London’s descent in to violent madness continues with a drive by shooting at the weekend outside a church in Central London’s Euston area that has left several women and a child severely injured. Police have arrested a suspect in Barnet in North West London for this offence but it remains to be seen whether the police have got the correct suspect and we will have to wait for any trial to find out what the motive was for this attack.

But what we do know is that this drive by shooting with a shotgun is yet another nail in the coffin for the idea that London is a safe place to live in or to visit. It is a crime that provides even more evidence that the Metropolitan Police and the Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is also the capital’s Police and Crime Commissioner, are failing to keep London and Londoners safe from crime.

London has always had a violent streak to the place and some areas have been more violent than others or in relation to other areas, but up until recently that violence was kept under some degree of control by the police. There was time when murderous stabbings and shootings would have been unusual even for London but now they are so common that only those with unusual aspects to them, such as this recent drive by shooting at a church, make the national headlines.

I can recall being about twelve or thirteen or so years old and my parents had no problem with letting me wander around Central London on a Red Bus Rover ticket. They knew that the City and West End was well policed and that it was considerably safer to let me wander around the centre of the city rather than some places in East and South East London, which did at the time have a record for higher than usual crime. There’s no way on earth would I allow my son to do the same today if he was the same age as I was at the time.

Central London, an area that is London’s major public face, the place where tourists gather and where many of our governing institutions are, is no longer a safe place. If it’s not shootings and stabbings in areas that were once relatively safe going on then it’s gangs of violent thieves engaged in en masse shoplifting.

Sadiq Khan and his administration have presided over not a rebirth of the city but its destruction as a safe place to live in and visit. Khan, along with central government, has failed to ensure that the Metropolitan Police are adequately funded so that they can cope with the rise in crime and what funds there are for the Met seem to have been wasted on worthless guff such as the Mayor’s ‘hate crime unit’. We now have situation where there is money available for the police to sit on Twitter to root out wrongthink and wrongspeak but not enough money to ensure that teenagers don’t stab each other to death in massive and rising numbers.

Khan swans around the world speaking up about things that are not part of his brief and what Khan whines about is certainly not what Londoners need which is a well run city where there is visible and effective policing and prevention of crime. Many of those who have observed the latest gun related outrage in London are shocked at the fact that such a crime could happen in Central London and in broad daylight. They are right to be shocked. Drive by shootings in the Euston area represent a major uptick in violence in the capital. Unfortunately I believe that crime in London is now so out of control that I predict that such crimes may become more common to the extent that, like the plethora of stabbings that afflict the capital, they will no longer make the news. It’s my belief that the crime situation in London will worsen unless the capital is led by politicians who care for London’s people rather than those like Khan who are more interested their own self aggrandisement and massaging their own egos.