Sadiq Khan has failed London, so why don’t the Tories expose him?
Sadiq Khan would have us believe that he is a nice mayor, a caring mayor, and a virtuous mayor of London. He is cracking down on “body-shaming” adverts on the Tube, and junk food advertising, too. He wants hundreds of drinking fountains across the capital to cut plastic waste. He hates Donald Trump and he really hates Brexit. Even my local Tube station has caught the virtuesignalling bug: for some reason, until recently it was garlanded with every flag of the known world and with earnest signs admonishing commuters that “London is open”.
I can’t be alone in considering all this extraordinarily decadent given the state of the city Khan purports to be governing. Burglaries are up, violent crime is up, and children are dying on the streets, and yet all Khan can seem to muster is a handwringing tweet in response to each tragedy. He shamefully tries to shift responsibility for a crime wave on to central Government when he oversees the Metropolitan Police, and is happily raising taxes to increase its resources.
And yet Khan will win handsomely at the next mayoral election. Partly this is because he has mastered the vapid politics of identity, convincing people that a city that voted 40 per cent for Leave is only inhabited by Remainers. He is a populist of the liberal-Left who, through divisive gimmicks, gives the impression of governing while really doing nothing.
If London is to have a mayor, he should pay the price for incompetence by going cap in hand to voters when he can’t pay the bills
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion
But it’s also because the Tories appear to have completely given up. The Government decided to bail Khan out when disaster struck Crossrail, the enormous new rail project the mayor is running, with a £1billion loan. Why? If London is to have a mayor, he should pay the price for incompetence by going cap in hand to voters when he can’t pay the bills. Khan is hardly likely to govern so recklessly if there is a risk his city could go bankrupt.
London Tories’ policy response to Khan is also ridiculously timid. Instead of his huge new “ultra low-emissions zone” car tax, which will price a great many drivers off the roads, why aren’t they proposing to scrap all speed bumps in the capital and launch a crusade against congestion to tackle the pollution caused by stop-start driving and idling cars?
Instead of building more council houses as Khan wants, why not sell off public sector land and commission homes for people to own, with a small proportion earmarked to be given away for free to long-term London residents? Instead of Khan’s endless knife crime strategies and youth club spending pledges, why not promise to sack 90 per cent of City Hall bureaucrats and hire thousands of new police officers – or even private security guards – to flood the streets and drive away the gangs?
It would be populist, shamelessly so. And yes, some of the trends in London are against the Tories: low home ownership, in particular, is eroding their traditional base. But this is municipal politics and it is a dirty game, and such Right-wing populist agendas have triumphed in other supposedly Left-wing cities globally. And it might, just, have a chance of defeating this do-nothing mayor.