London Boy

Capital punishment

Matt Goodwin 14/05/24

Against some stiff competition, I’m thinking Humza Yousaf, Keir Starmer, both Jeremys-Hunt and Corbyn, Michael *shivers* Gove, Dawn Butler, Nicola Sturgeon, David Lammy, Rishi Sunak (obvs), and now that Mark Drakeford has gone, whoever it is who is currently responsible for ensuring Wales remains a joyless, jobless, tourist free, 20 mph wasteland, I’m pretty sure that the worst politician in Britain is Sadiq Khan.

Which is not great for me because I live in London. And Khan has just been elected for a ‘historic’ (how can it be historic? The bloody thing has only been going since 2000. I’ve got socks older than that) third term as London Mayor.

The good news is he’s unlikely to make it a fourth. Because at the rate it’s going, by 2028, London won’t need a Mayor. It will need a clean up crew.

You know. The sort of outfit that gets despatched in hazmat suits to council flats six months after old Mr Mackenzie stopped banging on the walls, and five months after the funny smells started coming from under his door. I wonder what happened to Mr Mackenzie anyway. Weird guy. Guess he moved away.

Quick trigger warning. Yes. This post is about London. I understand a lot of you simply don’t care about the capital. And that’s OK. I never used to care about what was happening in San Francisco or Downtown LA. Until it turned up shuffling and scabby on the streets of Camden, and screaming jolly genocide on the thoroughfares of Westminster. So I get it.

Look the other way if you like. Perhaps your town or city won’t suffer London’s fate in the next few years.

Good luck with that.

Khan’s victory was a foregone conclusion really. At least Tory Central Office seemed to think so. After the way they shafted Shaun Bailey last time, they clearly had trouble finding anyone credible to stand.

And so, getting desperate, someone eventually managed to persuade a dinner lady at their kid’s school to step up. And so we got Susan Hall.

That’s probably unfair. I did listen to Susan Hall speak a couple of times, and watched some of her truly awful campaign adverts on Youtube.

And to be honest I agreed with a lot of what she had to say.

In the end though, like pretty much everyone else, I couldn’t really bring myself to vote Tory. So I plumped for Amy Gallagher instead. The SDP candidate, whistleblower, and mental health nurse.

Amy has actually done something with her life. Putting her job, career, and future on the line to stand up to the sort of idiots I only moan about in an online blog. Good luck to her.

More than one person has said to me that Khan was only elected because he won London’s muslim vote. I’m not so sure, almost all the white Londoners I know voted for him.

Of course they did. Because I’m middle class. And live very near Islington.

Personally, I find attacks on Khan’s ethnicity self defeating. Because they allow progressives to immediately dismiss any legitimate criticism as simple bigotry. Or even better, ‘Islamophobia’.

So let me be clear. I don’t care that Sadiq Khan is a muslim. (Even when he does make that difficult when he seems to find an ‘equivalence’ between terrorist group Hamas and the Middle East’s only democracy.) I care that he’s rubbish. And I care that he’s ploughing my city into the dirt.

Khan thinks that wanting to drive to Ikea makes you are far right fascist, that lacking enthusiasm for women’s football is a hate crime, and that terrorism should be considered a part and parcel of life in the big city.

He seems to be trying to finish in 2024, what the Luftwaffe started in 1940.

A bit much? Sorry Maaate.

London is dying.

Even the West End is on its last legs. Once a colourful Mary Poppins mix of red phone boxes, equally red buses, monuments to Nazi defeating war heroes Nazis, busy shopping parades, and a vibrant theatre land, it has recently become a haven for industrial level shoplifting, beggars, muggers, phone thieves, pan handlers and drug addicts.

Oxford St used to bill itself as ‘Europes premiere shopping destination’ not anymore. Now it seems little more than a mile long strip mall of American Candy stores, pickpockets, and tacky souvenir shops.

Where your senses are assaulted by a stinking miasma of bin juice, overflowing sewers, caramelised peanuts, and dope smoke. Frankly I miss the sweet smell of 80s pollution.

With a background soundtrack of booming Balearic beats spewing from the gaudy, street clogging, rip-off rickshaws.

Jesus, how I hate those fucking rickshaws.

And at night, even at the weekends, it’s pretty much a ghost town. London, the city that never wakes.

Central London past ten o clock has all the vibrancy, energy and excitement of nap time at a toddlers’ play group. Hardly surprising, over one thousand late night London venues have closed since the lockdowns.

Whatever Sadiq Khan’s £117k a year ‘night tsar’ Amy Lamè, pronounced ‘lame’, is doing, I wish she would please just stop it. Because it clearly isn’t working.

(Just when to check these links only to discover Amy has just been given a pay bump. To £132k!)

Even the gay centre of London, Old Compton Street, in the heart of Soho, which could always be relied upon to keep it up well past midnight, seems uncharacteristically flaccid and limp these days.

It hasn’t helped that local councils have allowed Soho residents to get clubs and pubs closed down on the grounds they are ‘too noisy’. What do these people expect? It’s central London!

That’s like moving to Venice, and then moaning that all the streets are wet.

Westminster council even tried to block Greggs, the bakery chain well known for its heady mixture of steak bakes, pastries and late night violence, from opening its Leicester Square branch into the small hours. On the grounds that the Met wouldn’t be able to cope if a couple of pissed up tourists got into a row over the last iced bun, and started a riot.

The half baked ban was overturned on appeal. The best pastry based victory against petty government diktats since George Osborne was forced to cancel the Pasty Tax.

Talking of tourists, Jeremy Hunt (see above) has done his best to shoo them away from the capital by stopping the tax free perk which helped make London such a popular destination for international shoppers.

Not anymore, now they’re off to l’enjoy les magasins and la fenetres des Paris.

Good riddance. And take your wheelie suitcases full of money with you.

What else? Well, there’s litter everywhere. It seems every bin in Camden, another major tourist destination, is overflowing like a blocked toilet.

Of course, with all those visitors, it’s a mammoth task for Camden Council to keep on top of. But the bustling private development around King’s Cross, also in Camden, seems to manage perfectly OK.

We might not have empty bins or clean streets, but on the LGBTQ Plus side we do have anaemic looking ‘trans’ zebra crossings all over the place. Finally the millions of trans people who live here can cross the road in safety. So that’s a win.

Crime is rampant. Khan has famously failed on knife crime, with kids slaughtering each other so regularly it’s like a Hackney based Hunger Games.

Of course there’s a racial element, and some of the measures promoted as panaceas by the right, like Stop and Search, aren’t necessarily the magic bullet they’re sometimes made out to be.

But regardless of arguments over policy, it’s pretty clear that the powers that be, prefer sacrificing children on the altar of political correctness, rather than acknowledging the more uncomfortable cultural factors associated with the issue.

As an aside. Whether with knife crime, the ‘trans affirming’ agenda, the silence over Northern rape gangs, or the ongoing attempts to rebrand and normalise pedophiles as ‘Minor Attracted Persons’, why are our progressive elites always so desperate to offer up children’s bodies to satiate the ever more unhinged demands of their wonky ideology?

They say it’s all about being ‘kind’.

Yeah. Being kind of weird and creepy.

Anyway. Back to the fun stuff.

Phone thieves constantly stalk the centre of town. The internet is awash with videos of them, masked predators on e bikes and scooters, swooping in, and snatching iPhones from hapless pedestrians, like seagulls stealing a seaside chip.

Nothing ever seems to be done about it. The police, and of course Sadiq Khan, claim they’re not to blame. Apparently it’s all Apple’s fault. For making nice things.

No, really

Then there’s Khans most unpopular policy, ULEZ, the ultra low emission zone which has crept like a miserable smog, from central London to the outer boroughs.

Supposedly the ULEZ is all about protecting kiddie’s lungs from the perils of pollution, rather than making money. It isn’t.

(And we’re talking an awful lot of money, £224m in 2022 alone. Transferred from regular Londoners pockets, to Khan’s coffers.)

Khan even claims that cutting the undetectable pea soup of poison will save 4000 lives a year. It really won’t. As I explain in detail here.

Unlike the Mayor’s Office, I’m just following, rather than attempting to manipulate, the science.

Many of London’s most intractable problems can be associated with high immigration.

As I have said before, I’m not anti-immigration per se, I’m very happy for us to invite highly qualified, like minded people to come from all over the world, and join our gang. To help make Britain more productive, prosperous and profitable, for all of us.

But we’re not doing that, instead we’re inviting unskilled people from very different cultures to ours, to come and start their own gangs. While telling them that ours is racist, morally bankrupt, and worthless.

Across London, anti semitism is becoming more open, the intolerance more aggressive. Jewish people are afraid to walk the streets. This should be unacceptable in any European capital city, let alone in England.

The police seem to have a policy of containment rather than enforcement. It looks like appeasement.

Just in my adult life London’s population has gone up from six and half, to nearly ten million.

But while we have massively increased the demand for housing, we certainly haven’t increased the supply.

Which is why, along with a series of ever more disastrous interventions into the housing ‘market’, buying or renting a home in London is too expensive.

People have to live somewhere. Though it seems for a fair chunk of them, that means a squalid tent outside upmarket furniture shop Heals on Tottenham Court Road.

I bought my house in London twenty years ago. There’s no way I could afford to buy it now.

I know. Boo hoo me.

But the point is, regular families can no longer afford to live here. Soon the only people left, will be the very rich. And the very poor.

And while we don’t want a ring of deprivation and ghettos round London like there is around Paris. I don’t see why a struggling family in Croydon or Enfield, should be subsidising social housing in parts of Islington, Camden, Maida Vale, Notting Hill, or other super expensive areas of central London. Places they themselves could never afford to live in their wildest dreams.

According to Sadiq’s PR department, my sort of family ‘does not represent real Londoners’ anyway. So maybe getting rid of people like me is all part of the plan.

The government’s solution to the housing crisis, not just in London but the whole country, is obviously, more meddling.

So look forward to rent controls, tax increases, finger pointing and fiddling around the edges. They’ll try anything apparently. Anything except building houses.

One thing that definitely won’t work is destroying the private rental sector.

Though it seems pretty obvious that there’s an ongoing agenda to shut down the private landlord market so that big corporations can sweep in and take over.

Is that a conspiracy theory? Not according to government adviser, and boss of Legal and General Bill Hughes. Who last week seemed to suggest that the government should shut down the private landlord market so that big corporations can sweep in and take over.

Of course we could allow London to grow, to build on the Green Belt. But that’s where posh people live. So they won’t do that.

So why do I stay? It’s a fair question.

Because despite all its flaws, failings, and faults I love my city. And most of the people who live here, wherever they are from.

Besides. Why should I leave, and surrender it to the likes of Khan?

With his asinine insistence that London was built on ‘diversity’.

Mine wasn’t. It was built by Wren and Ernő Goldfinger. By Dr Johnson. By John Snow (no, not that one) working out the source of a cholera epidemic. By Jack Shepherd. Samuel Pepys (genuinely amazing how much of his 17th ‘lived experience’ would be familiar to Londoners today. ) By Ken Livingstone and the GLC, Mastermind winner Fred Housego. By Guy the Gorilla (Who, I genuinely grew up believing was the actual ‘Guy’ from Elton John’s ‘Song For Guy’)

It is Big Ben. Nelson’s Column. The sad faced fiver-a-photo fading punks of Camden Market. The boutiques of Carnaby St. The charm of Seven Dials. Skateboarders on the South bank. It is the Blitz. The view from Primrose Hill. The Post Office/BT/Telecom Tower. Rolling out of the Costa Dorada on Hanway St at 3am when you were due back at work by eight. It is Reckless Records. St Pancras Lock. The A40. The much missed New Piccadilly Restaurant. It is the scary looking guy on Tottenham Court Road who stood all day, selling rubber toys that climbed down bus stops. It is too many pigeons.

It is walking the canal through London Zoo on a misty morning.

It is the Post It Note on a dingy Soho doorway promising that the rancid flat above a dirty book store somehow hosts a ‘Top Model.’ Seems unlikely.

It is the grandeur of Regent’s Park and the charm of Russell Square Gardens.

It is the Guns of Brixton, and Waterloo Sunsets.

It is changing guards at Buckingham palace. It is Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

It is everything Khan and his ilk have tried to erase, or at least, transmogrify into a made up happy clappy multicultural present which simply does not exist, and a fake believe pantomime past, as historically credible as an episode of Bridgeton.

In April five horses from the Household Cavalry broke free from their trainers on Horse Guards Parade and ran amok through central London. Though two were badly injured, I believe they are all now in good condition.

It’s the perfect metaphor for London under Khan. The disintegration of order, the overturning of history, the destruction of tradition.

Unbridled chaos galloping through the city streets. Beauty, strength, tradition and grace turned to bloody, shivering, sweat soaked squalor.

Can we save London? I fear it is too late, now the horses have bolted.