We are used to hearing far-fetched tales about London from people with American accents. It was only in 2018 that the New York Times praised the city for having finally abandoned the boiled mutton and bowls of porridge that, according to the writer, had until then been just about the only items on its menus. That same year Donald Trump described a hospital in the city as a “war zone” with “blood all over the floors”, having previously said that London was so “radicalised that the police are afraid for their own lives”.
But now the American accent is coming from inside the house. The Conservative Party has released an attack ad for the London mayoral elections which looks and sounds like a mid-century trailer for a Batman movie, but is also full of strange untruths about London and its Mayor.
Sample: London is “a city now run by the Labour Party. Its police answer to them”. (They don’t, they answer to the Home Secretary). “The Labour Mayor seized power…” (having been voted in), and now the capital is overrun with “faces covered with masks, terrorising communities at the beck and call of their Labour Mayor master” (Does Khan really have time to command a successful crime network, on top of implementing congestion charges?). And “gripped by the tendrils of rising crime, London’s citizens stay inside, the streets are quiet”. (Not the last time I checked.)
The Tories released an attack ad for the mayoral elections that looks and sounds like a trailer for a Batman movie
And the lies don’t stop there. The ad also includes footage of a panicked crowd in a New York subway station, rather than a London Tube — and a graph which shows the capital’s “violent crime volume” rising then reaching a plateau, but fails to mention that the rise coincides mainly with Boris Johnson’s time as mayor.
The ad was finally deleted this week. But it is worth addressing one of its untruths in particular — that London is overrun with crime — because no one can seem to get this quite right. Shocking individual cases, such as a stabbing on a moving train near Beckenham yesterday, linger in the mind. But the statistics tell a different story.
According to the ad, which was tweeted from the Conservative account with the claim that “London under Labour has become a crime capital of the world”, there has been a “54 per cent increase in knife crime” during Khan’s time as Mayor. In February, in a recent article, Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall painted a picture of a London “under siege” with “criminals ruling the streets”. Last year Khan himself was forced to admit he was wrong to claim knife crime had decreased during his term in office. So what is actually going on? Is London’s crime rate going up or down, and how does it compare to the rest of the country?
First, the overall crime rates. According to the latest Crime Survey for England and Wales, Londoners should actually feel safer than everyone else in the country. In the year to September 2023, 14.9 people per 100 experienced a crime in the capital, compared to 15.7 per cent nationally. London has one of the lowest rates of anti-social behaviour.
According to a newspaper analysis of the crime survey, London’s murder rate first rose and then fell under Khan. It reached a peak in 2019, but is now lower than it was in 2015, Johnson’s last year as mayor. It is also at a lower rate, by population, than other areas of the country, such as South Yorkshire, and far lower than in many American cities, including New York.
When it comes to knife crime, the capital is worse than many areas in England, but not the worst — hospital admissions for stabbings are not as high as in the West Midlands, for example. Knife crime is a problem: it surged by 20 per cent from 2022 to 2023 in London, but is now eight per cent lower than before the pandemic.
A more nuanced picture, then, than the Conservatives are painting. Of course, if you actually want to get to grips with a crime problem, scare stories do not help; it is only with accurate record-keeping that you can work out which measures work and which do not. The Mayor blames Government cuts to youth services and the Metropolitan Police; the Government blames the Mayor. But perhaps it is the adversarial relationship between the two that has caused some of the problem. Mayors need to co-operate with Westminster: unlike his predecessors, Khan has served his entire mayoral term so far with the opposition in government.
And there’s another reason not to run fact-free adverts in a mayoral campaign: you are talking to locals. Unlike the rest of the country — and those across the Atlantic — Londoners can simply go outside and see that the claims are not true.
