There are a few things that stand out about the reign, or as some would say misrule, of the Greater London Mayor Sadiq Khan. The first is how Khan has spent hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds on public relations and burnishing both his own image and that of his administration. This is money that has been utterly wasted and which could have been spent on things that would benefit Londoners much more than it has done. The second thing that stands out about Khan’s time in office is a massive rise in street violence.
Now London has always had violent bits and violent people, I recall knife violence being a thing in London in the 1980’s but this violence was to a large extent an aberration. Knifings were known about but they were not common. That is not the case today. In London today knife attacks, often fatal ones, are incredibly and worryingly common and what is worse is that both the perpetrators and the victims are far younger than they may have been in the past. It’s not people in their early to mid 20’s who are wielding knives in street fights or being the victims of knife violence any more, it’s people in their mid teens.
A combination of Khan’s initial hostility to policies to reduce the carrying of weapons such as stop and search and his warping of police priorities by way of his role as Police and Crime Commissioner for London to prioritise nothingburger stuff like ‘hate speech’ has helped to turn London into a violent crime riddled cess pit. Whilst the Met faff around with monitoring Twitter, kneeling to BLM/Marxist thugs and allowing Jew hating nutcases to prowl around the city uttering threats to Jewish women, the blood is running freely in London’s streets.
We are not yet past the first week of the month of July and already the knife deaths are piling up leaving in their wake the shattered families of victims and the ruined lives of perpetrators who often kill for no good reason whatsoever. The perpetrators will if apprehended quite likely get life sentences for little more than moments of madness and misplaced bravado. Sometimes London’s youth can be murdered or wounded by knife wielding assailants simply for being in the ‘wrong’ postcode area or an area controlled by one particular gang of criminals. It’s easy to take the route of ‘well it happens doesn’t it’ or believe that it’s only ‘criminals attacking criminals, but that’s not always the case. An innocent teenager could step onto the ‘wrong’ road or ‘wrong’ area and lose their lives because of this minor error on their part.
The killing of kids, yes kids goes on and on and I see no sign that Khan or his increasingly debased Metropolitan Police will do anything about it.
The latest pair of killings were unrelated and took place in different parts of London. One involved the death of a 16 year old boy in Lambeth and the other a 15 year old boy in South Woolwich. There have been no arrests so far in the Lambeth attack but a 15 year old boy who presented at a South London hospital with stab wounds has been arrested for murder, presumably in connection to the Woolwich murder.
These two deaths follow on from another death on Thursday 2nd July in Croydon. In that incident Camron Smith was stabbed to death in the Shrublands area. There have been two arrests in this case, a 15 year old boy who can’t be named for legal reasons and 18 year old Romain Le Pierre. They have been charged with murder and robbery.
London is mired in carnage (or should that read ‘Khanage’) and the situation is getting worse and worse. Day in and day out we see reports of murders that might have been prevented had tough and effective action been taken to break up the gangs and impede the carrying of knives. Sadiq Khan could have done what was necessary and focus the attention of the Metropolitan Police on the lethal issue of knife violence. Unfortunately Khan did not do this. Instead he wasted nigh on one million pounds on a police ‘hate crime and hate speech’ hub that has done nothing to make Londoners any better protected from the crimes of violence that most worry them. He has also politicised the police making them less equitable, less impartial and less able to tackle crimes without fear or favour. At a time when the police should be being proactive in dealing with knife crime, Khan and the equally awful Met Commissioner Cressida Dick, have shackled the police with the handcuffs of political correctness.
The Mayor of Greater London in their dual role as Mayor and Police and Crime Commissioner set the tone for how London is both run and policed. Sadly as far as I can see the only tones that Khan has set for London’s governance and policing are discordant ones.
