings and stabbings in the city this summer — and he says the cost of living crisis is to blame.

as if that makes it OK. Money is too tight to mention for a great number of people, but that doesn’t make crime acceptable.

VIDEOS on social media this week have shown gangs of young people steaming through central London shops stealing trainers. elsewhere, others committed knifepoint Rolex robberies to top up their depleted wage packets.

But if the Leftist mayor can blame the Government for the increase in violence on his watch — instead of examining his own role in this terrible escalation — then he is not going to miss that opportunity.

Perhaps he’ll use his mayoral powers to charge Mr O’halloran posthumously with obstructing a violent crime; I wouldn’t put it past him.

the incident is so tragic and so awful, it almost makes me long for the return of Mayor Boris and his water-cannon mentality.

For surely those with a thirst for violent crime should, if convicted, be swept off the streets, charged and jailed. Not excused and coddled, because interest rates have gone up and they can’t afford a cheeky Nando’s. Note that even before he was elected to City hall in 2016, Khan had pledged to bring down the Metropolitan Police’s use of stop and search in the war against knife crime. he was against it because of racial tensions and what he saw as an infringement of human rights.

Khan has pursued this objective throughout his time in office; in one fell swoop hampering police efforts and driving up crime rates while aligning himself to modish liberal causes.

If black lives really did matter to him, he would not have presided over a huge increase in knife crime, while congratulating himself on embracing fashionable Left-wing ideology rather than the violent reality of the capital’s streets.

I’m not saying stop and search is the answer to London’s woes — but that and the subsequent four-year prison sentence for carrying a knife is surely the best and most practical deterrent to discourage the carrying of weapons.

It may at least make criminals think twice about leaving home tooled up with blades and axes.

Somehow the fact that Mr O’halloran was on a mobility scooter makes this crime so much worse. Whizzing along the pavements, these machines are a commonplace sight on British high Streets.

Yet we can only guess at the effort and courage it takes every single person who, imprisoned by the weakness of their own body, climbs aboard one of these scooters to go about their daily business. Just getting out the front door of a morning, puttering along to claim a last sliver of independence, can be an act of extraordinary bravery in itself.

that is another reason why Mr O’halloran’s death on a sunny suburban afternoon is so very shocking. But is it also symptomatic of a deeper malaise in society — or just another dark day on the violent streets of London?

It is not the cost of living that Mayor Khan should be concerning himself with, but the terrible cost of dying.