Sadiq Khan was elected mayor of London over three years ago in May 2016. The honeymoon has long been over. The city’s vital signs are being monitored closely by the media and political opponents for symptoms of weakness or recovery in the lead-up to the new electoral campaigns for the mayoralty, which will be decided in a little over six months’ time.
Khan, as mayor, must surely be in one of the most prominent and supercharged positions of cultural power in the world. His voice is loud and significant.
London, arguably the foremost city on the planet, is certainly the one which best represents the face of humanity, with a population even more diverse than New York’s – and with higher average property prices as well. London also has fewer guns than New York, but on the other hand, it appears to have many more knives.
At the moment the headline takeaway from Khan’s term, unfortunately, is that London has become a dangerously violent place – “Stab City” – with knife-murders under his leadership at an all-time high. As the city’s mayor, Khan stands, perhaps unfairly, to receive some blame for it.
Yet, it should be noted that violent crime is (modestly) up across the British Isles, and that police numbers have gone down, with 20,000 fewer officers than a decade ago. There might just be a connection between the two. Home Secretary Sajid Javid recently announced he would reverse the policy of law-and-order cuts imposed under prime minister David Cameron in 2010.
It should also be noted that it was Johnson as mayor who instigated the London-wide policy of abandoning “stop and search”. Khan was encouraged by the Home Office to continue this liberalisation after he became mayor.
Although stop and search is rarely effective in catching serious criminals, and is arguably corrosive of community relations, it meant that Khan was in the firing line when blame for increased crime was apportioned by the media. It also meant that the mayor, rather than the Home Office – responsible for lower police numbers – was primarily criticised for the bloodshed.
In truth, what the UK might have is a deterrence problem rather than a knife-crime problem, and as a result of that a nasty and intractable gang problem now, too.
Three years ago, things looked different. After Johnson decided not to run for a third term as mayor of London, stepping down on 5 May 2016, London had its first Muslim mayor in Khan – an historic step forward for a diverse and tolerant UK, a great signal to the world.
Khan was photogenic, persuasive, and a moderate Labour man to his fingertips. As such, his installation as London’s figurehead was timely: at last somebody representative of London’s multi-ethnic population would be leading it (Johnson was part-Turkish with an Indian-extraction wife at the time, but he was also a Conservative and a posh Bullingdon-Etonian).
Khan as a liberal Muslim was moreover a reassuring presence at a time when the fear of Islamic fundamentalism was rising in response to Daesh (the so-called Islamic State group) running rampant in Syria and Iraq.
“I want to show that as a city, we still stand for pluralism and diversity at a time when there are narrow, populist, nativist movements around the world,” he told the GG2 Power List. “We want to show that we are still a beacon for the rest of the world and that London is open.” Those words are Khan to a tee: modern, progressive and internationalist – but also maybe somewhat out of step with the Labour Party as it stands under Jeremy Corbyn, and which might have implications for the direction in which Khan’s career goes next.
Before entering politics in 2005 as the MP for Tooting, in south London, where he had been born in 1970 to immigrant parents from Pakistan (his father worked as a bus driver and he grew up in a council flat as one of eight children) Khan had enjoyed a successful career as a human rights solicitor, campaigner and activist.
After joining the law firm of Christian Fisher in 1994, Khan represented people such as former Metropolitan Police Superintendent Ali Dizaei, Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and then-Islamic fundamentalist, UK-born Maajid Nawaz of terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir. The since-reformed Nawaz, founding chairman of counter-extremist organisation The Quilliam Foundation, praised mayor Khan in the following terms: “The victory of London’s new mayor as a non-Islamist Muslim is as much a blow to Islamist bigots as it is to anti-Muslim bigots. This victory speaks to the possibilities of integration. It offers hope for our country’s new immigrant families. And as a symbol of social mobility, it provides aspiration to those from humble backgrounds.”
The sentiment was a fitting capstone to Khan’s humanistic journey – but also to his appetite for power and recognition.
Khan was always going places fast. He became a partner in his law firm after just three years and by 2002 it had been renamed Christian Khan.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown made him an assistant government whip at age 37 after only two years in the Commons, and then a year later Khan got his foot on the first rung of the ministerial ladder at the Department of Communities and Local Government. The year after that, Brown made him a transport minister; then one more year and Khan found himself out of government and back to being MP for Tooting following the Conservative general election victory in 2010.
In opposition, Khan served for a time as shadow justice minister under the new Labour leader Ed Miliband (whose leadership campaign Khan masterminded), but that was not enough to dampen his ambition. He began to think about a challenge to Johnson as a potent line of attack on the Tories where both he and Labour might succeed. Miliband helped to orientate Khan towards the capital, naming him shadow minister for London and putting Khan in charge of the London council elections in 2014. Labour made great advances: Khan is talented – and ruthless – at electioneering.
According to Maajid Nawaz, Khan (a Sunni) worked closely with Tooting Mosque in 2010 “to stir up anti-Ahmadi sectarian hatred” against his LibDem rival Nasser Butt, knowing that “Ahmadis are perhaps the most persecuted minority sects among Sunni Muslims.”
Despite that, Nawaz also affirmed that “Sadiq Khan is no Muslim extremist. And it is not only his track record voting for gay rights that proves this. Having known him when I was a Muslim extremist, I know that he did not subscribe to my then-theocratic views.”
What it really showed was that Khan was a determined and effective politician, who would do what it takes to get elected. Khan knew instinctively the simple wisdom propounded by India’s Bharatiya Janata Party leader LK Advani, that the further you stray from the centre in politics, the fewer votes there are.
After another defeat for Labour in 2015, the ever-ambitious Khan resigned as an MP and turned to face City Hall – and to what now seems inevitable victory soon after.
There are, however, certain problems that could beset his re-election campaign.
Johnson, prime minister at the time of writing, left the mayor’s office after two terms in charge of the capital still popular with the people of London. A YouGov poll commissioned at the end of his term revealed that 52 per cent of Londoners believed he had done a “good job” as mayor of London compared with 29 per cent who thought he did a “bad job”.
Where Johnson banned booze on the buses, Khan banned bikinis on billboards, but apart from sharing a pale streak of very English-style authoritarianism, their styles and performances diverged.
Facing re-election in May 2020, the demographics of London – young, liberal and multi-ethnic – should gift Khan an unassailable incumbency advantage. On the other hand, his polling metrics are looking broken, with his popularity by July 2019 at a three-year low (his rating was +31 when he entered the mayor’s office but at the time of writing is -3).
There are pockets of dissatisfaction with Khan’s performance as mayor: he is sometimes called “Photocall Khan,” and the law-and-order situation on the capital’s streets has been cruelly termed “Khanage” in an unfairly personal manner (crime is up 16 per cent overall since June 2016 and violent crime by 13 per cent but, as noted, not only in London). Khan’s boast that the numbers of homeless had been falling has been silenced by the recent rise in rough-sleepers back to its previous level.
On housing Khan appears to be damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. London’s property market is impervious to incentives to deflect it from ever higher prices and no matter how many housing starts Khan encourages, they will never keep up with increasing demand for space in the capital.
On the other hand, his proposed solutions, such as rent controls, promise only to interrupt further the supply of new accommodation and worsen the situation – for tenants especially, of whom there are ever-increasing and unwilling numbers.
Paradoxically, there is some feeling that poorer Londoners are suffering more under a Labour mayor.
The incoming barrage of pollution legislation from City Hall – an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in force since April 2019 and from 2021 the ULEZ expanded to include the entire area within the North and South Circular Roads – laudable as it might be, has led critics to describe it as a ban on poor people’s cars.
A rich foreigner in Mayfair will be able to drive a new five-litre Bentley and incur no emissions charge, but a nurse or a teacher in Wood Green or Brixton attempting to keep their second-hand banger going will effectively be forced to junk it. The optics, as the saying goes, are not good.
Taken together, these factors might make the contest closer than anybody would like to predict, even considering the relative anonymity of Khan’s rivals for the mayor’s office.
With Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn polling so badly (only 14 per cent of people see him as prime ministerial material whereas in September 30 per cent still liked Johnson), Khan must surely be tempted to follow in Johnson’s footsteps and throw his cap into the ring for the Labour leadership – something that journalist Andrew Gilligan believes was always Khan’s long-term plan, with the mayoralty simply a stepping-stone.
And all this, of course, taking place under the sturm und drang of the ongoing Brexit melodrama, with the UK political situation in a febrile and unpredictable state.
If a general election takes place, either before or after Brexit, and if the Labour Party fails to win enough seats to form an overall government – which from current polling looks highly likely – it is possible that a Labour leadership contest would be held before too long.
Would Khan abandon the mayor’s office for the thankless task of being the leader of the opposition? Khan is, above all, a Labour man, and a moderate Labour man at that. He might well conclude that a party less to the Left has more chance of being elected to power and that he is the man to accomplish the task.
It is certain that Khan – who can sometimes appear irritable and combative – feels the frustrations of the mayoralty deeply. He really only has power in three areas: transport, housing and policing, all of which are in a critical situation which has worsened under his leadership, but none of which he can really control.
“Over the last four years, violent crime has been going up across the country,” he told the GG2 Power List. “The causes of violent crime are very complex – we are talking about poverty, social alienation, a lack of opportunity.” He is no doubt correct, but as mayor he has his feet held to the fire with no real power either to quench it or move further away from the heat. The same with housing, the same with London’s rickety transport network with its chronic underfunding and daily breakdowns.
Khan knows he can only really solve these problems long-term as prime minister.
