Sadiq Khan – or Sir Sadiq, as we will soon be calling him – has suffered a lot of brickbats during his two-and-a-bit terms in office. Some, like Trump’s criticism, have been playing to the worst, prejudiced instincts of their own bases and should be immediately dismissed.
Others are more justified. For example, what are the great achievements he can point to, after eight years in charge of Britain’s capital? Activists, we can be sure, shuffle awkwardly when asked this on the doorstep. “Not being Boris Johnson” is not that much of an accolade for a politician who has now been hovering at or near the top of politics in Westminster and London for nearly two decades.
For example, in this election year, knife and gun crime was up 20% year on year in his beat, but he got elected anyway. In his role as Greater London’s Police and Crime Commissioner, he has political oversight of the Met. One imagines that that means achieving some key policy goals that matter to Londoners, but these days it all seems to be more about providing officers to support the “LGBTQ+ Community”– an increasingly fractious and disunited “group” these days, in any event – and having police officers dancing at Pride, than tackling actual crime on the streets.
But the biggest oversight in Khan’s oversight is surely the fact that, for the last year and a quarter, there have been pretty much weekly demonstrations, coordinated by the dreadful Palestine Solidarity Campaign: a far-left grouping, often mentioned in dispatches at Uncut over the years for their anti-Jewish sentiment, rather than their standing up for the rights of non-aligned Palestinians.
