Donald Trump has a point when he says that London has changed beyond recognition, and for the worse. Increasingly, our capital resembles the New York of Trump's early property-developing days of the 1980s. Riddled with anti-social behaviour, inadequately policed and increasingly violent.
This week, a spokesman for London’s execrable mayor, Sadiq Khan, said President Trump was wrong, and London remains “the greatest city in the world”.
What utter hogwash. This is a city where, in a decade, recorded crime has risen by a third. Where sexual offences have gone up by three quarters, and theft from the person has more than doubled.
It affects rich and poor, visitors and residents. The showily wealthy are wary of wearing expensive watches and jewellery in public. Everybody else thinks twice before pulling out a mobile phone.
More than 70,000 were stolen last year. Tourism bosses say it’s putting tourists off coming to London. The super-rich are taking their millions to Dubai, where the streets are safe.
One third of all stabbings in England and Wales happen in London. Think about that statistic. But also consider that, while violent crime (up 40 per cent in London in ten years) makes the headlines, it’s the creeping low-level lawlessness which is making parts of the capital functionally ungovernable and uninhabitable.
The sort of anti-social behaviour that is impossible to ignore. The smell of dope on pavements; pavements colonised by scooters and e-bikes with no legal right to be there.
The endemic shoplifting. The fare-dodging on the Tube, which, coincidentally, a tenth of all passengers now refuse to use because of incidents witnessed while travelling.
Policing is part of the problem. On current trends, if you’re mugged in London, the chance of your assailant being brought to book is about one in 20. There’s also a deep official unwillingness to face up to facts.
Most assailants are non-white. But, just a moment ago, as I looked at an LBC story about London knife crime, which featured a white youth in a hoodie holding a blade, I was reminded again that the media and public bodies are living in a state of woke denial about the ethnicity of perpetrators.
None of this helps with potential remedies. Stop-and-search is a tried and tested way of saving (mainly black) lives, and yet the practice is consistently opposed and denounced by campaigners as racist. Ditto facial recognition cameras. With no solutions in sight, people are voting with their feet.
The uncomfortable truth about white flight in London is suppressed because of woke denialism - Colin Brazier | Met Police, PA Wire
This week, we learned that the exodus of white Londoners, which was supercharged by covid, is far from over. A report from the Education Policy Institute, examining why so many London schools are closing, found that white Britons are over-represented in those heading to the Home Counties and further afield.
With a predictability we have come to expect, the authors of the report blamed Brexit for the falling school rolls. Crime wasn’t considered to be a significant factor, even though it’s hard to find anyone who’s abandoned the capital who doesn’t see criminality as a catalyst, if not the direct cause, of their departure.
Where are they heading, these lost tribes of London? The answer can be seen in the fields not far from where I live. Within 10 miles of my home, plans were outlined last month for two separate housing developments - each comprised of 1,000 homes. These homes are not being built on brownfield sites.
They are going on land that is currently farmed. The area, still recognisably rural, will be utterly transformed and suburbanised. And these new properties, what are they? Shoe-boxes mainly, devoid of space for parking and play.
Not a patch on the comparatively grand Victorian and post-war housing stock these internally-displaced peoples are leaving behind.
How many of these new homes and new estates will be occupied by young men and women who want to start or enlarge a family, but find the idea of doing so in London unconscionable?
How many imagined their son being stabbed, their daughter being assaulted? Who among them found the quality of life in London so reduced as to make a big commute a price worth paying for safe family formation?
I don’t know, and nor, it seems, does anyone else. Many of us will be familiar with someone who has moved from a multicultural hell-scape to pastures greener. But the emotions and - often agonised - reasoning that drives this white flight does not feature in the official statistical corpus.
Nor is anyone in a position of power prepared to make a link between immigration and London’s rapid acceptance of levels of criminality more typically found in less developed parts of the world.
Even now, to make the seemingly uncontroversial link between rising levels of migration and declining public services is not something our current government will countenance.
Of course, crashing indigenous birth-rates are part of this story. Schools need new pupils. But empty cradles are a nationwide crisis, whereas nine of the ten areas where schools are closing most rapidly are in London.
Something other than falling fertility is at work here. The role of crime, and the fear of crime, is not seriously considered by officialdom in shaping the decisions of would-be parents to get the heck out of Town.
Two questions arise. First, if things are bad now, where will they be in, say, 2050? By then, those parts of London like Hackney and Tower Hamlets, and Tottenham (where birth-rates remain high among non-white, often Muslim families) will have become even less recognisable to someone who craves nothing more than a place to bring up children which looks and feels British. The idea of sending a child to a school with only a handful of white children seems far from optimal.
Second, is there really nothing to be done to arrest London’s slide into lawlessness? It can be achieved, but it would require policies that aren’t for the faint-hearted. Yes to stop and search. Yes to automatic facial recognition.
Yes to flooding the streets with police officers who can enforce a zero-tolerance approach to everything from nicking groceries to jumping the Underground barriers.
And yes to long sentences to those who carry knives or (that most depressing symbol of Britain’s failed multicultural experiment) the machete.
Most of all, yes to a much more assertive policy of deportation. Nigel Farage was right to say this week that granting Indefinite Leave to Remain to recent arrivals is a recipe for demographic calamity. The simple reality is that the quality of life in London will improve if more foreign criminals are banished to their country of origin.
And by discouraging any further large-scale immigration, and unwinding some of the migration that’s already happened, we can make housing in London more affordable and stop quite so much of the countryside around it from having a concrete makeover.
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