London has always had good bits and bad bits although the bad bits or the good bits do not always stay the same. Sometimes, over the course of history, areas that were once seen as undesirable or bad end up morphing into areas where people want to live and equally there are parts which were once respectable but became places where people didn’t want to live. This chopping and changing of the way an area is perceived is somewhat a natural phenomenon because businesses and industries wax and wane and areas change because of internal and external migratory factors.

However, what is happening in London today under Mayor Sadiq Khan and his very PC Police chief Cressida Dick, is very different from the sort of demographic, economic and social changes that have made areas in the past good or bad. Under Khan and Dick, the entirety of London is afflicted by violence, disorder, lawlessness and incredibly piss poor policing. Whether you are a resident of Havering or Haringey, Camden or Croydon, you cannot say today that your area is any less afflicted by violence such as those caused by postcode linked gangs than other areas. Sure there are areas such as Richmond upon Thames that are at present less bad than other parts of the capital, but even there the phenomenon of seemingly random stabbings resulting in the death of the victim are starting to appear.

Whilst it is true that the main cause of crime is the criminality of individuals, London has been afflicted by appallingly bad management. Of course London was badly managed by the likes of Ken Livingstone in the past when the Greater London Council was still around and Boris Johnson when Mayor didn’t do enough to improve residents security but he was somewhat shielded from criticism by the relative success of the London Olympics which in turn glossed over the failure by both Johnson and the Metropolitan Police to have a plan of what to do when the London Riots broke out in 2011, thereby making them worse. But London’s current management could be said to be worse than Livingstone and worse than the Boris Johnson administration.

Under Livingstone and his infatuation with identity politics and Johnson with his somewhat allegedly indolent management style that relied on underlings to get things done, London still functioned reasonably well. More importantly even under these less than perfect leaders, most people in London did have a sense of security, they could go to work or to the pub or out shopping and not be in the sort of dangers that they are in now under Sadiq Khan. Now there are even violent disturbances in department stores like Selfridges, where a brawl involving men carrying knives occurred. Even under Livingstone and his lunatic policies did we see stuff like this in a place like Selfridges. It used to be the case that the only thing you really had to watch out for in Oxford Street where the Selfridges shop sits were pickpockets, now it’s nutters with knives. Crime under Khan has not just increased in number but has also increased in severity of that there can be little doubt.

If you don’t believe that the aforementioned incident is now commonplace, how about another knife brawl in London, where as you can see from the video embedded below, a knife fight where at least one assailant is armed with a machete.

Or a stabbing in Southwark, or how about a shooting and a stabbing in the Brixton area that spawned accompanying public disturbances. If that’s not enough to convince you that lethal and potentially lethal violence is now, as Sadiq Khan said of terrorism, ‘part and parcel’ of living in a big city then why not consider a gang of young men fighting in Greenwich in which a man was stabbed and had to be airlifted to hospital or the anti-Semitic vandalism that occurred in Vartry Road, Stamford Hill in which a school bus that was identifiably connected to a Jewish school had its tyres slashed. If you still don’t believe that Khan’s term in office has interestingly coincided with a massive rise in violence then consider that five people in London were murdered over the recent Bank Holiday and a record number of murders for a May occurred in London with 21 murders being recorded.

Khan is at least partly to blame for London’s decline into a crime dominated cesspit. You may recall how he was elected initially because he promoted the idea that London’s police needed to reduce stop and search, his campaign claimed that such stop and search policies were ‘racist’. Khan set the seed and watered it and helped to create the situation that exists now. Khan, for a while at least, tied the hands of the police when dealing with street crime whilst pumping millions into empty public relations campaigns, political posturing and took officers away from front line policing and put them in personal vanity projects such as the Met’s ‘hate crime and hate speech unit’. Khan’s initial promotion of an end to stop and search and this policy’s impact on police actions, allowed violent gangs to grow exponentially. Problems that should have been nipped in the bud by robust and proactive policing have been allowed to fester and that festering mass of crime has resulted in London being a city where violence is all too easily and widely distributed. It’s a sad state of affairs that a meme like the one below is not as over the top and unbelievable as it should be. London is indeed now the sort of place where safety warnings have to be given to tourists not just regarding stuff like pickpocketing but about street violence of a sort that characterises places like Mogadishu or other dangerous cities.

Sadly this situation is all likely to get worse. Khan’s policing policies, policies that seem to be favoured by the current Met Commissioner Cressida Dick, have made Londoners far more unsafe than they have been at any time in my lifetime. In London we have the perverse situation where a nutter can wave a big knife around and probably have a reasonable chance of getting away without being arrested, but say something unorthodox or disliked by the Left or the identity politics crowd and your chances of arrest are far higher. Khan’s economic policies, most notably his ‘Green’ policies are also going to afflict the sort of small businesses that would employ people who might, if deprived of an honest living, fall into a world of criminality. Contacts in London are telling me that people, especially the sort of people who run small businesses or who are engaged in light haulage are leaving in droves for other parts of Britain because Khan’s ‘Green’ policies are killing or will kill their businesses. A decline in economic activity will invariably cause an increase of crime that will in turn cause more law abiding Londoners to leave, especially if they have children that they want to protect from Khan’s Khanage on the streets.

Londoners could have changed this situation or at least started on the process of making London better by replacing Khan as Mayor. Unfortunately, as in the last Mayoral election in 2016, the Apathy Party won with only 55% of Londoners bothering to get out and vote. This is a tragedy as Khan did not get a massive vote of confidence as he was only 5% ahead of the Tory challenger Shaun Bailey. If more Londoners had bothered to get off their arses then Londoners might be celebrating the end of Khan’s misrule of the capital instead of seeing the grinning visage of Khan at City Hall again and crying at the knowledge that more years of Khan will mean more years of decline. Some I’ve spoken to have given up on London and are not waiting for the next Mayoral election for a chance to get rid of Khan and put a more sensible leader place, but are leaving and in some cases taking their businesses, expertise and economic activity with them. The loss of such people from a city does not bode well for the future.

To conclude: A sensible and proactive leader of a city like London would have seen the problems that were growing and would have tackled them by moving more resources to the police or even crime diversion projects and away from vanity projects or public relations activities. Unfortunately Khan is not a sensible leader for a city like London and he continues to spend vast sums of money on his destructive Green policies, vanity projects, divisive identity politics guff and PR videos for the European football tournament that are so divorced from reality that they spawn worryingly accurate parodies such as this one that I saw on the Guido Fawkes site and which I’ve embedded below.

Khan has been a disaster for London. He’s been the biggest disaster since the Great Fire of London as at least that disaster killed off the rats that were carrying plague. Under Khan, Londoners are afflicted by a different plague this time of two legged rats carrying guns, knives, acid and all manner of other weapons and engaged in the sort of criminality that unlike in the past does not stay mostly among criminals, but afflicts and affects every single Londoner.