And at Westfield there are boys lying in wait. Teens are there, in small groups, sent to target girls of around 13 who are hanging out with no adults in tow. This is “first-stage seduction” — a tried-and-tested technique — and I’ve seen it first hand, as a group of three boys bought ice creams for a couple of girls who they had obviously just met. The girls were giggling and coy and lapping up the attention, clearly in awe of the boys. Then the lawyer I was with discreetly pointed out the older Asian men hanging around the peripheries, watching the interactions.

Stratford’s shopping center has been a notorious grooming hotspot for years. It’s easy to be anonymous in the cavernous mall, and security guards have spoken about how hard it is to keep an eye on suspicious individuals as they disappear into the front and out of the back of many of the large department stores. “It’s not illegal for teenagers to have coffee together, or to flirt, go into the cinema, or try on sneakers,” one police officer told me. “What are we supposed to do?”

By now, everyone is familiar with the grooming gang scandal. But few people realize how serious the problem is in London — and those who do are very reluctant to call it out. As we are only now discovering, the capital’s politicians, police and social workers are just as guilty as those pilloried Up North for conspiring to keep this growing threat out of the public eye. Rather than exposing and stopping the trafficking of girls, they have dodged the issue by saying this isn’t sexual exploitation: instead they say the girls are criminals too. They’re being recruited for “county lines”, to move and supply drugs.

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, produced exactly this deflection at the beginning of the year. Asked directly, by Susan Hall, leader of the Conservatives in the London Assembly: “Just how many grooming gangs have we got in London?”, Khan replied with an unhelpful: “The situation in London in relation to young people being groomed is different to other parts of the country.”

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There followed a lengthy and revelatory exchange, during which Khan managed to dodge the same question nine times. Eventually, he did manage a response — of sorts. “What we have in London,” he said, “is young people being groomed, your words not mine, to be using county lines.”

Khan’s response is scarcely credible on many levels, especially since the grooming of girls in London has been going on for decades and if one whistle-blower is to be believed, it is at “catastrophic” levels. Jon Wedger is a former Metropolitan Police officer with more than 25 years experience investigating child sexual exploitation. Back in 2006, Wedger submitted a list of 50 youngsters who had been groomed and sexually abused in the capital, providing details such as the car-registration numbers of the perpetrators. But he was told to back off by social services, and even a large children’s charity, because he was generating “extra work”.

Wedger tells me that nothing has changed. The gangs are still operating; the authorities are in denial. And the methods of procurement are just as we’ve seen countrywide. “The idea that they aren’t prevalent with the similar MO in London is just staggering to me,” he says. While the city is target-rich, Wedger’s focus has been on care homes. “Girls are being collected by men outside children’s homes in fancy cars, and being taken to a brothel. In the meantime, the police are looking for kids cycling around London dealing drugs for the big players, and the girls are ignored.”

The authorities are, quite literally, turning a blind eye to the problem. As late as 2018, Metropolitan Police officials claimed they were unable to address concerns about grooming gangs because “the terms ‘rape gangs’ and ‘grooming gangs’ are not legally recognized and do not appear in MPS policy”.

And yet, we know for a fact that Arshid Hussain, central to the infamous Rotherham grooming cases, took one of his victims to London, where she was sexually assaulted by three men as repayment for Hussain’s debts. And Mohammed Karrar, convicted in 2019 in the Oxford grooming scandal, trafficked his victim repeatedly to Paddington Station, selling her to other men. We also know from Professor Alexis Jay’s 2021 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse that grooming gangs in London exist and operate along the classic “boyfriend model” of procurement, just as they do in the North. But at every mention of the situation in London, Sadiq Khan insists on using “county lines” terminology, instead of acknowledging the existence of rape gangs.

Michaela Addison has worked closely with victims and survivors of grooming gangs in London, and she is appalled at the use of what she describes as “sanitized language” to describe these crimes. It’s perfectly understandable why the mayor might do this, she explains: “if you can’t name it, the problem doesn’t exist”.

But the problem does exist. Just ask Katie. She was victimized twice: once by the grooming gangs, and then by the police. “I fell in love with Dan, big style,” she tells me, describing her Afghan boyfriend. “And by the time I realized he was a psycho, I was trapped, I was living partly with him, and partly with my foster carers, and his friends would come round and take me to flats where dirty old men would queue up to abuse me.” Katie was 15 years old at the time, and only called the police when it became clear she was in real danger. “I saw Dan with another bloke and he had what I thought was a gun. I knew they were dealing drugs, they used to give me some when I’d seen enough men, but it was the gun that really scared me, so I went into the police station and told them everything.”

However, the police totally ignored her claims of sexual violence and pimping, honing in only on the allegations about weapons and drugs. “As soon as I mentioned the gun, I could tell by the questions they were asking me that all they wanted to know was, ‘Where is this gang, who were the main drug dealers, where do they stash the gear?’”

Katie, now in her 20s, knows she will never see justice for what happened to her. “It’s all about county lines,” she tells me. “The girls are worth less than the gear.”

When I approached Sadiq Khan’s office for comment last month, this dismissive response found its echo: “The Mayor and the Met remain vigilant and will continue to do everything they can to protect children in the capital from violence and exploitation in all its forms, such as offending by grooming gangs,” but that in London, “in particular, we are dealing with “county lines”… These gangs exploit children and often use coercion, intimidation and violence, including sexual violence.”

The trouble is, to use such language implies that the girls are complicit in criminal activity, rather than being the victims of abuse and coercion. It also avoids the fact that the term “grooming gangs” is heavily racialized.

Susan Hall has also been deeply troubled by Khan’s insistence over many months that grooming gangs only exist in London in the context of county lines. “Given how widespread this appalling criminality has been in other towns and cities across the country,” she says, “it is impossible to think that grooming gangs like those uncovered in Rochdale and many other areas have not also operated in a city as big as London.”

The evidence backs this up: Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, is on the record denying that London has a grooming gang problem; but when presented with the evidence, admitted that there is a “steady flow” of live multi-offender child sexual exploitation investigations, and a “very significant” number of cases that would need to be reinvestigated as a result of the current review.

“This is exactly what Sadiq Khan has done,” Maggie Oliver, a former police officer and anti-grooming gangs campaigner, tells me. “He denied the problem for as long as he can, and then being forced to at least partially admit that it’s going on but by using different language to describe it.”

None of this is to dismiss the importance of the county lines angle. It is serious, widespread and warrants significant police attention. But the reluctance of the Met and the Mayor’s Office to discuss grooming gangs — to even use the term, let alone investigate — means that rape victims are, as usual, the ones paying the price.

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All the while, carers and whistleblowers are having to go back to basics in order to convince people that these girls are actually victims of grooming gangs. One sexual health worker I spoke to told me that in many cases, the police simply weren’t interested. There is, she told me, one notorious McDonald’s in South West London where gang members like to go to pick up girls. She and her colleague had reported, no fewer than half a dozen times, “information that the girls have told us about themselves being directly abused, and, in one case, two very young sisters being targeted and raped by the men”. But each time she followed up her call, she discovered that none of the previous reports had been logged. “We had given them as much information as we had, including in one case a car registration of one of the perpetrators, but they have mysteriously ‘lost’ all of this information.”

As Wedger told me: “What you don’t look for, doesn’t exist.”

But for how long can the authorities keep looking the other way? Already, news is starting to break. Only this week, a national newspaper confirmed what our investigation suspected. Sadiq Khan had access to and is known to have read several separate reports by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, from 2016-2025, which identified six victims of these gangs. These documents also outlined the dreadful details of the abuse endured by these girls — some as young as 13. Some of the girls were raped by multiple men in London hotel rooms after being plied with drugs and alcohol. Chris Wild, an author and care-home consultant, has described the problem as “more catastrophic in the capital than anywhere else in the country”. We now know that Khan knew about it, and still he could only obfuscate and point to “county lines”.

The really shocking thing, though, is that we have been here before. While Khan keeps his own counsel, Keir Starmer’s grooming gang inquiry, which was resisted for so long, is already falling apart. Members of the initial panel have claimed that the terms of the investigation are already being watered down, and cite “a disturbing conflict of interest” regarding the identities of two possible chairs. Fiona Goddard, a member of the panel and a grooming gang victim, sent a searing note of resignation, in which she echoed a refrain which is now too all familiar: “I’m further concerned by the condescending and controlling language used towards survivors throughout this process who have had to fight every day just to be believed.”

As the scandal in London grows, the process for bringing institutions to account is in complete disarray. And last night, a third member of the Starmer inquiry resigned: all three women are victims; all three are sick of the continued cover-up. The question for the rest of us is: how can there ever be justice for the abused girls, and retribution for the perpetrators, if public servants such as Khan remain in denial?

Today, all of that is gone. Now, the only families who have homes and space in London are the ones who are very rich, and an ever-decreasing subset of the poor who have managed to cling on in social housing. Everyone else, especially the children, are overcrowded. Their families rent rooms in houses, they don’t have gardens and one in every 20 doesn’t have a home at all. Instead, they bounce from one temporary homelessness accommodation to another, a miserable, distressing journey through badly maintained rented rooms and hotels. Down the street I grew up on, it costs £1,000 to rent a single room. 

In three and a half decades, then, we have undone a century of progress on housing. Yet if this process began in the Eighties, with Margaret Thatcher’s planned destruction of council housing and deregulation of the private rented sector, every politician who has had responsibility for housing and for London in the years since shares some of the blame — with vast consequences for the city’s skyline, school system and even its broad culture.

Even before she came to power, Thatcher had a vision: we would no longer rely on the public sector to house people who couldn’t afford to buy, by offering council homes at local rents. Instead, we would let these people choose a private rented home and allow people to claim benefits to make up the difference. We shifted, essentially, from a welfare system based on bricks to one based on benefits, with “Right to Buy” the jewel in the monetarist crown. 

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At the same time, Thatcher made changes to the private rented sector: abolishing both rent control and security of tenure, which guaranteed tenants a new lease once the old one expired. Now, private landlords could raise rents as quickly as they liked and evict their charges at the end of a short-term tenancy for no reason at all. This was the beginning of the end: the security and community working class Londoners had built up was based on council housing. Thatcher’s moves would destroy those communities. 

The Conservative reforms came at the worst possible economic time for two reasons. First, the rapid deindustrialization of the economy, and the construction of a new financial sector in London, meant that the capital had become the center of the country’s wealth and employment. After enduring a steady decline in population for decades, the city’s population started to rise, and rapidly too, as people moved here for work. The number of Londoners has increased every year since 1988, neatly chiming with the financial Big Bang.

Then there was the global fall in interest rates, which occurred in the Nineties after Thatcher had moved on. This did several things. The first was to wreck people’s pension plans. No longer would their savings pay out enough for retirement. So they looked for another, secure destination for their money instead. And thanks to low rates, and a new financial product called the “buy-to-let mortgage”, created with the knowledge and blessing of government, there was an easy option: property in London. Millions began flowing into buying up homes in the capital: not to live in, but to rent out to the city’s growing population. I remember watching the numbers in the property section in the local paper rise to almost silly-sounding amounts: £100,000, £200,000, £300,000. How could anyone possibly afford these sums, just to live in? 

Then Tony Blair arrived, with a big Labour majority, in 1997. Things might have changed. We could have moved away from the Thatcherite focus on benefits and private landlords, back to the tradition of the 20th century: the construction of social housing on a large scale. But we didn’t. Tony Blair oversaw some of the lowest rates of council building since the “Addison Act” created the model of local authority-owned housing in 1919. New Labour did, to be fair, pump money into upgrading some social homes: but this came with strings attached. 

For one thing, councils had to transfer their homes to private social housing providers, or set up private management bodies to get hold of it. And though the money might have offered nice new kitchens and bathrooms, it didn’t address the fundamental problems with the fabric of aging housing estates. Strapped for cash, councils turned to another option: knocking them down and selling the sites to private builders to pay for a rebuild at higher density, with higher rents and more private housing. South London’s Aylesbury Estate — where Blair gave his first speech as leader — was slated for demolition in 2005. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the city was also changing. The arrival of a London mayoralty led to the elevation of Ken Livingstone. A veteran of local politics, Livingstone had been leader of the Greater London Council, until its abolition in 1986. This time around, Ken’s biggest idea was to build upwards. On his watch, dozens of new skyscrapers were signed off: The Gherkin, The Cheesegrater, The Shard — all these icons of capitalism started their journey under the auspices of Red Ken. 

But this caused a problem. As skyscrapers became increasingly common in London, the value of land on which they could be built exploded, jumping by 30% since the financial crisis alone. No longer would developers build rows of family-sized housing, as they had well into the 20th century. The land was just too expensive to make this model work any more. And with planning laws preventing the city from expanding outwards — the Green Belt has become a kind of religion for politicians of all parties — it would instead densify: with gargantuan office and apartment blocks popping up from Victoria to Croydon. The cost of building these towers, and indeed buying the land, meant they were never going to be affordable for families: even those who didn’t mind living in the clouds. 

All the while, London’s population was growing at an even faster rate. Blair, his confidence in free market absolutism, opted against a transition period for the “free movement of people”, when the EU expanded in 2004. Now, workers from all around Europe could come to what was one of the continent’s foremost economic centers. But there would not be housing for them when they arrived. So, instead, they piled into the private rented sector, driving the value up even higher for landlords and encouraging them not to rent out houses. Rather, they split them up into rooms to maximize their income. A house in London was now an extraordinarily valuable asset, with millions of cheaply-priced loans chasing every new “opportunity”. How could normal families, who just wanted somewhere to live and school for their kids, hope to compete? 

Then came the financial crisis and another opportunity to reset. The model we had followed to this point was plainly broken: wasn’t it time to try a new one? Instead, we would double down on our mistakes. The Bank of England responded to the crisis by cutting interest rates to historic lows and pumping money into the economy via quantitative easing. This meant that money rushed to safe assets, and property investors could borrow cheaply. Property in a Western capital with high demand for housing was the new gold. Speculative developments began to pull in billions from investors all around the world. A wall of investment money crashed into London’s market, sending the value of prices soaring yet higher. Suddenly, it was very easy to get stinking rich from building private housing in London and selling it off-plan in Hong Kong. 

But what these investors did not want was “affordable housing” — which cut their profits and lowered the attractiveness of the asset to investors. David Cameron’s coalition government obliged, introducing a system of “viability” which gave property developers a way to avoid their legal commitments to building affordable housing. Residential tower blocks piled up in the London skyline with hardly a unit of social flat in sight. Boris Johnson, as Livingstone’s successor as mayor, enthusiastically encouraged this trend: signing off projects boroughs had refused for containing too little affordable housing, selling off public land to private developers, and turning over government cash to help private developers build on new sites. 

At the same time, Cameron went further than Thatcher had in dismantling social housing. Grants for new social homes were cut to a third of even the historically low post-Thatcher rates. Budget cuts were also forced through ,which pushed social landlords to junk much-needed capital investment. Property increasingly fell into disrepair. A revitalization of Right to Buy saw the remaining decent stock sold off, and new build housing was let under a new “affordable rents” regime — which was still too high for the poorest to afford. Social housing, in the traditional sense, was completely residualized, while waiting times for a council home in London boroughs stretched into decades. 

And where Thatcher had elected to move from bricks to benefits, Cameron went a step further: cutting benefits as well. He prevented claimants from receiving anything more than the lowest third of the local market rate, and then froze that rate. This meant that as rents rose, the number of properties someone on benefits could afford rapidly shrank, even as many claimants were also holding down jobs. More and more families were duly evicted, and found they had no options for somewhere else to live. 

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The city started to sink into a permanent crisis, as young families escaped elsewhere. And if the London they left behind was physically unrecognizable from that of their parents — a cityscape of ugly prefab towers, built from plastic and steel — the capital’s housing crisis is now having a broader societal impact. So few young families can afford to live here, for instance, that the school system is collapsing. According to one recent study, London accounted for nine out of the ten areas nationally with the biggest drop in primary-age students, with Westminster Council closing three schools over the last five years. 

And even for those working-class Londoners clinging on, the situation is grim. These days, residents typically spend a stonking 41% of their incomes on rent. And if that inevitably has a stark economic impact, London’s culture has arguably been harmed too. Long gone are the days when struggling artists could find cheap digs in the city center — leaving plenty of time for music or writing or whatever else they had set their sights on. 

Over recent years, meanwhile, Covid has piled on even more pressure. In its aftermath, rents soared yet further, as a sudden surge in immigration due to post-Brexit reforms, a rise in international students, and an uptick affluent families seeking more space converged at the same moment — all while landlords were less willing to put their properties on the market. Sadiq Khan has done more than Boris to reverse the decline, starting off the first genuine program of council housing construction in the city since Thatcher. But he too has faltered, his build numbers dropping and his electoral promise of 50% affordable housing in new developments long forgotten. 

As for Khan’s colleagues in Whitehall, Labour has few answers either. New rental reforms will offer longer term security, but do little to help those who simply can’t pay the rent anymore. Extra money for social housing construction is welcome, but given the size of the challenge, it is too little and too late. The larger chunk of funding won’t be available until after 2030, which in practice means new homes are a decade away. That speaks to a broader failure: notwithstanding Keir Starmer’s pledge to build 1.5 million new homes nationwide by the end of this Parliament, planning approvals lately dropped to a record low. And so we have the London of today: unaffordable, atomized, sterile. Its communities dead or dying, the keys handed over to private landlords and property developers, my parents’ dream a distant memory. 

***

Peter Apps is the author of Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It, published on 25 September

We watched people come and go. Black and white, but mainly black. The estate was largely Afro-Caribbean, which is a problem when you’re perpetually accused of only stopping black people. A few of the pub-goers were known cannabis dealers. They saw our marked car and either sucked their teeth or pointed their fingers at us like pretend guns. “There you go,” said Stuart, nodding at a tall black man wearing a tracksuit. The man was leaving the beer garden, wreathed in sickly white smoke. “That’s my man.”

The thief-taker got out of the car and began reciting the catechism known to all police officers: “I can smell weed on you, mate. I’m gonna search you. Now, have you got anything in your pockets you shouldn’t have, anything sharp?” Then he continued with a heavily-abbreviated version of the information required under Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. The search led to the discovery of several wraps of crack and a quantity of cash. The man in the tracksuit was a dealer who the thief-taker had been keeping a beady eye on. And, yes, the scent of weed was the key to the door.

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I later tried the same trick myself. Stopping a suspect who smelled of weed, I searched him and found a car key. The suspect, who didn’t have a driving license, had “borrowed it”. Inside the car? A dozen freshly stolen leather jackets from a local motorcycle shop. I was no thief-taker, but then again the guy with the stolen jackets wasn’t exactly Moriarty, either.

The tactic is hardly a secret. London’s police are sanguine about cannabis use unless you’re — to put it bluntly — taking the piss. During my stint as a uniformed officer I was fairly liberal in my application of the law, but found it was a useful tool for catching bad guys. And, for some reason, petty criminals love weed. Sadly, such earthy truths offend the sensibilities of those in power. Which is presumably why Sadiq Khan’s recent review of drugs use in the capital recommends decriminalizing small quantities of cannabis for personal use. The review, which pompously treats London as an independent state rather than the UK’s capital city, was (of course) headed by an impeccably liberal lawyer and close friend of Tony Blair, Charlie Falconer. Falconer said officers use such tactics “disproportionately against black men”, and that the enforcing of drugs laws is an “incredible friction point between the police and black communities”.

The politics behind this review are typical of London’s mayor: performative, headline-grabbing, problematic for policing and designed to garner support from Labour’s base, especially younger voters. Unlike his predecessors, Khan’s support for the Met has been equivocal, despite policing being one of his only significant Mayoral powers (the other is transport).

Khan is the third London mayor since the role was created. I have been an officer under all three London mayors, of whom Khan has been the most unhelpful to policing. Ken Livingstone, despite his reputation as a Left-winger, understood the importance of robustly policing a capital city. Boris Johnson had the good sense to subcontract policing to his more capable deputies and, eventually, to get rid of the lackluster police chief Sir Ian Blair. What of Sir Sadiq? His opportunism is shameless yet instructive. How so? Delve into the small print and you’ll see how, practically, his proposals are unworkable. The Mayor said: “The report makes a compelling, evidence-based case for the decriminalization of possession of small quantities of natural cannabis, which the Government should consider.”

This is where the proposal falls apart, or perhaps the mask slips. Small quantities of natural cannabis? Patrol officers would be required to become mobile pharmacologists. All arrests for drug possession are usually “on suspicion of”, because, at the moment they seize the drug, officers can’t evidentially prove precisely what it is. Another difficulty is that, compared to other drugs, cannabis covers a wide spectrum, from brain-rotting psychoactive skunk to the sort of mellow, artisan weed smoked by surfer dudes on Cornish beaches. How, in the rain, at 2am, is a police officer meant to know the difference? This betrays the report’s likelier purpose: the police officer isn’t meant to stop and search in the first place. Just leave the kids alone! Perhaps I’m a natural cynic. Or perhaps I’m simply a keen student of Sadiq Khan’s approach to Ulez “evidence-gathering”, whereby his strident claims about air pollution and congestion were found wanting. Either way, this looks more like an attack on stop and search as a tactic.

What we should pay attention to is the direction of travel. Stop and search is a totemic issue for progressives, and always has been. Is it always fairly applied? No. Is it necessary? Yes. Is Sadiq Khan prepared to tackle the reasons why stop and search is so contested, or simply pander to his political base? I would, were I able, lock Sir Sadiq in a room and make him watch the third season of David Simon’s TV epic The Wire. Written by progressive creatives for a largely progressive audience, The Wire is nonetheless the best drama ever produced on urban policing. The episode titled “Amsterdam” concerns the consequences of an experiment in decriminalizing drugs in order to ease community tension and treat addiction as a health issue. The experiment goes badly wrong when gangs realize parts of Baltimore have essentially turned into a free-fire zone, a place where they can ply their trade unhindered by local officers.

As ever, though, British politicians trail their American counterparts by five to 10 years. American cities have experimented with varying degrees of drugs liberalization in cities such as Portland and Los Angeles, with predictably dystopian results. The criminal ecosystem, the real one as opposed to the one described by academics, thrives on weakness of any kind. A city weakening its stop-and-search policies for small amounts of drugs, as the Americans discovered, has a cumulative (if not intended) effect as users and dealers drag with them their associated social problems. Portland was transformed from an artsy, bohemian city into an open-air drug market and refugee camp for the addicted homeless. Los Angeles and San Francisco, with their lax prosecutors and defanged police, became lawless paradises for shoplifters and robbers.

Even San Francisco, America’s most liberal city, has had enough. Its Democrats have rediscovered the benefits of robust policing, prosecution and sentencing. The lax policing was an inheritance from the academic revulsion at the “Zero Tolerance” policies of the early Nineties, whereby law enforcement targeted minor offenses. The approach was viewed by criminologists as oppressive and ineffective, a verdict that ignored the “lived experience”, usually so respected by academics, of people living in communities blighted by criminality and antisocial behavior.

This light-touch style of policing is finally going back out of fashion. Naturally, the academics concerned have yet to admit they were wrong — just that their pet policies “haven’t been implemented properly”. Predictably, the milquetoast British College of Policing also reviles Zero Tolerance law enforcement.

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Alternatively, closer to home, Sadiq could simply Google Brian Paddick, the real-life police commander who posited legalizing cannabis in the interests of “community relations”. This isn’t to unnecessarily disparage Brian, who in my experience was a fundamentally decent man. Serving in Brixton in the early Eighties, he became evangelical about reforming stop and search. The results of his experiment in what I’ll call “Total Tolerance” are disputed, but like the Mayor’s review, it was about much more than implementing drugs laws. It was, again, about a direction of travel, part of the ouroboros of a debate between “robust” versus “soft” policing. The answers are, of course, situational, complex and uncomfortable. This reality is too often lost on policymakers.

My experience suggests that drugs laws are like speed limits. If you set the motorway limit at 70mph, invariably the police (although not money-grubbing cameras) will usually turn a blind eye until you hit 90-ish. Why? Resources. Discretion. Common sense. It’s the same with minor drugs offenses. Politicians like Sadiq Khan don’t really like stop and search. They don’t trust the police, either. Why doesn’t Khan simply say so? Or would that involve opening fresh cans of worms about police funding, training, recruitment and leadership? Including, of course, the Mayor’s. He is, after all, the de facto Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater London.

The wheel goes round and round… and where will it stop? We all know, actually, but that never deters progressives like Khan from trying another spin. In the meantime, the Mayor has his headline for the day. The quangocrats of his drugs review board will have been paid their stipends. The slow, inexorable creep of progressive policymaking continues, only ever heading toward one destination: failure.

Meanwhile, for operational police officers, the mood music is clear. It’s also clear to the activists seeking to undermine or even defund the police. All parties know that stop and search is something frowned upon by the powers-that-be. Should something go wrong, an officer is unlikely to be defended by those at the top. All this means that thief-takers like Stuart are no longer welcome in London’s police. Parts of London already resemble cannabis-stinking favelas. Perhaps, until Sadiq Khan notes the lessons from Portland and elsewhere, that’s where the city’s future lies.

Unlike the high-rise “transactional” cities of New York, Chicago and San Francisco, all groaning under record levels of vacancy and massive investor losses, London never had an official “downtown”, with all major business clustered in dense formations. Rather, as one observer noted in 1843, London’s development occurred organically, surrounding “itself suburb by suburb like onions 50 to rope”. Of course, parts of central London have suffered significant losses — see Canary Wharf and Spitalfields — but the capital’s archipelago of villages have mostly survived. Far more than its great American rivals, London is actually increasing its population.

This, let’s not forget, comes in the wake of Brexit, which many feared would turn the City into a tertiary player. Yet even here, despite the loss of listings from some prominent firms such as ARM, London is thriving: it has since welcomed the financial powerhouses of Bloomberg, Citadel and Alantra into its embrace.

Crucial to London’s success is its prospering technology and media industries, which, notes Tony Travers, a visiting professor at LSE, increasingly drive the capital’s economy. Its creative sector, for instance, now accounts for almost 15% of jobs in London, up from 11% in 2010. In the realm of tech, one recent study suggested that London beats New York and San Francisco. Indeed, Microsoft plans to open an AI hub in the city, part of a $2.5-billion investment strategy, following other firms such as OpenAI. According to the Harvard Business Review, this makes London both first in the world for talent attraction and the top destination for foreign investment in financial and professional services.

None of this is to say that London’s streets are paved with gold. Flick through the capital’s Evening Standard and you’ll find report after report about surges in crime. Even so, notes Munira Mirza, who served as policy director for former prime minister and London mayor Boris Johnson: “London is doing better in many ways than a lot of US cities… But for Londoners, the perception is that crime, street cleanliness, housing costs, road congestion, etc, have been getting worse because public services and infrastructure have not expanded to match the growing population.”

And yet, she observes, overall crime rates have fallen under London’s last three mayors and, in terms of crime and anti-social behaviour, levels are well below the national average. Travers partly credits this to the fact that the UK has not experienced an American-style “opioid crisis” or “defund-the-police moment”. As a result, London saw 104 homicides last year, equivalent to 12 per million people, compared to 45.4 per million in New York, one of America’s safer cities.

A similar story is playing out in London’s classrooms, particularly when it comes to ethnic-minority performance. In one diverse district in Chicago, not one student can do grade-level math. According to data from the Illinois State Board of Education, 30 schools last year, 22 of which are in the Chicago area, failed to lift even one student to grade-level reading.

In London, by contrast, state schools are consistently improving, particularly in recently developed free schools. Moreover, immigrants are actually lifting the performance of London’s state schools above their counterparts in the rest of the country. “London’s schools are better now because of the immigrants,” suggests Mirza. The proximity of world-class universities — in London, Cambridge and Oxford — not only helps jumpstart elite industries such as tech and media, but has also attracted generations of ambitious foreigners who then choose to stay in London.

It is difficult to imagine how any rival city-states — including Singapore — could operate so successfully without the interference of a powerful central bureaucracy. In Dubai, there is no real recourse from the wrath of Sheikh Mohammed. In India, corruption, pollution and lower life expectancy make Mumbai or Delhi less than likely locales for rich investors and skilled professionals. Beirut was once promising, but is now largely a sectarian ruin. As for Latin America, even business-friendly Sao Paolo is now in poor repute.

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Similarly, none of the other huge Asian cities — Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei — are likely to become sufficiently cosmopolitan to compete with London or New York. All remain essentially insular, with few migrants and a culture that is less than welcoming to outsiders. During the Eighties, it was possible to imagine Tokyo, driven by the rapid expansion of the Japanese economy, to claim a top spot — but today, despite its wealth and size, few would consider it a dominant international capital. Worse yet are the prospects for China’s cities, as well as CCP-strangled Hong Kong, arguably the most likely hotspot for Asian capital and once among the most valued office markets in the world.

Perhaps the least appreciated advantage of London lies in its historical inertia. “London,” wrote Ford Madox Ford in 1905, “is the world town, not because of its immense size but its assimilative powers.” In just one generation, the French Huguenot, the eastern European Jew, the Hindu brahmin, Muslim merchant, the Sikh soldier, the Caribbean or African can all become Londoners, all attracted, as Ford put it, “a glamour like that of a great and green gaming table”.

This stems from two foundational factors: the legacy of Empire and, more importantly, the notions of due process, privacy and property. It is here that London particularly diverges from its offspring in the developing world, and even, to some extent, in North America. London, whose origins lie in Roman Britain, simply projects the old Latin concept of civitas better than any of its rivals.

In the past, the capital, like many other older cities, pushed its version of modernity, with high-rise towers and the promotion of “swinging London” deployed as a rebuke to its stiffer imperial past. Yet it also fostered a web of relations and open attitudes, making London a natural home for migrants, rich and poor. Although some ethnic communities still cluster, largely in Britain’s north, London’s newcomers are now part of the municipal fabric. There are few of the banlieues one sees in Paris. “You don’t get a lot of the ghetto vibe here,” observes Mirza.

Mayor Sadiq Khan, himself the son of an immigrant bus driver, may be less than competent, but he is no Bill de Blasio, who worked overtime to destroy New York, or Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, America’s leading urban arsonist. The capital has its problems, but it continues to prosper: a city whose past paradoxically guarantees its future. London, as the saying goes, is a bad habit to lose.

Lamé was hired in 2016 as part of Sadiq Khan’s “plan to turn London into a leading 24-hour global city”, her job being to “champion nightlife and nurture our night time economy”. Since then, some of her more ill-disposed critics have pointed out that she doesn’t seem to have done much to “nurture” London’s night-time economy — apart, that is, from presiding over an impressive salary hike for Night Czars employed by London’s Mayoral Office.

The real challenge when you’re placed in a cushy political role, with negligible power and no prospect of remedying the social ill for which your job has been designed, is sensing when to declare victory. Lamé, it turns out, can’t do this properly either. In a widely ridiculed recent op-ed defending her record, she madly proclaimed London “the best 24-hour city in the world”, one whose “world-renowned nightlife” had left “other global cities looking to [it] for inspiration”. Sitting rather uneasily alongside this vapid triumphalism was repeated acknowledgement of the “huge challenges” London’s night-time economy nonetheless faces.

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Apparently banking on the fact that no one watching had ever visited another major city, Lamé doubled down on this baffling line in a follow-up interview with the BBC. London, she insisted, was a “truly 24-hour city”. When the awkward question arose of what exactly London’s 24-hour economy consisted of, Lamé’s puzzling first suggestion was people “working for the NHS” — the implication being that, because it is still possible late at night to travel across the capital by ambulance, London is a thriving metropolis. It is difficult to know what makes this defiant style of political gaslighting seem a good idea, even when you bear in mind that Lamé had to account for herself somehow. The claim that London is “the best” 24-hour city in the world isn’t just false — it involves obvious presupposition failure. London is simply not up and running half the time.

Consider, as I often do, drinking. Has London ever been a more hostile environment for late-evening drinkers than it is now? Wander into a London pub at any point after dark, and more likely than not your offer to trade money for alcohol will be met with the familiar vitriolic shake of the barman’s head that conveys the response: “Are you mad? It’s almost 9:30 on a Thursday evening, of course we’re closed.” Over the years, I have gone to simply extraordinary lengths to prolong an evening of drinking in London. I have dashed about town on the shakiest of speculations that some-place-this-guy-knows might still be open. I have climbed into strange taxis with taxing strangers. I have posed as a guest in hotel bars. Seeing no alternative, I have allowed myself to be bullied into nightclubs so unpleasant that no amount of alcohol short of a lethal dosage could alleviate the misery of being there.

On one particularly dispiriting evening, my friends and I once completed the paperwork necessary to join a members-only casino just so that they’d let us carry on drinking their past midnight, a short while after which we were asked to leave for not gambling enough. Dragged against my will in the early hours to a club staffed by topless dancers who seemed to be under instruction to target aloof customers, I found myself explaining, as camply as seemed necessary, that, unlikely as it might sound, I was actually just there for the conversation and the £14 bottles of Heineken. “Everybody gets a dance,” came the ominous reply, as reinforcement hostesses advanced towards me like gunboats out of the half-darkness. I begged; I pleaded incoherently to just be allowed to sit and drink; and somewhere out in the night I could hear the sound of Amy Lamé cashing another enormous cheque.

What kind of society imposes such frightening costs on law-abiding citizens? Dr Johnson conjectured that a man tired of London must be tired of life. But he didn’t know about Sadiq Khan’s “24-hour London Vision”. Today, it is only those who against all the odds haven’t quite given up on living whom London is still able to routinely terrorise and disappoint. Time a midweek visit correctly — either quite early or quite late — and swathes of central London take on a practically post-apocalyptic atmosphere: the streets deserted, the lifeless city resembling a monumental abandoned film-set which you can stamp around like Philip Seymour Hoffman in the closing scenes of Synecdoche New York, wondering whether anyone else has noticed how unhinged things have become.

To make the situation more maddening, the underlying causes of London’s nightlife problem aren’t hard to grasp. The scarcely credible fact that London does not have a network-wide 24-hour underground system discourages businesses from operating, and people from socialising, late in the evening. You can read the deadweight loss off the empty streets. The few places that make a point of staying open late have a captive, self-selected, audience and can be as nasty and expensive as they like.

Civilised nightlife dies under these constraints. In the last three years, 1,100 bars and clubs have closed in London. Added to this, the kind of bars, clubs and pubs that you’d want to stay open are terrorised by local authorities, which allow a small number of hostile actors to behave like veto players over late-night activity: withholding licences, bullying businesses with excess regulation, and ministering to Nimbyist instincts about noise and activity even in the densest and most central parts of London.

It is important not to forget what a manifestly unnatural constraint this is to impose on city life. If there aren’t going to be late-opening bars and restaurants in, say, Soho, then these things aren’t going to be anywhere. And if this is the case, it is not at all obvious what the distinctive function of a city is supposed to be. On that framing, it is no longer true that part of the implicit bargain of city-dwelling is that one sacrifices private space and income in the expectation that one is compensated by a hospitable and vibrant public realm.

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All of this raises the question of why anyone would put up with the dysfunctional, life-denying norms that have degraded London’s nightlife. It is tempting to think that the only psychologically sustainable response towards such constraints is complacent acceptance. Perhaps we have become accustomed to thinking of it as a brute inevitability that, mid-conversation and at some point around 10pm, the bells sound out across London, the dentist-chair lighting snaps on, and everyone is instructed to leave — initiating the hard-transition to somewhere grosser, more expensive and further away. It doesn’t help, of course, that the horrors and privations of London’s nightlife are felt mainly by the young, a group which in recent years has revealed itself to have only the feeblest grip on its collective interest as a political class.

One predictable reaction to this dismal picture of youth culture is the sort of self-congratulatory bullet-biting that comes so naturally to the proponents of contemporary public-health moralism. Drinking, carousing, casual sex: these things are bad for you, unhealthy, inherently risky. Better, in the image of Amy Lamé’s London, to have a night-time economy staffed principally by health workers keeping alive a population with increasingly little to live for. On the moralist’s view, what might feel like personal deprivation, and the frustration of natural instincts, is in fact all in the service of the theoretic collective good.

During lockdown, many young people self-consciously welcomed the disappearance of Fomo — complacently satisfied by the knowledge that everyone was having as bad a time as they were. Even at the time, it was clear that this reaction expressed a mistakenly parochial view of what counts as missing out. Whole groups and cities, as well as individuals, can miss out if they try hard enough.

Travelling around the borders of London’s outer periphery, there are many scenes like this. Here is English Suburbia with its mock Tudor housing, cosy box gardens and high streets embellished with the faint traces of Victoriana. Once it dreamt of eternally sleeping between the city and the country. Now it finds itself in the throes of a quiet upheaval.

Over the past decade it has become an unlikely receptacle for one of the country’s more decisive demographic and socioeconomic changes. Record immigration into London and its surrounding areas, as well as a millennial generation unable to become home-owners, have defined an exodus that has brought London with it. Driven by the long-term trend of gentrification in the capital and the post-pandemic rental crisis, they are arriving in places such as Worcester Park, pitching up with their flat-pack furniture, overdrafts and low expectations.

And so a wave of building, hoping to mop up these emigres from the capital, has also begun to redefine these areas. Clustering around the train stations, high streets, converted libraries, churches and even hospitals are the sites of many of the country’s newest housing developments. “Have you ever been to Japan?” says one elderly resident of Harold Hill in London’s Zone 5, standing next to a dribbling fountain outside the newest set of flats. “It’s like bloody Tokyo over there in the morning,” he says, pointing to the station that marks the end of the Elizabeth Line.

“I wish we could just stay as Essex,” says Dan, a sales manager, outside the Tesco next to Harold Hill’s newest development, a stone’s throw from Amersham Road where Thatcher once did PR for her right-to-buy policy. “You have a situation now where those born here can’t afford to buy houses. They’re being pushed out of the area entirely by people wanting to live in London. It’s not right. There’s just no sense of community here anymore.” And what of the mayor, who with the recent Ulez expansion seems to be extending the capital’s political control into these areas too? “Sadiq Khan is a fucking wanker. He shouldn’t be telling us what to do out here.”

This is a growing sentiment on London’s outer periphery. In a pub down the road from the line of would-be renters in Worcester Park, those who missed out on a room come face to face with a mood that is distinctly Ballardian. Khan’s Ulez policy, perhaps symbolically, has split the area in two, half in the domain of London, half in Surrey. “Some of the best news I’ve heard all year,” says one man, when there is mention of the improvised explosive device that gutted a Ulez camera in Sidcup.

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Travelling east, towards London’s Kent border, I go in search of the Sidcup vigilantes, who’ve also been caught on camera chopping down Ulez cameras with angle grinders. This used to be the land of Mondeo Man, the Thatcherite archetype that had escaped the confines of the traditional working class into a realm of propertied affluence. On the train down from London Bridge, the capital’s sprawl slowly transitions into the markers of that semi-rural home owning dream: allotments marked with Union Jacks; gardens strewn with abandoned paddling pools; the debris of family life laid out on synthetic lawns.

“We had to sell two cars, and we’ve been left out of pocket,” says Steve in a cafe on the high street when I ask about Ulez. But the policy teases out deeper emotions: this is also no longer “a place that felt leafy and green, like in the countryside”, says his wife Linda. They first moved here in 1994, and when asked about the changes, they insist it’s still a nice place to live — it’s just become a lot more “busy”. The couple now find themselves holding the line against these trends, resisting the developers who are carving “beautiful old Victorian houses” into flats to fit the cosmopolitan wave of single-owner occupancies, a trend that has seen the ONS predicting one in seven people could be living alone by 2039. They have already turned down numerous offers on their house. “It’s sad,” says Linda. “It seems like soon there won’t be any houses for families to move into left.”

Outside the café, I find some of the arrivals now living in the rented properties that are starting to redefine Sidcup. A trio of international students from Nepal studying at Ravensbourne College near Greenwich look slightly confused when I ask them whether Sidcup has met their expectations of studying in one of London’s universities. “We have just arrived and we are exploring the area,” they say. “We cannot believe how expensive it is, even to live outside of London.” Nearby I find Chloe, a self-employed painter-decorator who is also renting. My questions about the local community receive a decisive answer. “I’ve been to places where everyone’s friendly, but walking down the high street everyone has a face like a slapped arse.”

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The same mood permeates the Surrey town of Sutton, where recently built apartment high-rises tower over a high street still marked with the quaint signage of an English market town. This is another area stuck between two competing visions of life on the edge of the London metropolis. Articles in local newspapers have even appeared interrogating the question: “Is Sutton in London or Surrey?” Down the road in Epsom, speculation on Reddit about plans to turn London into a mega-city of 20 million people has touched a nerve, prompting a flurry of articles expressing horror at the idea of the Surrey town losing its identity.

“It’s a bit like Blade Runner but without the science fiction,” says Richard on the high street when I ask him about life here. A reference to a hyper-technological dystopia might seem a bit far-fetched for a town whose main attraction is the National Trust property Morden Park Hall. But he is really talking about his living situation: a small room alongside two dozen strangers in a converted care home. Politicians are already trying to court this discontent, hoping to disrupt the Conservative rule in these areas. “The Surrey Shifter” has appeared on the lips of Liberal Democrat and Labour activists seeking to attract millennials who now find themselves in these Tory suburbs but are locked out of a stable home-owning contract. But even among the new arrivals who have tried to inherit London’s suburban dream, there are difficulties. “The mortgage has gone through the roof,” says Daniel in his late 30s, who recently purchased a semi-detached property near Epsom. “Moving out at this rate is not exactly off the cards.”

These changes on London’s periphery touch on a more existential question about England itself. Will its future generations be able to replicate the stability of the traditional suburb, or will they inherit something entirely different, a place increasingly dictated by upheaval from the global-facing metropolis? England’s futurists, stretching as far back as H.G. Wells, have always toyed with this question. In his short story, “The Argonauts of the Air”, Wells foresaw Worcester Park as an Edwardian village which had nonetheless become the rural setting for one of the capital’s spaceports. “The London Citizen by the year 2000 a.d.”, he went on to predict in a 1902 essay on the growth of cities, “may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb”.

Today, his vision resembles something of an Anglo-Futurist fantasy. Journeying towards the end of London’s various commuting routes, it is instead the writing of the Georgian reactionary William Cobbett that touches on the local discontent. A great defender of English arcadia, in 1830 he foresaw the expansion of London as the “great wen” — nothing more than a sebaceous cyst, poised to gradually leak its urban discontents into the shires of England. And, looking at areas already conquered by London sprawl ends, this rings true. “Epsom is becoming the new Croydon,” says Matthew, one commuter in his 50s when I ask him where London ends and the Home Counties begin.

Faced with the end of the metroland dream, Labour have explicitly stated a desire to build on the green belt surrounding the city, a prospect which delights many faced with an endemic housing crisis. But further expansion into this area will inevitably rub up against an already existing sense of de-gentrification on London’s suburban periphery. In recent years it is the geographer Phil A. Neel who captures the changes to these areas best, struggling homeowners and gig-economy workers who find themselves lost in the “foothills descending from the summit of the megacity”. In Neel’s understanding, those on the edge of these urban centres are defined not by the cultural and economic stability that once came with suburbia, but instead find themselves increasingly at the whim of the global city and its “obscure machinations”. And nowhere is this more transparent than in this zone of disquiet that now orbits the capital. For here, New Britain has gone in search of a new home, bringing with them a question that seems to increasingly define these parts: where exactly does London end?

But is he really the best candidate to speak about sexism? This is the same man who dropped Joan Smith from her role as Co-Chair of the Mayor’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board without explanation, although it is thought to have been because she has campaigned against giving biological men access to women-only refuges. Khan, like so many prominent Left-wing men, is on the “trans women are women” side in the gender war; he appears not to understand what sex is.

The gender wars have proved useful for these men over the past few years. They have used the issue to firmly and incessantly position themselves as progressive superheroes, bending over backwards to be seen as supporting the oppressed and marginalised at all times. These men signal their support for Black Lives Matter — and spout, at every opportunity, “trans women are women”. But scratch the surface of Left Man and you will find all kinds of hypocrisy.

Left Man uses liberal feminism as a smokescreen to mask his misogyny. He is unwaveringly committed to the “sex work is work” and “porn is empowering” ideologies. So long as there are a few female voices claiming that women freely choose to rent out their body parts for men’s one-sided sexual pleasure, the social structures that underpin porn and prostitution worldwide — the racism, colonialism and misogyny — can be set aside.

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While men on the Right tend not to bother pretending to support feminism, progressive men not only claim to be feminists, but also then try to dictate feminism’s terms. Recently, in the interval of a play exploring the history of racism in the US, I heard a white, bearded dude shout, “my feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit”. He was sitting with a group of mates, sipping real ale, and I heard mumbles of “transphobia” and “TERFs”.

The mantra that the young man shouted out was coined by Flavia Dzodan who, in her scathing critique of feminism, argued that “intersectionality” means including men in the category of women, and celebrating prostitution. It is a twisted version of the original definition, which was created by the feminist law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the specific challenges faced by black American women in the workplace. If you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of oppression and exclusion, Crenshaw argued, you are likely to get hit by both.

The shouty beard at the theatre brought home to me what a gift Dzodan’s bastardisation of Crenshaw’s concept has been to so many men on the Left. They get to look progressive, while still disdaining women.

Likewise, as Tom Farr, a lawyer and pro-feminist campaigner against violence against women says, the reason so many white men are keen to attach their name to anti-racism activism is because they can look as though they are challenging their privilege without actually doing anything. They have precious little awareness when it comes to their own racism — or indeed their sexism.

“The championing of ‘sex work’, which is in part built upon the racist objectification of black women, makes it clear these men care not one iota for deconstructing their actual privilege”, says Farr. “But to actively challenge sexism and misogyny they would be required to change their behaviour and own up to their own contribution to male oppression and exploitation of women”. They can virtue signal about ending racism, but to work towards ending misogyny, they would have to give up the advantages associated with their male privilege, and their right to treasured modes of sexual release.

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Some men get it, and their genuine commitment to tackling misogyny shines a light on the posturers. Robert Jensen, the author of The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (2017), believes that men on the Left who celebrate pornography and prostitution tend to downplay the prevalence and devastating effects of rape and other forms of violence against women. It is no longer possible for men on the Left to claim that racism, economic or global inequality is irrelevant to their work, he tells me, “but men on the left can, and routinely do, ignore the relevance of patriarchy”. He writes not only about the misogyny explicit in pornography, but also the racism; unlike many men on the Left, Jensen understands Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, and is able to apply it.

But for every man like Jensen, there are ten like Owen Jones. The leftist uber bro insists he is a massive supporter of feminism, while defending men’s use of pornography, despite its inherent racism and obvious harms to women. Jones has even defended MPs and judges — our public servants — accessing it during office hours, because however much men like Jones want to be seen as on the right side of history, they will almost always defend the right of men to debase women. As Jones himself said, magnanimously forgiving the disgraced judges, “There’s clearly a sound argument that judges should be doing their jobs, not getting off on porn. Fair enough, but there’s all sorts of procrastination that goes on in the workplace.”

Men tend to bond over sexual entitlement, and porn specifically. The American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson waxed lyrical about the commendable anti-racist values of Hugh Hefner — the pimp and pornographer responsible for transforming images of women being sexually degraded from a niche market into mainstream entertainment. Hefner “featured” black women in his pornography, because selling the racist stereotype of “exotic” women to white men makes money. Jackson was thrilled to be interviewed in Hefner’s flagship porn rag Playboy, and in an article following Hefner’s death in 2017 lauded him thus: “Very few whites associated with blacks publicly. But Hefner opened his nightclubs to African-American performers and patrons.”

Hefner hated women and referred to them as “dogs”. But boys stick together and damn those bitches that make a fuss about being degraded and abused. It is almost as if they only support social justice movements in which men have a stake. Or, as feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon put it, “It seems that if your oppression is also done to a man, you are more likely to be recognized as oppressed, as opposed to inferior”. As these men of the Left might put it, it’s bros before hoes.

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And, in their quest to put men first, they tell actual feminists how to do feminism properly — using intersectionality, again, to silence women. There was a particularly egregious example at Washington’s march against Trump in 2017. Perched on a plinth above the crowds were two young white men, sporting smug expressions, standing either side of two young black women. The men were holding the poles of a huge banner bearing the slogan “White feminism was built on the back of women of colour”. The imagery is clear, and straight out of the Marvel Universe: Left Man saves the poor powerless heroine, while pouring scorn on the lady villains of “white feminism”. This is a toxic combination of white knighting and virtue signalling, covered by a progressive smokescreen.

And you can see this toxic mix guiding policy. Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch (and a highly paid white man), has lobbied for the removal of all laws pertaining to prostitution, including pimping and brothel owning. When criticised by feminists (including black women) for his support of the sex trade, Roth erected a façade woven from arguments about free choice, and economic empowerment for women from the Global South. “All want to end poverty, but in meantime why deny poor women the option of voluntary sex work?” tweeted Roth. To which sex-trade survivor Rachel Moran responded with: “Wouldn’t you say, if a person cannot afford to feed themselves, the appropriate thing to put in their mouth is food, not your cock?”

But patriarchy is depressingly resilient. It can thrive in all sorts of environments. “As a member of the Labour Party my whole adult life, I’ve always taken it for granted that lefties were the progressives ones, and the racism and sexism was left to the nasty party (the Tory’s)”, says Lucy Masoud, a former firefighter who was one of the very few black elected officials in the Fire Brigade Union, and the only black lesbian. Like many feminists, she is sick of the new breed of progressive man. “They describe themselves as ‘cis’ and hang around in Dalston drinking stout and declaring that trans women are women. But under all the faux progressiveness always lays the same entitled misogynist.”

What worries me, a life-long leftist, is how much power and influence Left Man has over young women looking to find their way as feminists. It is hard to see and believe that these men are seeking only to protect their own interests. But these sexists in sheep’s clothing can’t be allowed to set the agenda.

The Government has announced new measures to “flush out the oligarchs, criminals and kleptocrats who think they can use UK property to hide their illicitly obtained wealth”. But let’s be honest: these people don’t “think” they can use UK property in this way — they know they can, which is why they’ve been doing so on a massive scale.

According to the anti-corruption campaigners, Transparency International, £6.7 billion in “questionable funds” have been invested in UK property since 2016 — £1.5 billion of which was bought by Russians accused of corruption or links to the Kremlin. No wonder that London is a described as a “laundromat” for “suspicious wealth”.

Boris Johnson may claim that “there is no place for dirty money in the UK” but, quite obviously, the UK has been — and still is — a place for dirty money. And the Government is now struggling to do anything about it. Yesterday, Keir Starmer confronted the Prime Minister: “Why are we giving Putin’s cronies 18 months to quietly launder their money out of UK property?”

Good question. Back in 2016, the Government hosted a “landmark” anti-corruption summit at Lancaster House in London. David Cameron, Prime Minister at the time, was very clear about what Britain would do: “First, we will expose corruption so there is nowhere to hide.”

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His specific pledge was to create a “new public register of beneficial ownership” for foreign companies operating in the UK. Instead of hiding behind shell companies and other legal smokescreens, “everyone in the world will be able to see who really owns and controls each and every company”. An accompanying press release promised that this “will include companies who already own property in the UK, not just those wishing to buy”. And to emphasise Britain’s leadership on this matter, it was stated that “this will be the first register of its kind anywhere in the world”.

Well, it might have been had ministers got on with the job; but they dawdled. This week, Boris Johnson finally committed his government to the necessary measures. “We are going faster and harder to tear back the façade,” he said. Let’s hope so — because it’s been almost six years since the Tories promised the property register and it hasn’t happened yet.

In 1085, William the Conqueror ordered a Great Survey, which covered every county of England and named over 13,000 places. Yet William’s surveyors completed their work — which became the Domesday Book — in 1086.

It seems ridiculous that its modern-day equivalent should take so much longer. Admittedly, there are nearly 100,000 properties owned by foreign companies in the UK. Establishing their true ownership is no small task. But that’s all the more reason why the effort should have started years ago. Why then was it delayed?

We can’t really blame David Cameron. Hosting the corruption summit was one of his last acts as PM. Can we blame his successor? Did Theresa May drop the idea when she took over? No, it continued as official policy under her administration — and also Boris Johnson’s. Rather, the problem was the glacial pace of implementation. 

There was a consultation 2017, followed by a draft bill — and yet more consultation. In 2018, the Government expressed its intention for the register to be operational by 2021. That deadline was missed. In fact, until the events of last week, the necessary legislation hadn’t even been scheduled. When pressed to do so, ministers just answered that “we will legislate when parliamentary time allows”. 

This week, a panicked Government pulled its finger out and by Tuesday, the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill made its long overdue appearance. It’s as if it were already drafted, ready-and-waiting to go — so why did it take Putin’s bloody war to prompt ministers to act?

Some might suspect undue influence, but there’s no need for conspiracy theories. The Government’s inactions are consistent with this country’s general lack of transparency over property ownership. 

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For instance, it should be possible to go to an official website and freely access a map showing exactly who owns every piece of land in the country. But you can’t. For a fee, the Land Registry does provide limited information on individual plots. However, to get this data for the whole of England and Wales would be extortionately expensive. Guy Shrubsole — author of Who Owns England? — puts the cost at £72 million. 

Even then, about a sixth of the land in this country isn’t registered at all. There is no requirement that it has to be, unless sold or inherited. The Government could put this right if wanted to — for instance by requiring registration as a condition of receiving farm subsidies — but it hasn’t. Indeed, far from empowering the Land Registry, there were two attempts (while George Osborne was Chancellor) to flog it off to the highest bidder. Fortunately, the privatisation was cancelled by Osborne’s successor, Philip Hammond.

True transparency isn’t just about who owns the land, but also about who controls it. In particular, we need a public register of land options — legal agreements which give property developers an exclusive right to purchase potential building sites. The urgency is that options enable land-banking — the practice of sewing up the supply of potential building sites so that property developers can ration the supply of new housing to the market.  

In 2016, one Cabinet minister, Sajid Javid, had the guts to condemn the land-bankers. Measures to improve transparency were subsequently proposed. But, true to form, the Government has yet to follow through. In fact, it hasn’t even responded to the public consultation which closed in October 2020. 

It’s as if ministers don’t want to blow the lid on the murky world of British property. And no wonder. Government policy still operates on the basis that escalating property prices are a good thing. And nothing can be allowed to get in the way. For instance, Rishi Sunak wasted billions of pounds on propping up the housing market during the pandemic — when it clearly didn’t need any help.

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By Aris Roussinos

Encouraging overseas investment in British property is an integral part of this insane, inflationary obsession. The Tier 1 Investor Visa scheme is a prime example. Introduced under Gordon Brown in 2008, the idea was to dish out visas on the condition that the recipient invested at least a million pounds in the UK economy. Needless to say, no distinction was drawn between job-creating investment and property speculation which only pushes up the cost of housing. 

Last month, after years of criticism, the scheme was finally shut down with “immediate effect”. Apparently, the Government was concerned that the route was being exploited by money launderers and other criminals. Nothing gets past the Home Office.

Of course, I’m not saying that the London property market is entirely sustained by foreign corruption and criminality. Most of the money that flows into it — including overseas sources — is above board.

Yet this is an under-taxed and under-regulated industry that provides an ideal environment for the world’s worst people. And for what? Inflating land values enriches the wealthy, while those without property — especially the young — pay the price. Our economy is weakened and our democracy damaged.

When William I ordered his Great Survey, it was an act of domination — of taking control of a conquered land. A modern-day Domesday Book would be the precise opposite: a means by which we take back control of our own country.

This might seem an uncontroversial policy for organisations providing accommodation for female victims of domestic violence — but that was far from the case. Research by Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of an organisation that supports victims of domestic violence in Hampshire, found that service providers “understood that they risked their funding if they spoke up in objection to trans women in female-only spaces”.

And so in the summer of 2020, I wrote to Sophie Linden, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, warning her about the chilling effect of Sadiq Khan’s mantra that ‘trans women are women’ on organisations that might seek funding from City Hall. I didn’t get the clear assurance I sought so in October that year I wrote to the Mayor, asking whether he believes that single-sex spaces are lawful in certain circumstances and necessary for the protection of the most vulnerable women in London.

It should have been an easy question to answer: back in 2009, when he was a Labour MP, Khan voted for what became the 2010 Equality Act and its list of exemptions, one of which allows organisations to provide single-sex spaces. In my letter to the Mayor, I said we are entitled to know if he has changed his mind about a piece of legislation that’s vital for the protection of women. That was sixteen months ago — and he still hasn’t replied.

My sacking as Co-chair of the VAWG Board came the following summer. I was aghast at the insensitive way it was done — by email, on a Friday afternoon when the entire country was stunned by a horrific mass shooting in Plymouth the previous evening. The killings were carried out by a young man who appeared to be an incel, a phenomenon I had written about in Home Grown, my book on the links between misogyny, domestic violence and terrorism. I was in the middle of doing broadcast interviews, explaining the background to the harrowing events in Plymouth, when the email arrived from City Hall. Within days, more than 4,000 women had signed a petition calling for my reinstatement. They’re still waiting for the Mayor’s response.

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Raquel Rosario Sánchez won't be silenced

By Joan Smith

At the time, Linden dealt with press inquiries, insisting that my removal was due to a restructure and had nothing to do with my views on transgenderism or any other issue. In a phone call, she apologised for the way I was informed and asked me to stay on as an ‘advisor’ to the board. I couldn’t see any point, given that I would no longer have any influence over the agenda. All the while, violence against women was reaching epidemic levels, with the number of rape reports in London climbing to a ten-year high in March 2021.

In that very month, Sarah Everard had been abducted, raped and murdered by a serving Met Officer. On the morning after Cressida Dick revealed the news that Ms Everard’s remains had been found, I received a phone call from Linden. Somewhat to my astonishment, she said she was calling to ask me what Khan should say about it. A few weeks later, I got another call from Linden, asking what the Mayor should say about VAWG during his campaign for re-election.

None of this inspired confidence in the regime at City Hall, to put it mildly. I kept on raising important issues, however, such as the Met’s egregious failure to identify sexual predators within its own ranks. I insisted that senior officers should attend the next meeting of the VAWG Board to tell us how they intended to deal with violence committed by police officers, and I called for a public inquiry into misogyny at the Met. I got no support from City Hall; suffice it to say that I wasn’t surprised by the series of scandals that culminated in Dick’s sudden resignation earlier this month.

After my phone conversation with Linden in August last year, amid a blizzard of emails cancelling all my scheduled meetings at City Hall, I agreed to write to her formally. I reiterated my view that the board needs a Co-chair who isn’t a salaried employee of the Mayor, and asked for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to my question about Khan’s support (or otherwise) for the crucial exemption in the Equality Act. In a pattern I’ve come to expect from the current administration at City Hall, Linden did not write back for five months.

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The heretics will not be silenced

By Jess De Wahls

In a letter that finally arrived earlier this month, Linden says that she and Khan “have always been clear that the commissioning of all of our services will be based on the best interests of the user”. But if we are talking about a women’s refuge, who is the user? Many of us would say it means natal women, but here is Linden’s answer: “It is vital that anyone seeking refuge is able to access the services they need and that women, including trans women, fleeing abuse from men should be able to access spaces where they feel safe”. (My italics.) If the Mayor intends to fund separate refuge spaces for people who are transgender, no one would argue with that. But does he?

I also doubt whether service providers will feel reassured by the legalistic language in Linden’s letter, which stands on its head to avoid offering an unequivocal endorsement of single-sex spaces: “Our approach in commissioning services does not penalise any agency that is working within the boundaries of the law… No agency we fund is required to act any differently from the requirements of equalities legislation.”

So what happens if the board of a refuge has a different interpretation of the Equality Act from the Mayor? If the CEO refuses access to a male-bodied trans woman, prompting howls of outrage from activists, will her organisation be treated by City Hall as “working within the boundaries of the law”, or accused of transphobia? Would any service provider funded by the Mayor dare take the risk?

There is one significant revelation in Linden’s letter. In a major climb-down, City Hall now accepts that the VAWG Board needs an independent Co-chair. It’s back to the status quo, in other words — but I’m not going to be reinstated. Despite offering fulsome thanks for “the vital work you have done for women and girls through your role on the VAWG Board”, City Hall has been having discussions about appointing an “external expert”. Members of the board will be ‘notified’ when an appointment is made.

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Cressida Dick has failed women

By Joan Smith

Forgive me thinking there is a bitter taste to all this. Khan went on supporting Cressida Dick, calling into question his judgement, long after I pointed out that the Met’s culture was mired in misogyny. Now Dick has gone and the country’s biggest police force has been left rudderless. Four and a half million women and girls live in London, where they face quite unacceptable levels of violence, yet the Mayor’s attachment to gender ideology appears to mean that no one at City Hall can talk about women without instantly adding ‘including trans women’.

More than ever, women in London need someone to stand up for their rights and make sure their voices are heard. As a feminist who believes in biological reality, that person evidently won’t be me.

Dick promised to make tackling violent crime her priority but the figures tell a very different story: recorded rapes have soared, domestic violence is rising and last year saw the highest ever level of teenage homicides in London (30, compared with 17 in 2020). Last March a vigil for Sarah Everard, raped and murdered by a serving officer, was a PR disaster for the Met, while Dick was forced to defend policing at the Euros 2020 final in July after scenes of violent disorder at Wembley.

The force is currently the subject of two inquiries, one ordered by Dick and the other, announced only a day later, by the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. The latter announcement was hardly a vote of confidence in the review ordered by Dick since both inquiries were prompted by the abduction of Ms Everard. Last week the Met was hit by another round of terrible publicity as a toxic culture of misogyny, racism and homophobia was exposed by the Independent Office for Police Conduct at Charing Cross police station in central London.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, was said to be “furious” and reported to have put the Commissioner “on notice”. What took him so long? His volte face came only five months after Patel offered Dick an extension to her term without so much as a squeak of protest from Khan. Patel apparently believed that the extension would provide “continuity”, although it’s hard to imagine many Londoners welcoming a continuation of the disasters that have taken place under Dick’s watch.

By the time she was granted an extra two years in September last year, the scandals accumulating around the Met were becoming impossible to ignore. PC Wayne Couzens had been accused of indecent exposure on at least two occasions, the most recent just three days before he murdered Ms Everard, but he wasn’t suspended and was able to use his warrant card to get her into his car. A PC in North London was sacked for using his baton to repeatedly strike a black teenager with learning difficulties who approached him for help after she became separated from her carers. Two Met officers had been charged with taking and sharing photos while guarding a crime scene in another area of north London where two black sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, had been horrifically murdered. Both officers were jailed at the end of last year.

Last October, it emerged that 326 Met officers and special constables had been accused of domestic abuse between 2017 and 2020, but “no action” was recorded in 265 cases. In a case that says much about the Met’s culture, two female officers who accused a colleague of rape had to wait three years before he faced a misconduct hearing.

In yet another case, reported by the Sunday Times, a senior detective is said to have kept his job despite being found guilty last year of gross misconduct for sexually harassing a woman who called 101 for help after she was mugged. DCI James Mason, who was a DS at the time of the incident in 2011, told the woman, Kristina O’Connor, she was “amazingly hot” and warned her that rejecting an officer’s advances was “frowned upon”. Her robber was never found. Embarrassingly, Mason later worked as a staff officer to Cressida Dick in 2019. O’Connor is now suing the Met for “enabling and normalising” misogyny after Mason was allowed to keep not just his job but his rank.

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It is something of an understatement to say that the force has problems with recruitment, training, supervision and disciplinary procedures. What this means is that women in London who report a traumatic experience, such as domestic violence, have no way of knowing whether the officer in front of them is implicated in such behaviour himself.

Dick has talked about every force having the occasional “bad ‘un”, an exceptionally ill-chosen turn of phrase that she used on the very day that Couzens appeared in court for sentencing. It’s a threadbare excuse, entirely discredited now that the IoPC has declared that the incidents at Charing Cross were “not isolated or simply the behaviour of a few bad apples”. What they expose is a permissive culture where misogyny, racism and homophobia are normalised, so much so that decent officers fear blowing the whistle because of the reaction of colleagues, or what it might do to their careers.

Many hoped that the murder of Ms Everard would be a watershed moment in terms of protecting women from sexual violence. But the situation in London has worsened since then, with the number of recorded sexual offences increasing dramatically; they rose from a rolling annual total of 18,608 in March 2021, the month Ms Everard was abducted, to 23,647 in December last year. The rolling 12-month figure for reported rapes increased from 7,479 in March to 8,740 in December, an increase of almost 17%. That’s one every hour, on average, and it hardly suggests that the police in London are effective when it comes to protecting women.

Some observers always doubted whether Dick was the right candidate for the top job. They pointed to her role in a disastrous counterterrorism operation in 2005 that ended in the death of an innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes. Dick was cleared of any blame but she was in charge of the operation, a circumstance some believed would block any ambition she had to lead the Met.

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There will always be bad men in the police

By Tom Chivers

In 2014 Dick sanctioned Operation Midland, an investigation prompted by the outlandish claims of a man called Carl Beech. He claimed to have been a child victim of a VIP paedophile ring operating in Westminster. Beech falsely accused a series of public figures before his lies were exposed and he was himself sent to prison for perverting the course of justice. Officers were so taken in by Beech’s claims that they encouraged him to repeat them on TV, his identity disguised as “Nick”. Dick was in charge of supervising the detective who publicly described Beech’s allegations as “credible and true”.

In 2016, Sir Richard Henriques published a damning report on Operation Midland that identified 43 failings by detectives who spent 16 months and more than £2m pursuing Beech’s allegations. Dick’s response to the criticism came in 2018, when she reversed the Met’s policy of believing individuals who report a rape. No one had ever suggested that complaints should not be investigated thoroughly or that detectives should rush a male fantasist into a TV studio before carrying out basic checks on his credibility. But it’s women who have suffered as the bad old days of scepticism have returned, with almost two-thirds of rape cases in London now ending in victim withdrawal.

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The police have a woman problem

By Sarah Ditum

Despite all this, politicians fell over themselves to praise Dick’s credentials when she got the top job. “Cressida’s skills and insight will ensure the Metropolitan police adapt to the changing patterns of crime in the 21st century and continue to keep communities safe across London and the UK,” declared the then Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. No one was more fulsome than Khan: “This is a historic day for London and a proud day for me as mayor”, he gushed. “It was absolutely essential that we found the best possible person to take the Met forward over the coming years and I am confident that we have succeeded.” Khan’s pronouncements often sound performative, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he was excited by the fact that Dick was not just the first woman but the first lesbian to hold the position.

Last summer, another dark cloud brooded over Dick’s head. It originated from the independent inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator axed to death in a pub car park in 1987. No one has ever been convicted of the killing, and the Met had previously admitted that corruption undermined the original investigation. The inquiry panel described the force as “institutionally corrupt” and criticised serving officers including Dick, who was accused of obstructing its work and causing delays that added further distress to Morgan’s family. Dick apologised to the family but denied the accusation and insisted, to no one’s surprise, that she was not going to resign.

Whether either of the inquiries currently under way will force Dick out is impossible to predict, given that she refuses to resign almost as often as Boris Johnson. But Londoners deserve better, and there is a bitter irony here. The appointment of the first woman Commissioner has been a failed experiment, exposing the urgent need for a Macpherson-style inquiry into misogyny within her own force.

It was a wave that meant that when I was publicly “cancelled” by the Royal Academy of Arts this summer, I was swiftly “un-cancelled” in a spectacular fashion. More importantly, it was a wave that finally smothered Stonewall’s ‘No Debate’ strategy — and dragged a conversation they had tried to avoid for so long kicking and screaming into the public sphere.

Things started to fall into place when, within a few weeks, Maya Forstater won her court case, protecting gender critical belief in law, my own story hit the headlines, and the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published a damning essay, It Is Obscene, revealing the horrendous treatment she had been subjected to after saying that transwomen are transwomen and not women.

Of course, it was a moment that had been brewing for a long time. Many feminists had been warning about the concerning impact of gender identity ideology for years, sounding the alarm and being vilified, ridiculed and ostracised in response. No doubt, the inimitable JK Rowling’s decision to make her views on the subject known last year helped pave the way for an increasing number of women to stand up and speak out; finally, everything is out in the open.

Yet this debate is far from won. Activists often still succeed in framing it as a “trans rights issue”, rather than something that actually concerns women. Looking at the vast political capture, it’s sometimes easy to lose hope. We see the Mayor of London tweet ideological dogma such as: “Trans women are women, trans men are men, and all gender identities are valid.” We see the leader of the Labour Party say: “it’s not right to say that only women have a cervix, it shouldn’t be said”. We see MPs such as David Lammy, who has made clear that he doesn’t even know what a cervix is, state unchallenged that there are “dinosaurs hoarding rights in the Labour Party”, referring to brave women like Rosie Duffield who keep pushing back against this ideological land grab.

To be fair, that last point resulted in a new trend for wearing dino costumes at most feminist gatherings and protests, so I suppose a thank you is in order, Mr Lammy.

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How artists lost their courage

By Jess De Wahls

Yet even his buffoonery shouldn’t be laughed off — if only because it distracts from the more insidious repercussions of the transgender debate. In many institutions and companies, “preferred pronouns” are now being implemented from the top down under the guise of “diversity and inclusion”. Anybody who dares to question this may find themselves quickly under investigation for alleged “transphobia” or called a bigot and cowed into silence.

Let’s make no mistake: “preferred pronouns” aren’t, as some would have you believe, just a courtesy. They are a form of compelled speech; they ask people to no longer trust their eyes, but instead do as they are told or be ostracised. I have previously written about the parallels between the current climate and the East German Stasi under which my whole family used to live. And it is becoming clearer by the day that those comparisons were not an exaggeration.

Just look at the state of academia, where professors who dare to acknowledge the biological reality of the sexes are being de-platformed and hounded, regardless of the toll the often-aggressive behaviour has on their well-being. The use of smear campaigns and intimidating “protests”, with individuals donning balaclavas and waving smoke flares, seems to have washed over from the US and are now commonplace whenever a “heretic” has been identified and needs “dealing with”. Just ask Professors Joe Phoenix and Kathleen Stock.

That this ideology has also crept deep into the Arts, once the most tolerant of disciplines, was clearly highlighted by my attempted cancellation. It was by no means the first time an artist has been attacked and ostracised publicly for her alleged thought crimes, but it was certainly a turning point due to the involvement of the Royal Academy. The public apology and reinstatement of my work in their shop thrust into the spotlight something that has been happening quietly but constantly for quite some years now.

Petty groups like ‘Terf’s out of Art’ and ‘The White Pube’ have long bullied artists, most of whom are women, into silence. Their success is proved by the fact that many of these cases don’t make the headlines, even though they still cost these women dearly, in some cases their entire career. Meanwhile, for those who are yet to be publicly called out, there’s another chilling effect: don’t expect to be invited to give talks at universities or to create public artworks with Arts Council funding. If you’re deemed ‘unacceptable’, you’re on your own.

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The year we gave up on reality

By Suzanne Moore

These silent cancellations are just as vicious as those fought out in public; perhaps even more so, because they leave their victims utterly defenceless. Being de-platformed for your views is something one can challenge. Being quietly excluded from any kind of platform and conversation altogether leaves you with nothing.

When I wrote on these pages in August about the deafening silence within the arts establishment following the attempt to cancel me, I did so with a sense of despair. It seemed to me that the blue-haired activists had won; that ‘diversity and inclusion’ now only matters as long as you repeat the mantras and toe the party line.

Things still look bleak. But after everything that has happened this year, a sense of optimism has started to creep in. That isn’t merely because the alternative is a dystopian hellscape of authoritarianism that history has seen many times before. It’s because the truth has a habit of prevailing.

What’s striking this year is the growing number of women and men who have started to say: Enough. One court case verdict follows another, holding the line against a vicious new orthodoxy that seeks to burn witches while screaming “JUST BE KIND”.

The Forstater ruling has cemented the protection of “gender critical belief” in law. The charity LGB Alliance has now firmly established itself as a much-needed alternative to Stonewall. Grassroots organisations such as FiLiA, FairPlayForWomen and Women’s Place UK provide support and resources to a vast and growing number of gender-critical women who have found their voice. And for everybody who dares speak out regardless of the consequences, there are many more waiting in the folds, preparing for their moment to be brave.

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Inside the trans publishing purge

By Josephine Bartosch

Fortunately, in my own case sanity prevailed and, like a monsoon rain, the stains my detractors tried to smear me with have washed right off, leaving me free to continue to create work without censorship, encouraged by a rapidly growing number of patrons and supporters. And I am not alone: despite great efforts to the contrary, heretical artists are finding new ways to exhibit work and bypass gatekeepers.

That is the lesson of the past year. Finally, the tide is turning. We have not been silenced; let alone defeated. So to those art students with a firm grasp on reality who may feel a bit hopeless: don’t be afraid. Come on in, the water’s fine.

Many of the streets have Scottish names; many of the houses are graced with distinctive male or female keystones above the front door, rumoured to be based on Archie and his wife. The estate is at least a 15-minute walk from the nearest train station and is mostly an established family neighbourhood. I have lived here for three years and have fallen hard for its charms.

While Archibald Corbett’s legacy is widely known and celebrated with affection locally, it’s unlikely that his politics would go down well with many of his estate’s residents today: he was an unapologetic capitalist (Lewisham has been Labour for as long as anyone can remember) and he disapproved thoroughly of drinking (summer nights around here are full of the sound of late-night partying; K-pop, Jamaican dance-hall, Eastern European folk, take your pick). And as someone who believed in decent housing for working-class people — by which he meant one family per house, a garden, proximity to a station and park — it’s likely he would have been appalled by what’s been going on lately in his streets.

Because at the moment, as a result of Tory housing policy, the modest houses of the Corbett estate are being bought up by property developers, their interiors ripped out, and in their place, units designed for individual occupation inserted into them. The units can be as small as 6.52 metres squared — smaller than a prison cell. By adding a hastily constructed loft, a narrow terraced house of approximately 60 square metres can be transformed into a “HMO” — a house of multiple occupancy comprising up to six separate “units”. These HMOs represent different things to different people: for the owners, they are sources of profit; for the neighbours, they can often be sources of nuisance or even danger. And for the vulnerable people who live in them, they can be a living nightmare.

As residents became aware of an increase of HMOs in the area, an acquaintance of mine organised a meeting last month with the Lewisham East MP, Janet Daby, to address the issue: he expected it would be attended by him and a few other people who were directly affected. In the event, the church hall was standing room only, with at least 150 people in attendance. The officials were clearly expecting this as we were met not only by Janet Daby, but two local councillors, three council staff including Lewisham’s Director of Planning, and three Metropolitan Police Officers.

Residents spoke of a sense of hopelessness as developers bought up houses next to them and undertook building work without any regard for its impact on them, ignoring party wall agreements. One woman from another ward but within the borough reported being told by a council officer to not go into her back garden because the irresponsible building work rendered it too dangerous. For her there was nothing that could be done, because the work was being conducted around the back of the house and was, as such, private and none of the council’s business. A councillor described the companies that make hay amid the lax regulatory environment as “cartels”.

The council staff and the politicians were not defensive, as I expected them to be. It was far more depressing: they seemed utterly defeated. The Director of Planning asked people not to sell their houses to these developers; one might reasonably ask, if you have a badly run HMO next door to you, who other than a developer is going to buy it? Another councillor suggested direct action and looked to the three Met police officers in attendance, one of whom had already described local HMOs as “not fit for human habitation”. They shrugged, perhaps in assent. The “cartel” comment councillor — with a flair for drama or perhaps an appropriate sense of what was at stake — spoke of law and order breaking down. Another woman questioned the absence of the state, why she was paying her taxes, and whether anyone cared about what was going on in the community?

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Activists aren't what they used to be

By Niamh Mulvey

What is going on here is something called “exempt accommodation”: housing that is exempt from the usual limit a local authority can pay in housing benefit for the provision of accommodation to vulnerable people. The additional money is intended to cover the cost of caring for the residents of such accommodation; people who are vulnerable for a whole host of reasons. Ashley Horsey of Commonweal, a charity that has researched exempt accommodation extensively, explained to me that there are two types: one sort is for people with long-term challenges such as mobility or an intellectual disability. This kind tends to be well run.

The other type of exempt accommodation (“non-commissioned”) is intended as a stop-gap for people who temporarily need assistance during a transitional stage in their lives. This includes people emerging from prison, people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, women escaping domestic violence, care-leavers and people who have been sleeping rough. It’s not uncommon for people from all of these categories — and others — to live alongside one another, sharing a hallway, a kitchen and an entrance. According to Crisis, 150,000 people across the UK are being housed in exempt accommodation, a 62% increase since 2016.

​​This type of accommodation (non-commissioned exempt) has created a situation that turns vulnerable people into units of profit to be mined by developers — the “cartels” the local councillor spoke of. Providers can charge up to £960 per month for the provision of accommodation for people in this category. By examining adverts for rental accommodation locally, one can clearly see this: a “studio” going for £960 per month in a borough where a double room in a more traditional house-share with a responsible landlord yields only around £500-£700 per month. At the meeting in Lewisham, one such landlord — and brave soul, given the atmosphere — spoke up in some bewilderment: why aren’t the Government regulating us, he asked.

The additional money paid to these providers is supposed to be used to provide assistance to residents, to ensure they have the help they need to move on with their lives. What has actually happened is that many providers absolutely fail to provide this “help” — it is neither defined, measured nor monitored — and simply cream off the money that is supposed to assist people, as profit. In a detailed report into the issue Commonweal describe an “accountability deficit” that has arisen here: there is no obligation on providers to ensure that their residents are looked after — despite the premium that is paid for the accommodation. The results can be grim — “sex for rent” situations, drug users living alongside those trying to stay clean and endless anti-social behaviour issues for neighbours.

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How to save fiction

By Niamh Mulvey

Imagine for a moment that you are a woman escaping a violent situation in your home. You get away, and you get housed. You turn up at your new address and find a six-square-metre room is now your home. The kitchen you use is shared by five others, some of whom have histories of violence, some of whom are using drugs. The kitchen has no window; you have nowhere to dry your clothes. You are supposed to stay here temporarily, but you can’t afford private rents, and there is no social housing available.

What do you do? What can you do? It’s too noisy to sleep at night. Your landlord is making up to £12,000 per year off of you; he doesn’t want you to leave and there is nowhere for you to go. Some women in situations like this have children living with them — and because of the lack of oversight, it is unclear how many children are currently living in such circumstances.

The “accountability deficit” — lax oversight, little to no building regulation and helpless local councils — has created a gold rush in neighbourhoods like Lewisham: places where housing is still cheap, relatively, and where local homeowners are of modest incomes and can’t easily afford solicitors to defend their rights. A local homeowner here in Catford dug into the ownership of the HMO next door to him and found the property was flipped four times in quick succession between companies owned by the same person. The tactics used by many of these companies are straightforward: they purchase houses, in cash, easily outbidding ordinary buyers. They then proceed with building work as quickly as possible and ignore legal requirements that require consent from neighbours.

If neighbours object, they have trouble finding out to whom they can object — these companies maintain a practice of keeping former buyers’ names on the land register or they flip houses (four to five times in one day) to obscure ownership. These companies take a calculated risk, knowing that most regular homeowners will not have the time or the resources to wade through the legality of the situation. The game is stacked utterly in favour of the developers; the only instrument the council has is weak and ineffectual.

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By Peter Franklin

This instrument — an Article Four Direction — can be used to prevent further HMO development in a neighbourhood, but only after complaints have been made. It cannot be applied retrospectively, meaning there is no disincentive for developers to continue to act with impunity. Article Four was applied in wards to the south of the Corbett estate and this is why development has suddenly descended upon these streets; the problem was not solved, it simply moved. The first many people knew of it was the sudden, poignant sight of six small fridges turning up for delivery at the recently-sold, small three-bedroom house next door.

This, of course, points to another issue: habitation by what amounts to six separate households creates a dangerous strain on services and facilities. I hear of a HMO in another neighbourhood that had its gas and electricity switched off due to fire safety concerns.

Nobody is being incentivised to fix this situation. Not local government, not the taxpayer, not vulnerable citizens, and not central government, which is effectively paying private corporations a premium to house people in dangerous conditions. But when the guiding ideology of our era lacks a moral dimension, or a sense of responsibility towards a community then this is where we end up. It’s hard not to think of Grenfell and the callousness of companies such as Kingspan, where staff have admitted to prioritising profits over standards. And I’m struck by the clinical nature of the language we now use around housing: units, delivery, services, clients. Who thinks about their homes in that way? Who are we forcing to think about their homes in that way?

A lack of housing security, a lack of a home — not knowing where or if you’re going to sleep at night or if the place you have is safe, is a reality for thousands of people across this country. The current solution: pay developers to make it go away; pay them whatever they want. The utter disregard for the dignity of the individuals involved or the neighbourhoods they live in, is grim and very telling. As a resident told me: the developers don’t live in Catford. They live in Knightsbridge or Dubai, or everywhere and nowhere.

These are our elites: they don’t put the names of their cherished homeland on the streets they create, they hide behind shell companies and when they look at vulnerable people and ordinary neighbourhoods, they see pound signs and profit.

I jumped at the chance, even though I am a member of the Labour party, and we worked amicably together for the next three years. Fast forward to 2021: Johnson is prime minister, Lord Greenhalgh (as he now is) is a government minister and I am out. Now I am in a peculiar situation: I have voted Labour all my life, yet was brought into City Hall by a Conservative administration — and sacked by its Labour successor.

The dismissal arrived last Friday afternoon, as I was writing and giving interviews about the dreadful murders in Plymouth less than 24 hours earlier (I have written a book about the relationship between misogyny, domestic abuse and terrorism). The last thing I expected, in the middle of such horror, was to be sacked by email.

After eight years of unpaid work on behalf of women and girls in London, it seems reasonable to expect that Sadiq Khan or Sophie Linden, the deputy mayor who replaced Greenhalgh, would have wanted to tell me themselves. But I have not heard a word from Khan and I only had a call from Linden yesterday after the Times published a story about the incident. Before that, all I had received was a series of diary notifications from her office, cancelling all the meetings I was supposed to have with her over the next twelve months.

The news was delivered in an email from Diana Luchford, a former civil servant at the Home Office, who is now CEO of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. I had to read it twice before the meaning sank in: I am out, thus removing independent scrutiny at a moment when the behaviour of the Metropolitan police towards women has been fiercely criticised.

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By Jess De Wahls

Take the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer, followed the force’s callous handling of a vigil to commemorate her. Or its failure to investigate when two murdered sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, were reported missing last year. If ever an outside voice were needed to raise women’s anxieties at City Hall, it is surely now.

My sacking has been attributed to a “governance review”, even though I made it clear months ago that I wanted to stay on as Co-chair. Luchford’s email did offer a sop: that I could remain on the board as an “advisor”. But that would remove my influence over the agenda and access to important meetings behind the scenes.

As Co-Chair, I was able to make sure that vital issues raised by recent events were discussed. For example, I argued that we needed to know what the Metropolitan Police intend to do to improve the way they identify sexual predators in their own ranks, and to make sure that complaints of domestic abuse against serving officers are handled properly. I also expressed my concern, privately, that the Mayor’s focus on issues such as knife crime risked diverting attention from crimes against women, including black women in London who suffer disproportionately high levels of rape and sexual assault.

At the end of March, just weeks after the abduction of Ms Everard, the number of rapes reported in London reached a ten-year high. The figures are shocking, and I thought they would be discussed at the most recent meeting of the London Crime Reduction Board, which is chaired by the Mayor. When I asked why we were not talking about the rape statistics, I was told they would be on the agenda of the next meeting — in October.

Linden has insisted that the sacking has nothing do with my attempt to protect women-only spaces in refuges, which receive key funding from City Hall. Last year I became aware that some women’s organisations were becoming alarmed by tweets from the Mayor’s official Twitter account. They felt under growing pressure to admit male-bodied trans women — men who have not undergone surgery but “identify” as women — to spaces currently reserved for female victims of domestic violence. No one is suggesting that trans women who suffer domestic abuse don’t need services, but they should be provided without affecting the principle of women-only spaces.

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The transgender lobby wants to rewrite the law

By Maya Forstater

“Trans women are women, trans men are men,” Khan declared in February, repeating the mantra of trans activists. “Trans people deserve the dignity and safety of being recognised as their gender,” he tweeted a few months later when it was reported that the government had dropped plans to allow people to self-identify as the other sex. “I’m dismayed that the Govt has made a U-turn on its own consultation to make the Gender Recognition Act more straightforward.”

It didn’t matter that trans activists were demanding almost total deregulation of the legal process of “changing” sex, which would make it less onerous than adopting a child or getting a driving licence. Or that self-ID has huge implications for women, most obviously for vulnerable women who need spaces away from men in refuges, hospitals and prisons. Sadiq Khan was fully on board — and had ignored requests from women’s organisations, including the Labour Women’s Declaration, for a meeting.

I discussed the Mayor’s tweets with Karen Ingala Smith, indomitable CEO of nia, the organisation that provides services to victims of sexual and domestic violence in east London. We decided to write to Linden, warning her about the impact Khan’s statements were having on organisations that depend on City Hall for funding: “How can it have anything other than a chilling effect when the Mayor publicly takes sides with a group of activists on such a contentious issue?” we asked.

We received an equivocating reply, repeating the Mayor’s view that “trans women are women” and making the dubious claim that the “basic human rights [of trans people] remain unmet”. Linden told us that the Mayor’s approach to providing services “is led by the needs of victims and survivors on a clear principle of non-discrimination”, a puzzling statement since women’s organisations are highly unlikely to discriminate on grounds of age, race, religion or disability.

They might exclude someone with male genitals from a women’s refuge — but that would be a lawful use of the exemptions in the 2010 Equality Act. We wrote again, seeking an assurance that no women’s organisation supported by the Mayor would be penalised financially for doing so. Linden did not reply.

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Women don't feel safe with Starmer

By Joan Smith

Then, last October, we wrote directly to Khan, reminding him that he voted for what is now the Equality Act when he was a Labour MP in 2009. “If you no longer support the Act in full, including the provision to restrict access on the ground of biological sex in certain circumstances, we believe that such a significant shift should be publicly acknowledged and debated,” we wrote. Ten months later, we are still waiting for a response.

Now I’ve been ousted. Yesterday, Linden took to Twitter to deny claims that I had been sacked after raising concerns about transwomen in refuges. She reiterated: “This is simply not true. The structure of all our boards at City Hall is being changed. [My dismissal] has nothing to do with any views Joan has expressed.” In response, all I can say is that I’ve spent years advocating for the safety of women and girls — and having an outside expert at City Hall seems to me as important as ever.

Around 25 minutes later, during which time a neighbour in pyjamas had trundled her bins out for collection and another had unlocked his bicycle and cycled off, the boys were back. They looked agitated. One of them hid the machete under a car and they walked off. Later, I found out a boy had been seriously wounded half a mile away and taken to hospital. Luckily it had not been fatal.

Some are not so lucky. This year has seen a flurry of street killings of teenagers — one every fortnight in London alone — most often by other teenagers.

Three days into 2021, Olly Stephens was  stabbed in a Reading park. He was 13 years old, as were the girl and one of the boys charged with his murder. The other boy was 14. A few weeks later, Keon Lincoln was stabbed to death in Birmingham, at the age of 15. Two boys, aged 14 and 15, have been charged with his murder. On February 18, Drekwon Patterson, 16, was chased and stabbed to death by a gang of youths in Wembley. On April 23, Fares Maatou, 14, was fatally stabbed in the head with a machete while in his school uniform. He was outside a pizza restaurant in East London, at 4pm. Again, two boys, aged 14 and 15, have been charged with his murder.

The list of children killing children gets longer by the day. Just last week, two teenagers were arrested after a 16-year-old was stabbed to death outside a school in Luton. On Thursday a 17-year-old was killed in Streatham, south London and on Friday, a 15-year old was stabbed to death during the school run in Hayes, west London. A 15-year-old has been charged with his murder.

Yet amid all this bloodshed, little is being done. Since street homicides involving young people started escalating in 2018 — most notably among black, working-class Londoners — politicians and media-minded crime chiefs have given us the usual spiel: it’s drug turf wars, middle-class cocaine snorters, rap music… But while these explanations may sound good, they are wafer-thin on evidence.

The Home Office now has a Serious Violence Strategy, London’s Mayor has a Violent Crime Task Force, and police in many cities have stepped up stop-and-search for weapons. But, just like the last time there was a panic and a clampdown (a decade ago), the deaths keep on coming.  This time, though, the people involved in the killings are getting younger.

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What the Left gets wrong about knife crime

By Ralph Leonard

Amid this blood-soaked landscape, youth worker and writer Ciaran Thapar’s new book, Cut Short: Youth Violence, Loss and Hope in the City, stands out. Thapar is at the front line of this most recent rise in street killings, supporting young people at risk of joining gangs in Brixton, south London. He is immersed in his neighbourhood, where he builds trust and friendships over time, and his book is partly the product of this. Cut Short follows three teenagers and a community centre manager he knows and looks at the knife crime phenomenon from street level, rather than top down.

For the boys he meets and works with, the threat of serious violence looms large from the moment they walk out their front door. A wrong look, a wrong answer, and in a split second they’ll be in a life or death situation. Jhemar, whose older brother is stabbed to death during the course of the book, compares picking up a knife before going out to putting on a pair of shoes. Most kids do not carry knives with the intent to kill; they carry them with the intent to save their own lives.

Territorial feuding is partly to blame for the violence. When one of the boys, Carl, is shot at, it’s because he was “standing in the wrong street”. According to Thapar, the “hyperlocal and ever-shifting” feuds are turbocharged by social media. Shaming, beefs, abuse, rivalry — even the Zombie knives and machetes — are glorified 24/7 on Snapchat and IG. But in London in particular, these territorial wars are rarely about defending drug turf, as it was a generation ago. A former gang member tells Thapar: “It’s less about money now and it’s more about emotions. It’s more mindless now.”

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Do police numbers really affect knife crime?

By Tom Chivers

Nevertheless, a The Wire-style drug turf war narrative is pushed by everyone: from London mayor Sadiq Khan and Met Police chief Cressida Dick to successive Home Secretaries and the otherwise clued-up Labour MP David Lammy. It’s super convenient, because it allows them to deflect responsibility away from the real reasons teenagers are killing each other and onto people they say are fuelling the drug trade, in particular “middle-class cocaine snorters”.

Yet it is duplicitous to make this link. The teenagers being killed in London are far removed from the powder cocaine trade. Apart from cannabis, the drugs they are most likely to end up selling, sometimes out of London on “county lines”, are crack cocaine and heroin, mainly to semi-homeless, addicted drug users, not the middle classes. Even if everyone did stop snorting coke, teenagers locked out of mainstream jobs would still be recruited to sell crack, a far more lucrative version of the drug.

Besides, when you look at individual teenage homicide cases, it’s clear that the vast majority are not killing each other over business. It’s about insults, bullying, resentments and arguments. Once these would have ended with a black eye — now they end in the morgue.

In 2018, I interviewed Jason (not his real name), who had been relocated to a secret address by Operation Trident (the Met Police unit set up to tackle gang violence involving black offenders), after he was run clean through with a machete when he was 17. It was a surprise to his family and doctors he survived. “No-one fist-fights anymore,” he told me. “It’s hard not to get involved, most kids your age carry a knife or machete, so you have to.”

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What's driving so many kids to 'go country'?

By Max Daly

There are many examples of petty beefs turning into deadly clashes. At the Old Bailey last month, a jury heard that Kayjon Lubin, 15, was stabbed to death last December in Beckton, east London by two 17-year-olds who believed he had taken their e-scooter. In September, a teenager who was 15 at the time was jailed for stabbing to death another 15-year-old, Baptista Adjei, on a packed bus in Stratford, over a Snapchat argument. Osman Sharif, 16, was hacked to death with a meat cleaver in a Tottenham street because of a row over some laughing emojis. Syed Jamanoor Islam was stabbed to death by a 16-year-old in Mile End in a feud that started with eggs being thrown by the victim’s brother as a joke.

But whatever specific incident sparks the individual killings, the truth is that these teenage deaths mark the end point of a process, a grim assembly line. On the whole, the victims and perpetrators involved, as academic reports into youth violence have always told the government, have similar backstories. These are not just any children, they are children who have usually suffered continuous trauma and have been rejected, shamed and belittled all their lives: at school, sometimes at home, by the police and even, as their neighbourhood becomes gentrified, by the well-off homeowners who fear passing them in the street.

They are known to social services from a very young age. They live in council housing in deprived areas. They have been excluded from school and have ended up at a Pupil Referral Unit. Many have experience of the care system, have been victims of abuse, and have absent fathers. In London, an overwhelming proportion are black, mixed race or from other ethnic minorities. Jason told me: “When I was younger no-one showed me respect. To get respect I turned into a monster. I’ve witnessed a lot of people die. It’s a normal thing. I’ve lived in care, I’ve lived everywhere, and most places I get looked at like something is wrong with me. So black kids have to be tough.”

As Cut Short points out, if the Government was sincere about tackling these deaths, it would be looking into the “trauma, fear and exclusion of young people”, it would drill down into “how unsafe and alone” they feel, and seek to expose the “failures of the state to care for its citizens”. But why bother, when you can solve the problem in one fell swoop by, as one MP stupidly suggested at a House of Commons briefing attended by Thapar, by “blunting the end of knives”.

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Sadiq Khan, the knife-crime fall guy

By James Bloodworth

They might live in claustrophobic neighbourhoods made worse by the intrusive and violent world of Snapchat, but these kids aren’t stupid, and what is happening in the political world is not lost on them. Tony, who runs the local community centre, described by Thapar as a “tiny island amid a sea storm”, says he believes that the nationalism and xenophobia around Brexit, and scandals such as Windrush and Grenfell, make young people in areas such as Brixton “feel like they don’t belong … it sends the message: you are not wanted”.

Indeed, it’s hard not to wonder — when faced with the Government’s abdication of responsibility for them — whether black working-class children who have led highly traumatised lives really are not wanted. I have no idea whether Jason has managed to escape the clutches of gang life. Or whether he is still alive. But what he told me should be beamed onto the walls of Parliament — along with the testimonies from Cut Short: “Most teachers told me I would end up dead or in jail. I got told I was worthless. It breaks your spirit. A lot of black kids get their spirit broken. Schools give up way too early, they kick you out from an early age. No school I’ve ever been to has helped me … Youth clubs are good. Even two hours talking to people, it’s support. But they shut down youth clubs and instead they spend all the money on a week-long knife crime clampdown.”

Cut Short ends with an appeal to the Government to treat youth knife crime violence as a public health emergency — just like Covid-19. It also calls for society to help out. “Start with something small. Walk into your local community centre, youth club…drop your defences. See what happens.” Given the subject matter, the book is surprisingly hopeful. By the end, with the help of various mentors including Thapar, the three teenagers are able to jump off the conveyor belt and create new chances for themselves — getting into university or making music. People have actually spent time with them; they have given them the confidence to step away from such a dangerous life.

Every time we hear about another child being stabbed to death, it should stop us in our tracks. We should hear the sound of a tolling bell each time. It should serve as a reminder that this death, this family’s grief, and this teenager sentenced to life behind bars, are all symptoms of a society that simply does not care enough. We might comfort ourselves by thinking that these children, who lie bleeding to death on the streets they grew up on, are different, that they are not like us. But they are our collective responsibility. Until we accept that this violent epidemic is a reflection of something toxic at Britain’s heart, it will only get worse.

In 1998, voters in the capital were given a referendum on whether or not we wanted to have a Mayor of London. It was the first time I voted — and I was delighted to be in the distinct minority of people who said “no”.

But we lost, and we lost bad. We made up just 28% of the vote, among a measly total turnout of just 34%. And yet, given the opportunity again, I would vote the same again.

Back then, the likely candidates to lead the nation’s capital ranged from Jeffrey Archer to Ken Livingstone. It did not require a clairvoyant to know where this was heading. In the end Jeffrey Archer went to prison and Ken Livingstone did not. So Ken Livingstone became Mayor.

Two embarrassing terms later, it soon became clear that the trouble with City Hall lay in the same problem that distinguishes all superfluous offices in government. People always equate expanding layers of government with increasing accountability; but the truth is that the more there are, the harder it is to hold people to account.

During Livingstone’s reign, for example, whenever the underground service ground to a halt there was always a fight over whether he was responsible or not. It was the same with every budgetary issue.

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What does Laurence Fox stand for?

By Tanya Gold

And yet, somehow, the most memorable feature of Livingstone’s time in office was the way he managed to impose his own outlandish foreign policies on his fiefdom. For example, while Westminster looked somewhat askance at Hugo Chavez’s regime as it set about crashing Venezuela, Livingstone made special alliances with it. Similarly, while the Government was distinctly pro-Washington, the Mayor of London, by contrast, was not; when President Bush visited the capital in 2003, Livingstone declined to meet him and denounced his arrival by calling him “the greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve probably ever seen”.

Now the reason I believe it’s worth returning to Livingston isn’t to justify my vote in 1998, but merely to point out that the problems at the heart of London’s mayoralty are endemic. The powers that come with the position are too unclear — or have, at the very least, the potential to be made unclear. And then there is a more obvious pitfall: that the position attracts  — possibly requires — figures who believe that London is merely a stage to stand on; a means to project themselves on to the wider world.

To that extent, the problems of Sadiq Khan’s mayoralty are no different from those of his predecessors. Just like those before him, Khan has been able to jump from one photo op to another, looking the other way as his city burns.

For instance, take crime in the capital. Under Khan, knife crime in London has remained at near-record levels, while rape prosecutions have slumped. But whenever the mayor is challenged on these issues, he avoids taking responsibility for them, preferring instead to prevaricate over “institutional racism” or talk about how London’s crime wave is caused by cuts ordered by Whitehall. The message is clear: it’s not my problem.

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Could Brian Rose be London's next Mayor?

By David Fuller

Like Livingstone before him, Khan has also decided that he can make up for what he lacks in actual power with narcissistic grandstanding. His time in City Hall has coincided with a number of major events on the national and international stage, into all of which he has tried to interject himself.

When, for example, the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016, Khan didn’t seem to care that it was a national plebiscite — or that 40% of Londoners voted for Brexit. Instead, he sought to weaponise the result, using it as an opportunity to present London as distinct from the rest of the backward country. He continued to parade the EU flag at every opportunity, up to and including turning the city’s 2018/19 New Year’s Eve celebrations into a tribute to Brussels.

Emulating Livingstone, Mayor Khan has even tried to make political capital by opposing an American President. In fact, he arguably took things one step further during President Trump’s visit to the UK in 2019; before the President had even touched down at Heathrow, Khan fired off a newspaper article comparing him to the “fascists of the 20^th century”.

Yet there are, of course, no prizes for guessing which of Khan or Trump went on to establish a totalitarian-sounding “Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm”. Put to one side the fact that one of the activists hired by Khan to review London’s landmarks was sacked within a fortnight for being anti-Semitic; far more striking was the decision of the Mayor’s office to announce the findings of the Commission in advance — a move seemingly taken straight from the Stalinist playbook.

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Sadiq Khan is wrong about rent controls

By James Bloodworth

Naturally, it is easy to scoff at such a fatuous approach to politics. But dismissing Khan in this way forgets that while he has busied himself with his “progressive” agenda, it has all been at the expense of addressing the genuine political issues that concern his constituents. Public transport in London has never been more expensive or inadequate — a reality made all the worse by the introduction of a new Green “ultra low emissions zone” that has made car-travel eye-wateringly expensive. Meanwhile house-building, which is so badly needed to address the shortage of affordable property, has actually gone down since he assumed office.

So what has Mayor Khan done? Well, one part of the Mayor’s budget has rocketed enormously: his PR budget, which has risen by a third since he took office. And perhaps Khan’s lead in the polls justifies the spend; it certainly seems to confirm the fact that, even if you do nothing very well, you can still succeed by spending on self-promotion. Either way, it’s a grim sign for the future of democracy in the capital, and a late — if pointless — vindication of the 28% who saw this coming over 20 years ago.

Instead, the man gazing out is Brian Rose.

Rose, 49, would certainly make an unusual boss at City Hall. He is, after all, a former Wall Street stockbroker who has spent the past year hosting Covid-19 conspiracy grifters on his YouTube channel and website. He is also Britain’s first post-truth political candidate.

In Rose’s self-created fantasy world, his campaign is proving a roaring success: he is running in second place to be Mayor, he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history” and his raft of glossy films calling out Mayor Khan have racked up millions of views.

Yet in the consensus-based reality occupied by the rest of us, this version of Brian Rose doesn’t really exist. Why? Because all his metrics of success have been systematically distorted — and in the one that really matters, the polling for London mayor, he doesn’t even register, not even breaking 1%.

So how has Rose managed to craft such a fabricated narrative of success? The answer, I suspect, can be traced back to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when San Diego-born Rose first made a name for himself after hosting the conspiracy theorist David Icke — most famous for claiming that world is controlled by a secret lizard Illuminati — on his show “London Real”.

In the frantic early days of the pandemic, the interview hit a nerve and went viral. Unchallenged by Rose, Icke spun a grand narrative, that the “Covid pandemic” was fake, was really caused by 5G and  was a cover for a murderous global cult who were determined to create a fascist state. He said that 5G was designed to cause a mass cull, and that if humanity didn’t “get off its knees” then “human life as we know it is over”.

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In an environment where 5G masts were already being destroyed, and engineers threatened, YouTube took the video down. All of which allowed Rose, never one to miss an opportunity, to turn himself into a free speech martyr; a victim of Big Tech censorship. Whether or not he knew it at the time, his Mayoral campaign had just begun.

In the following days, Rose went into overdrive, claiming that he had been censored by Big Tech and that he was determined to fight back. He launched a crowdfunder for what he called a “Digital Freedom Platform” to host another interview with Icke. It would, he said, be “of the people, by the people and for the people”. More importantly, it would be fully independent of London Real.

What he didn’t say, however, was that it would also be fully owned by Longstem Ltd, the company that owns London Real and has one shareholder: a Mr Brian Rose.

Still, in the early days of the pandemic the crowdfunder hit a nerve among those frustrated with Big Tech’s heavy-handed attempts at censorship. Rose hit the initial $100,000 target in less than a day — so, over the course of a few days, he added new features to the crowdfunding campaign to justify increasing the target, including unspecified “blockchain technology” for $200,000, and a promise to take YouTube and other tech companies to court for another $200,000. In the end, the crowdfunder maxed out at over a million dollars.

But it was unclear from the start what the point of the platform was, or even whether it was necessary. Several tech commentators have noted that he could have used any number of free video services, such as Bitchute, to host the videos, if YouTube took them down. Needless to say there have been no court cases brought against the big tech platforms — though Mr Rose’s spokesman assures us that they “plan to proceed” — or any introduction of “blockchain technology”. Instead, he seems to have dedicated all his energies to his Digital Freedom Platform, and hosted a slew of interviews with other controversial conspiracy figures, from Infowars‘s Alex Jones to anti-vaccine activists Judy Mikovits and Robert Kennedy Jr.

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In fact, at the time, the only tangible development was the sacking of nearly all of London Real’s video production staff, and the hiring of political advisors for his mayoral bid. Today, the homepage for the “Digital Freedom Platform” takes you through to a campaign site of “Brian For Mayor”. When I pointed this out to Rose’s campaign, his spokesman said that the Digital Freedom Platform “is in the process of being set up as an entirely separate commercial entity”. He also emphasised that none of the money raised through the “Digital Freedom Platform” fundraiser has been used to fund this mayoral bid.

After raising $1m, Rose was flying high, but then he managed to push his luck just a little too far. Shortly after the crowdfunder was completed, he announced that he needed to raise running costs for the platform to $250,000 per month. Within hours, the penny dropped for his supporters; the comment threads under his video turned into a bear-pit. Overnight, he became an online pariah, and finally got the media attention he craved — but not the headline he wanted: “The YouTuber Accused of Using Coronavirus to Scam His Followers”.

And yet in many ways, Rose’s fall from grace was a long time coming. Before he set up his Digital Freedom Platform, the main source of income for London Real was their expensive online courses. Indeed, at one point these courses were the business’s main source of income; eight-week courses titled “Business Accelerator” or “Podcast Yourself” were, for example, on offer for $3,000, while those who wanted to join his exclusive “Inner Circle” – for personal mentoring – could do so by coughing up $15,000.

Predictably, many of Rose’s “customers” felt they had been scammed: the website Scamguard has 28 scathing reviews of the courses, and a Google search for reviews shows up multiple unhappy customers. A Facebook group set up to advise unhappy customers on how to get their money back has nearly 300 members. In fact, many of those who signed up for London Real’s courses managed to get their money back from credit card companies, after they were able to prove that the courses were such poor quality that they were covered under the credit card company’s guarantee against mis-selling.

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By Mary Harrington

The $15,000 “Inner Circle” fared even worse. A few months ago, a letter signed by nearly every single person from the “Inner Circle” was sent to Rose, asking for their money back and complaining about the lack of value from the course. One of the signatories told me: “We had no mentorship whatsoever, it was a joke, we would have three minutes with him every 15 days and he would just talk about himself. The whole course rebelled against him.” When they eventually complained, the member said, Rose lectured them about how lucky they were to speak to him, as “people queue just to shake my hand”.

“Like many businesses, we receive occasional complaints,” Rose’s spokesman admitted. But, he said, “the reality is that this is from a handful of people amongst the thousands of satisfied graduates of our academy”.

It’s a bold claim in the face of such criticism, yet such self-confidence informs much of Rose’s myth-making today. From the start of Rose’s mayoral bid, he has claimed to be the “second ranked candidate” in the mayoral race, because he was second favourite at the bookmakers. At one point, before any polling data was collected to burst Rose’s bubble, he was rated at only 3-1 to beat Sadiq Khan.

How did he achieve this? Well, a number of political pundits have questioned whether Rose may have bet heavily on himself to distort the odds. In a flattering interview with the Times last month, he confirmed that he has bet on himself. His spokesman told me: “Mr Rose has staked a small amount on himself in the mayoral race, which wouldn’t be enough to influence even a single bookmaker’s odd”. As it stands, he is still around 20-1 at many bookmakers, ahead of the Conservative Candidate Shaun Bailey.

One suspects, however, that those odds remain extremely generous. On the face of it, if you visit the London Real YouTube page, it looks like Rose’s recent films, including one criticising Sadiq Khan, are receiving hundreds of thousands of views. Yet many of these videos show the tell tale signs of being paid posts, and the vast majority of his films released in the last few weeks are getting around two or three thousand views, a massive drop off from the heights of his conspiracy content during the pandemic.

As for his claim that he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history”, this also doesn’t appear to tally with reality. The non-profit group “Reform Political Advertising” identified this as one of multiple “false statements of fact, or blatant misrepresentations” in his advertising, in a letter they sent to his campaign.

Typically undeterred, Rose has since tried to repeat the trick of the Digital Freedom Platform, and generate controversy by claiming to be victimised by powerful forces. For months, he has been one of the only candidates to be campaigning heavily in person under lockdown, releasing stylised videos of him without a mask and shaking hands and mingling with assorted Londoners.

When the inevitable happened and he was stopped and fined by police while campaigning in February, he attempted once again to turn himself into a martyr, releasing a video claiming that he was being targeted for political reasons. He was given an on-the-spot fine, and tried hard to spin up some notoriety firstly claiming falsely to have been arrested, and then also falsely that he now had a criminal record as a result of the fine.

When I asked Rose’s campaign about this, his spokesman said: “Mr Rose was referring to the fact that he would ultimately be arrested if he refused to comply with the terms of the FPN he received. As he has chosen not to comply with these terms, he anticipates that the next phase of the legal process will commence in due course.”

That, of course, remains to be seen. And in the meantime, faced with the increased scrutiny that comes with any political campaign, his fantasy world could soon be about to come crumbling down. Only a couple of days ago, for example. Dorian Yates, a regular London Real guest, pulled out of an interview and released a statement claiming that Rose had refused to allow him to question on-air what had happened to the money donated to the Digital Freedom Platform.

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By Timandra Harkness

Rose is yet to respond to Yates’s claim, instead preferring to release films of him shadow-boxing the camera. But in truth, it is hard to see where he goes from here. The pivot from his glossy interviews via his Digital Freedom Platform to his mayoral bid has alienated his online fanbase, while more and more of his course “customers” are starting to speak out. He now has Facebook groups and Reddit threads dedicated to calling him out and picking apart his claims.

Indeed, once London’s voters deliver their verdict, it is hard to see where Brian goes next. After all, the actual votes counted come May 6th are a somewhat purer metric of popularity. And so far London seems immune to Brian’s reality distortion field.

Live on an average Londoner’s wage
James Bloodworth, author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

He announced his intention to run as an independent candidate only a few days ago, but Conservative MP Rory Stewart has already been dismissed by some commentators as not being enough of a Londoner to win the contest.

In this age of identity politics, out-of-towner is not an appellation that Mr Stewart is going to wish to find attached to his name during a mayoral contest. Indeed, Sadiq Khan appeared to win the last contest merely by repeating to Londoners that he was the local son of a bus driver.

So Rory needs some kind of policy gimmick to draw media attention away from any focus on his origins beyond the M25. Fortunately, I have just the plan. Following in the footsteps of former Labour MP Dave Nellist, Rory should pledge if elected to live on the average London worker’s wage.

It’s a gimmick — but it might be just enough of a gimmick to set Stewart’s campaign alight.

As well as being paid an average worker’s wage, Stewart would also have to dispose of his comfy house in South Kensington and live among London’s army of penurious renters. However, his descent into England’s proletariat would be softened by the knowledge that it would only be temporary while he served out his term.

We live in anti-establishment times, and such sacrifice and ascetism would surely be rewarded by the electorate, in whose eyes Rory would be transformed from an effete liberal raconteur to a stolid man of the people. This is a winning formula in today’s political climate.

Let Londoners drink on public transport
Claire Fox, Brexit Party MEP and founder of the Battle of Ideas festival

Rory could do with a bit of an image makeover after that Pret a Manger joke, which makes him look like a healthy-eating stick-in-the-mud. One way he could do it would be to reverse the ban on drinking on public transport.

Firstly, it would be a liberal thing to do, in the classical sense, trusting that the vast majority of people can enjoy a tipple without harassing others.

Secondly, it would be a nice vote of confidence in London’s night-time economy, which has faced many pressures in recent years, yet is vital for anywhere with ambitions to be a “world city”. Let partygoers and clubbers enjoy a drink on their big night out and mark out London as a place that likes to let its hair down.

Last, but by no means least, it would be a poke in the eye to Boris Johnson, who likes to claim he’s a libertarian, but whose first move as mayor was to introduce the drinking ban in the first place.

Make the capital a hedgehog haven
Tom Holland, author of Dominion

Just because Rory is moving from Cumbria to London doesn’t mean that he has to leave behind Mrs Tiggywinkle. Despite all its concrete and tarmac, London can be a surprisingly hospitable place for wildlife, and alongside the foxes nosing around our rubbish bins and the migratory birds who flock to nature reserves like the London Wetland Centre, hedgehogs too provide the capital with a touch of the countryside. Even in the very heart of the city, in Regent’s Park, a tiny population of the animals consistently voted Britain’s best loved wild mammal clings on.

Londoners who want our hedgehogs to be saved from extinction cannot leave the task to conservationists beyond the M25. There is a job to be done in the capital as well. The sheer scale of London means that hedgehogs are unlikely to flourish here without a co-ordinated attempt to link their habitats together.

Councils need to be encouraged to allow herbaceous vegetation and shrubs to grow along the edges of parks; public utilities to sink tunnels under roads; householders to open gaps in their garden fences. As a candidate to be mayor, Rory should back the provision across the capital of what the London Wildlife Trust has called “hedgehog superhighways”. The ambition must be to ensure that no hedgehog habitat in the city is an island entire of itself.

A capital that neglects to save its last remaining populations of these enchanting, iconic and authentically wild creatures, at very little cost and inconvenience, will be a capital that has lost something of its soul. I would love to see Rory put this in his manifesto.

Rethink the green belt
Jonn Elledge, editor of CityMetric

The case for rethinking London’s Green Belt will, by now, be familiar to anyone who’s given a thought to the capital’s housing crisis. Short version: we need more homes; we’re not willing to demolish existing streets so we can squeeze them in there; large chunks of the Green Belt are ugly and next to stations, so let’s have at it.

What is sometimes missing from this debate, though, is that a Green Belt with more houses on it might actually be more green. The farmland which fringes the suburbs, after all, tends to be drenched in chemicals which do untold damage to nature. It’s also far less accessible to the public than, say, Victoria Park.

As perverse as it sounds, redeveloping some of that green belt as homes with carefully planned parkland in between might actually increase both biodiversity and suburban Londoners’ access to green space. By reducing the need to commute from far-flung towns like Luton or Southend, it might be more environmentally friendly, too.

This is a hard case to make, of course, but if there’s any higher purpose to an insurgent campaign like Rory Stewart’s, surely it’s to make the case for important but unpopular measures. And if he wants to play on the easy setting — well, he could always restrict himself to promising to build homes on golf courses.

Get Londoners walking and talking
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Demos think tank

Rory Stewart’s main problem is that his brand — walking about and talking to strangers — is about as un-London as you can get. What works on the fells of Cumbria starts to feel weird when hemmed into a Tube carriage with 120 other sweaty souls.

But he has no choice. A brand is a brand, and his policy platform should be to remake London in his image: the best place in the world to walk, and the best place in the world to make a new friend.

#LondonWalks is the easier proposition. Pedestrianise our high streets. Convert our disused railway lines into strip parks, like New York’s high line. Reward families who walk the kids to school. Ban lorries from the roads between 6am and midnight. Allow people to close off any residential streets on Sundays for children to play outside. We’d be calmer, and healthier, if we all got our 10,000 steps a day.

#LondonTalks will challenge us sceptical city dwellers. But we’d be a stronger city if we made more effort to speak, and listen, to each other. Let’s start with a single day, when every Londoner can pledge to say hello to a stranger. Then a day when everyone who doesn’t know their neighbour pops round to say hello. From there, who knows?

The Mayor doesn’t have to just be a technocrat, pulling policy levers. They can also be a leader of social change. London, Rory-style, might prove a refreshing change.

Introduce an annual London census
Jon Cruddas, Member of Parliament for Dagenham and Rainham

The speed at which people migrate into and within the capital is extraordinary, yet it is barely recognised by the state. This is a critical issue for those living in the poorest parts of the city — those with the cheapest rents and house values. It places extraordinary pressures on public services in these areas of greatest need.

The state is totally ill-equipped to track in real time such movement, remaining captive to a ten-year census cycle. The data is outdated before it is even published, given the velocity of change in a city such as London. The best tracker is the school roll — which is inadequate for effective public policy making.

A new baseline for distributing public resources is desperately required, not least because the poorest communities are disproportionately taking the strain in terms of the escalating city headcount. Such a resource would also be invaluable in lobbying central government over all aspects of public policy from health to education, council allocations and policing.

The Mayor should urgently engage the Leverhulme Centre on Demographic Science at Nuffield College to build a new census model for the capital as an innovative, transparent metric to underscore public policymaking for London.

Take on the absentee landlords
Peter Franklin, Associate Editor of UnHerd

Rory Stewart won’t win on the strength of his awesome Roriness alone — it just gets him a hearing for his ideas. Luckily, as an independent, he can propose whatever policies he likes — so they’d better be bold and brilliant.

To deal with the charge that he’s too privileged to be Mayor, Rory should take aim at London’s most privileged interest group: the city’s private landlords, in particular its absentee landlords. Our capital is a magnet for the world’s money, but if it’s just used to buy into a restricted land supply, it does nothing for Londoners apart from putting up the rent.

Our capital should be a welcoming and dynamic destination for the world’s most talented people, not a series of empty apartments for idle speculators to put their cash into. If they want to use London bricks-and-mortar as a safety deposit box while making no other contribution, then it’s a service that should be charged for.

So here’s the policy: levy a hefty annual fee on every dwelling above a given value. This would be reduced in proportion to UK taxes paid by the owner — or money invested into a qualifying enterprise. Genuine entrepreneurs would pay nothing, absentee landlords and tax avoiders would pay full whack.

Oh and the proceeds would go to the regeneration of London’s rundown housing estates.

Reform political lobbying
Tanya Gold, journalist

I am bored with personality politics, saviours-of-the-day and people who claim to be different but go on to be the same. Ennui and the willingness to close your eyes on television is not enough; nor is obvious cleverness, nor unusual sensitivity. I suggest this, if Stewart wants to be taken seriously as a political reformer: reform political funding and political lobbying.

People beyond the bubble, which is growing larger each day, think Westminster is a closed shop, and, even if it were only a belief — I’d say it’s only moderately corrupt for now — it would be dangerous enough. You should not be able to buy privileged political access in Britain, but you can; and if it isn’t useful why would you do it?

At an event at Tory Conference — run by a PR firm posing as a think tank — I sat next to a monied man who heckled the very idea of taxing capital. In his hand was an itinerary including a private dinner with a senior Secretary of State. He didn’t pay for it, you say? Don’t be stupid.

Stewart should start with this – it would be worth it.

Build some decent social housing
Jenny McCartney, journalist

The most obvious policy that Rory Stewart should vigorously espouse in his London mayoralty bid is the one that so many politicians before him have fudged or failed at: a highly ambitious campaign of building good-quality social housing.

Stewart sounds receptive to the idea, having said earlier this month in a letter to Londoners that “It is obvious that we need to build far more houses and flats — not just gimcrack boxes, but homes we can be proud of.” But others have said similar things before, only for their promises to get tied up in complicated contracts with developers and elastic definitions; during Boris Johnson’s term as mayor, “affordable” was redefined to mean up to 80% of market rents, terminology that has not exactly proved accurate.

The current gross disparity between social housing supply and demand has helped create an expanding category of “working poor” in London — a throwback to the Victorian era — comprising people who are squeezed economically by high private rents but unable to access social housing. The implied contract between the individual and the state — that of work for basic security — has been eroded.

Potential pledges could be to end “right to buy” on London council properties; create a consumer regulator to enforce standards for social housing tenants; campaign for more central government money to reach new annual targets for building social housing; restrict the purchase of London investment properties by foreign buyers and encourage high-quality, imaginative constructions.

Aneurin Bevan — who, post-war, steered the UK’s biggest ever building programme for social housing — would have wept to see the housing difficulties of many families today. Some very radical, or very old-fashioned, thinking is required. Come on, Rory.

Good schools, not gangs
Ralph Leonard, Nigerian-British writer

London is one of Britain’s “hotspots” for the knife crime “epidemic” that regularly crops up in the news. At the moment politicians are frantically searching for quick, short-term solutions, such as increasing police numbers, cracking down on drill music and expanding stop and search. Arrest and convict may be the cheaper strategy, but it isn’t effective and doesn’t even begin to address the long-term social causes of knife crime.

No single policy will instantly “solve” London’t knife crisis totally, but a radical overhaul of the education system will help significantly and begin the long process of addressing this problem. Making education more attractive would be central to all this.

Education needs to be better and be seen to lead to better things; instead many of London’s schools are overcrowded, increasingly dilapidated and deprived of resources. The best chances are only for the rich.

Rory should pledge to raise the quality and standards of both middling and struggling schools, and demonstrate how being in school and learning makes a difference — and leads to greater material and psychological wellbeing than getting involved with gangs and knife crime. In doing so, Rory must recognise the damaging effects of the austerity cuts brought about by his spurned party, and commit to reversing them, through an ambitious long-term plan to providing the capital’s schools with adequate resources, teachers and renovated facilities.

Don’t just preach feminism — practise it
Julie Bindel, journalist and campaigner

During the Tory Party leadership contest most of the candidates, including Rory Stewart, declared that they were feminists (after Dominic Raab said he was “probably not” one). Quite frankly, I doubt very much that is the case, but if Rory Stewart wishes to truly set himself apart from the Tories, including former leader Theresa May, he could put his heart and soul into developing and maintaining services for women and girls who have experienced male violence in London.

The housing crisis in the capital means that if a woman escapes domestic violence with her children, then unless she is seriously rich, she is going to end up either sofa-surfing or in grotty bed-and-breakfast temporary accommodation. It’s no wonder so many women return to violent men, risking their own lives, when that is the alternative.

Similarly, sexual violence and rape in London is at an all-time high; the conviction rate at an all-time low. And yet at the same time, rape crisis services are being squeezed into nonexistence.

And then there is the issue of women being trafficked into London to be abused in the sex trade. There are barely any services available to these women if they do manage to escape, which means they face deportation. Surely we can do better than that? If Rory Stewart wants to make his mark, he could stand proud as the first ever Tory that took the pandemic of violence against women seriously.

I’ve experienced it first hand. In 2016, during research for my book Hired, I lived in a poky bedsit close to London Bridge. The rent seemed cheap by local standards (£80 per week) – until I realised what I was getting. For this sum me and my flatmates were crammed six to a room, with only flimsy cardboard partitions separating each bed from that of its neighbour. Each morning we would wake up amid a chorus of coughing and spluttering, our breath visible in the gloom.Rental properties like this are ubiquitous in the Capital.

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The horror of renting from one of London's rogue landlords

By Charlotte Pickles

It is with this in mind that the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan recently proposed capping rents should he win the next mayoral contest in 2020. “The housing crisis is now having such an effect on a generation of Londoners that the arguments in favour of rent stabilisation and control are becoming overwhelming,” Khan wrote in a letter to Labour MP Karen Buck in December. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has also pledged to introduce nationwide rent controls should his party get into government.

The housing crisis can, of course, be blamed on the failure of successive governments to build new homes. Britain has around 560 houses per 1,000 people, while most continental European countries have over 600. In fact, it was reported last year that there are more than 423,000 new homes in Britain that have been granted planning permission but are yet to be built because developers are sitting on land.

As such, the number of people living in the rented sector in Britain has risen precipitously in recent years. By 2021 it is estimated that a quarter of us will be living in privately rented accommodation. This applies particularly to young people: as things stand, up to a third of millennials – those born between 1980 and 1996 – face renting their entire life.

And the sheer proportion of income going on rent puts many at risk of homelessness were they to lose their job. On average, Londoners spend more than 40% of their earnings on rent – in Camden its a whopping 61%.

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The grim reality of renting in Britain

By James Bloodworth

Against this backdrop, it is not difficult to see the appeal of rent controls. Such a policy could be implemented in a variety of ways, but the aim of any cap is to prevent landlords from increasing rents based on market prices.

Rents could be temporarily frozen, capped at market rates or lower, or the amount landlords are permitted to increase rent by could be restricted. Neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Sadiq Khan have been clear as to which option they would prefer.

Unsurprisingly, rent controls are popular among many of those currently renting in the private sector. According to a 2015 Survation poll, fewer than 10% of people in Britain are against some kind of mandatory legal limit being set on rents, while 59% are somewhat or strongly in favour of rental caps.

When I was writing my book, my flatmates lived in grim and unpleasant conditions because they simply couldn’t afford the market rate for more comfortable dwellings in the parts of town they needed to live in for work (had they lived further out they would likely have spent a similar amount commuting back in). George, a 33-year-old Romanian plasterer and former flatmate of mine who I met up with again last month, summed up the attitude of many in the private rented sector: landlords, he told me, were “filling their pockets while your wages disappear”.

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Home Truths – Part IV: how ministers made the housing crisis worse

By Liam Halligan

But while rent controls sound like a neat policy solution, do they actually work? Or might they instead have unintended and negative consequences?

One potential paradox of rent controls is that a significant reduction in rents could negatively impact those on low income by encouraging landlords to sell their properties, thereby reducing the amount of rented stock in circulation. In San Francisco, where rent controls are in place, one side-effect has been owners choosing to keep properties vacant because improvement costs outstrip the money they can bring in via rent.

Yet, as the San Francisco-based writer Caroline Dickie has noted, many San Franciscans would “struggle to pay rent without rent control… because so many people want to live here and zoning regulations, condo ordinances and other factors make it extremely difficult for the city to add new buildings”. Some of this will sound familiar to Londoners.

Another American city that has a long-standing policy of rent control is New York: a panel of experts sits down annually to determine how much more landlords are allowed to charge tenants. Yet the flaw in the model was summed up by Anthony Breach in a 2017 article for City Metric: “Those already in rented flats when controls are introduced do well, but the city’s young people and migrants from the rest of the country and abroad are penalised as they need the new homes that are not being built.” In other words, apartments in the centre of town are dominated by New Yorkers with high incomes paying low rents, while low-income residents are very often confined to the city’s outskirts.

These are the potential unintended consequences of introducing rent controls in isolation, as Sadiq Khan appears to be proposing. A two-tier system invariably springs up in which those living in rent-controlled apartments refuse to move while others must compete for (fewer and, therefore, pricier) properties at market rents.

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The housing crisis is bad, but can we please talk about renters

By Charlotte Pickles

In fact rent controls did exist in Britain until the late 1980s, and one of the reasons they were abolished was because, according to a 2017 parliamentary report, “landlords took opportunities to sell up and invest elsewhere”, depleting rentable housing stock.

An increase in the supply of social housing could help to offset the distortions caused by rent controls, but only partially. London boroughs have never built more than 30,000 council houses a year, and at present London requires around 50,000 new homes annually. Most of the supply is currently built privately; a policy of rent controls could see this figure – around 20,000 annually – actually decrease, worsening our housing supply problem.

The attraction of rent control policies to people like George is obvious: these are people who are stuck in substandard rented accommodation and are paying through the nose for it. Yet the experience of other cities around the world shows that, while an alluring policy tool to deal with the perceived avariciousness of landlords, rent controls would bring a host of problems.

Of course, such a policy fits the prevailing political climate, in which people look increasingly to the state to solve the country’s problems by decree. But arbitrarily capping rents is more likely to end up creating a privileged tier of renters while making the housing market even more precarious and expensive for people like George. State intervention is best focused on ensuring Britain’s housing is fit for purpose, and building more council homes.

We live in an age when easy solutions are all the rage, even when they exacerbate the very problems they purport to solve. Rent controls are not a neat solution to Britain’s ongoing housing crisis – and Khan and Corbyn should know better.

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Britain's homelessness shame

By James Bloodworth