The plot against London
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Shortly before Christmas, the Conservative MP and former security minister Tom Tugendhat published a lengthy post on X detailing his regular long late-night walks home from parliament. They took him past housing estates and poorer areas. He heard many languages. Some streets were dirty, others smelled of dope but, aside from the odd drunk, he never felt threatened. The capital has its issues, he added, but “London is safe”.
What made this post unusual was how much it diverged from the dialogue of the right, the populist right especially.
London is one of the world’s great cities, a thriving diverse metropolis and economic powerhouse. But this story does not work for the populist right and even parts of the once ruling Conservative party. Their leaders, allies and friends in the media prefer a different story. Nigel Farage talks of “living in lawless London”. The former prime minister Liz Truss headlined the first episode of her new YouTube show: “London is falling” (while simultaneously trying to persuade people to invest £500,000 in a new London club).
Agitators, from Laurence Fox to Andrew Tate, fill the web with tales of a crime-ridden hellhole, a city of no-go areas. This story is gaining traction.
And never far from the surface is that London has been lost to immigrants, Muslims especially. To this version is often added one word. It is not London, it is “Khan’s London”, a reference to the city’s three times elected Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan. A line is drawn from a high immigrant population to a Muslim mayor to a city of danger.
The animus against Khan is out of all proportion. There are many legitimate criticisms of his record, but he is a mainstream politician facing endless racial smears. In 2024, Lee Anderson was thrown out of the Conservative party for observing that Islamists had “got control” of Khan and of London. Now he is a leading light in Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Farage himself has told TV viewers that “Christmas has been cancelled in London” because the word does not appear in the Oxford Street lights (depicting angels and stars).
These relentless, often fake, assaults on the capital spewed out on social media — one Tory attack supposedly depicting a riot at an underground station turned out to be footage from the New York subway — are now doing real damage. One government member says they are having an impact on overseas investment decisions. “In the UAE people say they worry about being stabbed if they come to London.”
It is important not to deny or dismiss London’s problems. There are kernels of truth in the attacks. London is a sprawling, boisterous city. Visible street crime, especially the snatching of mobile phones, has grown hugely. Knife crime has risen significantly, though recent figures suggest the beginnings of a decline from the highs. There are rough areas. The Tory justice spokesman Robert Jenrick highlighted the failure to tackle fare dodging on the Tube. Women still feel unsafe walking alone at night, though alas this is neither new nor unique to London. Seemingly absent policing allows shoplifting gangs to operate openly and with impunity in some areas. The impression is created of little sanction or deterrent for many visible antisocial behaviours. Some pockets of high immigrant concentration present challenges to integration.
Against this, the crime data also shows the murder rate is at a 10-year low, better than Paris, Brussels, Madrid and most major US cities. Violent crime against the person is also down. There are genuine concerns. But tone matters and the rubbishing of London goes beyond normal campaigning.
A bias against generally more liberal, multicultural cities is common to populist movements worldwide. They peddle a narrative of metropolitan elites against “real people”.
There is, though, something else going on with the assault on London. It is about demography. While the capital remains majority white, only 37 per cent of the population classifies itself as white British. That does not mean it is minority British. A significant percentage of the Black and Asian population are British but immigration hardliners somehow forget to count them. London is undeniably a multi-ethnic city. And since mass immigration is central to the populist right’s cause, the capital must be seen to be failing.
This story is encouraged and amplified by the right in the US whose playbook its British miniatures are aping. London’s mayor is a Maga hate figure. Opponents of Zohran Mamdani in New York warned against turning the city into a version of Khan’s London. JD Vance has joked about the UK being an “Islamist state”.
But for all the capital’s challenges, this story is distorted. As a vibrant city where different communities live mostly harmoniously cheek by jowl, London stands against the populist right narrative on immigration. Thus they prefer to exaggerate and inflame. No solutions are offered, only division.
No one is pretending the city is without problems and the attacks are a warning to the mayor and the Metropolitan Police of the need to get a grip. But London is a long way from fallen, and no one should doubt the real agenda here.
It is ever more vital to call out those who truly have fallen — those politicians who most ostentatiously wrap themselves in the British flag, while cynically and dishonestly trashing their own country’s greatest city.
