The Mayor of London isn’t fooling anyone with his cynical grime grandstanding

Interesting scenes at the London Assembly this week. Which isn’t a sentence you get to read every week. During a question session with the Mayor, the Conservative London Assembly member Susan Hall teased an interesting response out of Sadiq Khan. Ms Hall was focused on how to stop knife crime. And in one slightly bewildering response Mayor Khan said “I’d rather invest in future Daves and Stormzys than future victims of crime.”

I am only fully aware of what he was talking about because of recent headlines blaring the fact that “Dave” had used the Brit Awards to describe Boris Johnson as a racist. My first reflection on seeing these headlines was that our former Prime Minister was taking his retirement worse than

I had thought. Still I couldn’t see why he should have used a popular music awards to make the claim. Further inquiry made clear that “Dave” like “Stormzy” is one of these single-moniker grievance-monger “musicians” whose chosen musical genre is something called “grime”.

Of course in a free society people should be free to create and listen to whatever music they enjoy. But equally, in a free society it is the right of others of us to say that we think that anyone listening to such stuff is polluting their ears. Admittedly “grime” is not my genre. Though it does at least live up to its name. On the few occasions I have dipped a toe in it I have always felt an urgent desire to wash myself. The noise – a dismally uninteresting variant of rap – is the sort of thing that middleaged politicians and BBC executives occasionally claim to love in order to look culturally relevant. As a matter of fact everything in the genre is the sort of thing any sensible person would wish not only to ignore but to discourage. Requiring little talent, and no musicality, the genre has that dirty, grubby, nihilistic quality that persuades people that although life may be nasty, brutal and short, it needn’t always be as good as that. It is a genre in which women are objectified, lives are cheap and violence is glamorised.

In other words, if it were the job of government to reduce knife crime through the medium of music then grime would be the last medium you would try to shepherd young people into. You might rather wish to coral them into, say, the performance of chamber music. After all, while the connections between grime music and knife crime can be debated, so far as I am aware there is no crossover whatsoever between violent knife crime and the performance of string quartets.

But of course the proposal from the mayor is not a serious policy suggestion. It is simply a magnificently and typically cynical grandstand. Unable to address the specific problem of the capital’s youth stabbing each other to death he is reduced to such cultural generalities.

So let me join him in one. If the Mayor were serious about tackling the long-term as well as short-term challenges thrown up by our innercity nightmares then he might suggest many ways in which people caught up in London street gangs should aspire to get out of their situation.

As the exceptional London headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh has pointed out, our society could be encouraging the young black men who make up the bulk of the victims and perpetrators of these crimes to aspire to become doctors, lawyers and teachers. They could be encouraged to escape their current lot, rather than to stay stuck in it. And certainly they would not be encouraged to believe that the best or only way out is through a musical medium that seeks to perpetuate and champion the very cycle into which their lives have become so tragically caught. Of course this would require a certain moral and political lead. A lead which the present Mayor – unlike his Conservative challenger Shaun Bailey – seems unwilling to offer. So I’ll leave the last word to Assembly Member Hall, who said to the Mayor’s face what an awful lot of us would like to have done: “We’ve got youngsters out there being murdered all the time on our streets. We’ve got knife crime out of control and you talk to me about Dave and Stormzy. It’s an absolute disgrace.”