Sorry, give me a second to catch my breath.
The New Year Honours List has just been announced, and I was so astounded by some of the awards that I immediately went to the Royal Family website. What exactly are the qualification criteria?
There they are, in black and white: “To be made a Knight or a Dame is to receive one of the highest honours in the United Kingdom, and is usually granted to those who have made a significant contribution to their field, usually on a national level.”
In other words, to become a knight of the realm a candidate has to be very good at what he does. Because of his sterling performance he provides invaluable services to the crown, which is to say the nation, the part of it under his purview.
If that’s the case, how can the name of the London mayor Sadiq Khan be even whispered in this context? I’ve lived in London for 36 years now, and to say he is the worst mayor I’ve ever seen is to say nothing. Yet here he is, the freshly anointed Sir Sadiq Khan.
Let’s put it this way: if a hypothetical mayor were elected on the promise of harming London in every possible way, and if he then devoted every waking moment to achieving that goal, he couldn’t possibly be any worse than Sadiq Khan.
If elevation to knighthood were a matter of ideological purity, then of course Khan would be a perfect candidate under this government. He is further to the left than even Starmer’s cabinet, by far the leftmost government in the past 50 years or so.
And then he is a minority hire, which gives him a jump on competition both ideologically and electorally. After all, Muslims make up 15 per cent of London’s population, and with a co-religionist candidate on offer, they are guaranteed to vote as a bloc. That’s how Khan has managed to win three elections to the post he is demonstrably unqualified to hold.
However, the website of the family that bestows, or rather rubberstamps, the honours doesn’t mention ideology, religion or race among its criteria for “one of the highest honours in the United Kingdom”. (I hasten to add that, as the founder, chairman and so far one of only two members of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I’d welcome such criteria with an open heart.) No, it specifically talks about a record of high achievement.
So what’s Khan’s record like? Well, he has indeed achieved impressive numbers.
Khan was first elected in 2016, and since that year the level of robberies, stabbings and other violent crimes has steadily fallen… No, not in London. Only across England and Wales. In London it has risen 30 per cent.
Twenty per cent of Londoners have been attacked or threatened with violence in the past five years. Khan responded to that lamentable situation in a predictable fashion, by busily closing down police stations all over the city. Police commissioners in other places have been just as busily opening new ones, but what do they know?
Having reduced the number of police officers in London, Sadiq Khan then hamstrung the remaining ones by limiting the use of stop and search. That tactic is blatantly racist according to him, and racism is a worse crime than any that could be prevented by stop and search.
At the same time, the mayor has looked with avuncular good humour on marches in support of Muslim terrorism, which have become ubiquitous since the 7 October pogrom. These have turned central London into a no-go area for Jews, along with those gentiles who frown on anti-Semitism.
Under Khan’s tutelage, 150,000 London Jews don’t feel safe even in the quarters they traditionally inhabit. They are routinely abused when leaving synagogues on Saturday, or when changing buses shuttling between Golders Green and other Jewish areas. Cars flying anti-Semitic banners speed through Jewish neighbourhoods with impunity. In response, city officials helpfully advise Jews not to display any outward signs of their religion, just to be on the safe side.
Climate fanatics also enjoy a free ride under this mayor. In fact, the same groups of thugs happily drift from anti-Semitic to anti-capitalist marches in an attempt to take control of London streets. The mayor looks on with a beatific smile as ‘protesters’ block major thoroughfares and throw orange goo on great paintings in London museums.
Khan himself is a climate fanatic, or rather a fanatic of the power-grabbing potential of climate activism. That’s why he has evidently decided to rid London of cars.
Socialists always hated private vehicles even before the elaborate global warming swindle became a force. A car is a factor of independence from public transport and hence from the state, which makes that form of transportation intolerable.
The mayor has set out to make cars unusable in London, and he is succeeding famously. And if they can’t be expelled, they can be turned into cash cows for our corrupt councils.
Acting in that spirit, Khan has greatly expanded ULEZ (the Ultra Low Emission Zone), imposing a daily charge of £12.50 on drivers of older vehicles in outer boroughs. That penalises the poor people Labour claims to protect, many of whom have to rely on their cars to go to work.
At the same time, Khan expanded the congestion charge zone, which Boris Johnson had narrowed when becoming mayor. Add to this the punitive 20 mph speed limit even on major roads, a profusion of bus and bicycle lanes, new traffic islands being constructed every day, and you’ll see why the Tom Tom Index identified London’s rush hour as the slowest-moving in the world.
That’s why cabbies can no longer make a living. For every 10 drivers leaving the trade, only two replacements come in, and no wonder. With only the meter moving fast, passengers have to count on their own two feet or the dirty and unreliable tube. Buses are no good in Central London: for example, courtesy of the good mayor, the 22 Bus takes at least an hour to travel the three miles from my home to Oxford Circus – and not just in rush hour.
This war on cars hits London’s retail businesses hard, with pubs, restaurants and shops going out of business at an impressive rate. But it’s especially damaging to emergency services that can’t get through bottlenecks even with the benefit of sirens and flashing lights. When Londoners talk about murderous traffic, they often mean it literally.
So what exactly is the “significant contribution” Sir Sadiq (as he now is) has made to the public administration of what to me is the world’s greatest city? None at all, although he has indeed contributed significantly to London’s public administrators. One in every four pounds we pay in council tax goes straight into the pension funds of council members.
That’s quite a lot, considering that London council tax has grown by 71 per cent since Sadiq Khan became mayor. That achievement clearly appealed to Starmer, in line as it is with the government’s policy of taxing people out of every hope of independence from the state.
The only surprising thing about Khan’s knighthood is that he hasn’t been elevated straight to the peerage. Such significant achievements deserve the highest accolade on offer.
Happy New Year!
We are all Londoners in Western cities today. In your piece I read, mutatis mutandis, of ‘my’ Canadian city and its mairesse (too contemptible to be named). Perhaps you’ve forgotten to mention it of London, but here we also firebomb a synagogue every month or so since Oct 7. No arrests as of yet.
It seems that he’s honoured for his impressive achievement in making Jews frightened to go out.
I look forward to your sequel, “Arise, Dame Who?” in which you marvel at the even greater nastiness of “Dame” Emily Thornberry.
But there’s some consolation in the MBE awarded to Tom Baker, who in the 1970s enriched the lives of millions of children without interfering with any of them. “Arise, Doctor Who!”
Unlikely as it may sound, Thornberry is even worse. And you make me sorry I missed Ton Baker: he was unknown in both rge USSR and the USA, where I spent (wasted?) the 1970s.