The Mayor fiddles while London bleeds
THe Page One headline in the evening Standard said it all: ‘First Stab Victims Of The new Year.’ Welcome to 2019.
Call me old-fashioned, but when I worked on the Standard, admittedly in prehistoric times, the front page was more likely to feature the first baby born in one of London’s maternity hospitals.
On Wednesday, the photographs were of a security guard and a young mother knifed to death within a few miles of each other.
Tudor Simionov was killed when he tried to prevent a gang dressed in designer clothes from gatecrashing a sordid sex party at an exclusive address in Mayfair.
Charlotte Huggins was murdered in her own home in Camberwell, South London. Both victims were 33 years old. elsewhere, a man was stabbed in the street in Blackheath and was said to be critically ill in hospital.
Mr Simionov had only been in Britain for two months, moving here from romania with his fiancee in search of a better life. He died at the scene, in Park Lane, after being attacked by up to ten men — including, allegedly, the 26-year-old son of Finsbury Park firebrand Captain Hook, the Islamist hate preacher currently serving life for terrorism offences in an American supermax jail. His son, Imran Mostafa Kamel, was remanded on firearms charges yesterday and remains a suspect in the murder.
Two other security guards and a woman aged 29 were also stabbed and were treated in hospital for non life-threatening injuries.
PARK LANE, like the rest of central London, was teeming with drunken revellers seeing in the new Year. The manager of a local garage said he had called the police to a crowd fighting and menacing his customers a couple of hours before the fatal stabbing. He said they came and went around 3am.
To be fair, police resources are always stretched at new Year. But routine foot patrols are thin on the ground at the best of times.
I was at a black tie ball in Park Lane shortly before Christmas. When I left after midnight there was no sign of a copper anywhere. Pounding the beat has long since slipped down the Met’s list of priorities. These days they tend to respond to crime after the event, rather than seeking to prevent it.
That’s not to question the bravery of individual officers, as exemplified by the British Transport Police who tackled the Islamist nutjob who stabbed three people, including a police sergeant, at Manchester’s Victoria station this week. But a visible police presence may have deterred the gang who killed Tudor Simionov.
no doubt London’s two-bob chancer of a Mayor Sadiq Khan would blame the absence of police on the streets on ‘austerity’ or the ‘Tory cuts’. Maybe if he hadn’t splurged £2.3 million of taxpayers’ money on a vainglorious new Year fireworks display, he could have diverted more money to the Met to put extra bobbies on the beat.
Some of this largesse was frittered away turning the London eye into a blue and yellow EU flag, as part of a cynical, self-serving propaganda stunt aimed at bolstering the Stop Brexit campaign and burnishing the image of the Mayor himself.
I wonder if Tudor Simionov was aware of Khan’s new Year message boasting that London would remain open after Brexit, broadcast in a number of foreign languages, including romanian.
no one has ever suggested London won’t stay open when we leave the EU. This was pure political posturing, at our expense.
The majority of Londoners may have backed remain, but the really significant statistic is that more voted Leave (1.5 million) than voted for Khan (1.3 million).
What’s most likely to deter immigrants from coming here is not Khan slandering Leave voters as knuckle-scraping, racist bigots, but the news that someone can be stabbed to death on one of London’s busiest, best-known and most upmarket streets within two months of arriving in the country seeking a better future.
Under Khan, there has been an explosion of violent crime. In addition to the new Year stabbings, a woman was shot in a nightclub in Hackney on the same night. A day earlier, 39 people were arrested in Hammersmith on suspicion of attempted murder after another stabbing at a party.
We are all now familiar with the fact that last year London’s murder rate overtook new York. There were 134 violent deaths in 2018, an increase of 15 per cent.
And if that chilling reality doesn’t put people off moving here from overseas, then perhaps they may be dissuaded by the paralysis on London’s roads and the exorbitant cost of housing — two key problems Khan has exacerbated, rather than solved.
He promised 80,000 new homes a year, yet in the 12 months to last April built just over 5,300.
London’s economy may be steaming ahead (no thanks to Khan) but public services are deteriorating. The streets are dirtier, rubbish piles up uncollected late at night, public transport is horribly overcrowded and traffic is gridlocked as a deliberate consequence of the Mayor’s policies. rough sleepers and aggressive beggars are a permanent fixture in the West end.
Yet while innocent blood runs in the gutters, and police budgets are restrained, Khan indulges in fatuous propaganda stunts, whether floating a donald Trump blimp over London or turning a traditional new Year’s party into a pro-EU festival of political hubris.
And instead of being able to celebrate an optimistic start to 2019, London’s evening paper has a splash headline marking the first stabbings of the year. The first of many more to come, no doubt.
Makes you proud to be British.