Dave Hill: The ‘lawless London’ myth does nothing to reduce crime

Dave Hill: The ‘lawless London’ myth does nothing to reduce crime

On Sunday, Sir Sadiq Khan, writing in the Observer, proposed a plan for Britain to respond to what he called a far-Right “on the march” in several parts of Europe and the USA, and called for what he termed “a serious strategy to halt extremists in their tracks” in his own country. The previous Thursday, during his January Mayor’s Question Time session at City Hall, Khan was asked by a Conservative opponent about his “key performance indicators” for “keeping Londoners safe this year”.

The question was a Trojan Horse – a ruse by Susan Hall, the Tory London Assembly member Khan defeated at last year’s mayoral election, to allow her to follow up by asking him about organised child sex offenders, otherwise known as “grooming gangs”. It is an issue her party leader, Kemi Badenoch (also Hall’s predecessor on the Assembly), has been very publicly raising at national level, in concert with the agitations of Elon Musk.

What followed was dispiriting, but also illuminating. For years now, the populist Right, which includes Tories such as Hall, fellow Brexit loyalists from other parties, their mass of media allies and, of course, Donald Trump, have been eager to portray the capital since Khan became its Mayor as descending ever deeper into a deadly mire of criminality, a city where nobody is safe.

You might recall the ludicrous Tory election broadcast of last year (pictured), with its portrayal of Londoners cowering in constant fear since the (now thrice-elected) Khan had supposedly “seized power”. The tag line “lawless London” has long been gleefully deployed by Right-wing newspapers, GB News pundits and the like in response to high-profile offences or any new set of figures that looks worse than the set before.

Hall is part of that group addiction to depicting daily life in London as uniquely perilous, with the Mayor directly to blame. You will recall her famous claim of November 2023 that she had been the victim of a pickpocket on the tube, before proceeding to dismantle her own allegation on live radio. But that experience, like her large defeat last May, has not humbled or deterred her.

At MQT she inquired, “just how many grooming gangs have we got in London?” Taken at face value, it was a ridiculous question. How can anyone quantify with an exact number the prevalence in a city of nine million people of groups of collaborators in a criminal activity that is, by its very nature, secretive in the extreme? If the Met had such a number, it would also know enough about those involved to have already arrested them.

But, who knows, maybe behind Hall’s unanswerable question, other motives lurked. At past City Hall public scrutiny sessions, Khan has voiced his view that some Tories, Hall among them, use such meetings primarily for harvesting footage that can be deployed as transferable clips on social media and used as hooks for outraged “talking points” by Right-wing broadcasters. He may have a point – the usual suspects were at it within hours, with the usual, unchallenged conspiracy theories attached.

Was there also something deeper and darker going on? The convicted gangs lately returned to the public eye were from towns in the north of England and of Pakistani descent. Though a born-and-bred Londoner, Khan, too, is of Pakistani heritage. Was Hall driving at something? Did Khan suspect she was? Were his requests for her to be clearer about what she meant, denounced by Hall as evasions, really a coded dare – a challenge to her to be frank about some veiled, broader accusation-by-association?

I won’t pretend to know what was in either politician’s mind. But some things about their exchanges, aside from the contempt each has for the other, were pretty clear. One is that they were a near-complete waste of taxpayers’ money. Their sole saving grace was that Khan, though he declined to directly answer Hall’s trick question – shrewdly, alas, given that any straight answer to it would have been used against him – did provide Londoners with some understanding that the sexual exploitation of women and girls forms part of the parasitic county lines problem.

Another was Hall’s ineptitude. Her righteous fire and bluster was undermined by her references to “country” lines, not “county”. It was an incongruous error for a self-appointed champion of women and the police – almost as incongruous as her delight at the return to power of Trump, a convicted fraudster who has also had to pay a woman £4 million in damages for sexually abusing and later defaming her. Hall is the Tories’ septic state personified.

Screenshot 2025 01 19 at 12.43.33

Most importantly, attempts to fashion an impression of a non-stop crime emergency in what is pointedly termed “Sadiq Khan’s London” – a mission to which Hall’s MQT effort was a new contribution – have a debatable basis in statistical fact.

Khan quoted some figures which concealed as much as they revealed, but the latest Office for National Statistics data show, for example, the people of Greater London to be at lower risk per head of being victims of violent crime than those of any other English region except one, and at lower risk than most of that crime resulting in injury. The area where violent crime is most commonplace is South Yorkshire.

Where London doesn’t do so well is in total recorded crime, where it tops the national table, slightly ahead of Yorkshire & The Humber and the North East. In the theft sub-division, it is, I’m afraid, the runaway leader.

But even the most pessimistic reading of the numbers does not provide a justification for confecting the fiction that crime in London is “spiralling out of control”, let alone for alleging that Khan, who doesn’t even run the Metropolitan Police, is the guilty party, as if, by some mysterious means and in some dastardly secret cause, he is deliberately letting it thrive – or could stop it just by barking a few orders.

The “lawless London” myth does precisely nothing to reduce crime, serving instead to escalate the fear of it among people unlikely to be its victims while ignoring the very real and pressing needs of those at greatest risk. The politics that perpetuate it are the lowest of the low.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky.

 

Categories: Comment

5 Comments

  1. Philip VIrgo says:

    If London is so safe why has the Mayor (very correctly in my opinion) put reducing violence against girls and women so high on his agenda?

    I recently became development lead for Neighbourhood watch in Lambeth and am trying to identify the reasons for the gaps between perception and reality … including the question of whose perceptions and whose reality.

    What quickly became clear is that the most angry individuals are not white right wingers but teenagers (all colours, but particularly black) who are patronised and/or ignored when they try to explain the pressures they face from organised gangs and abusers (on-line in their bedrooms as well as on their way to and from school) without running the risk of being grounded, driven to school (or humiliatingly escorted), let alone denied access to mobile phones by parents wanting to “protect” them.

    It came as no surprise to me to learn that surveys of teenage happiness and/or angst put London bottom of a very depressing league. I suspect, however, that the pattern is very uneven across the London boroughs and may well be susceptible to being addressed by LOCAL action on community safety … but the action needs to be based on genuine engagement with all the communities of London, especially women and girls in the groups most likely to be abused, as opposed to verbiage from those more concerned about honour and image, than reality (I include white liberals alongside self-appointed misogynist community leaders).

    1. Dave Hill says:

      Thank you for your excellent comment, Philip.

      My article is primarily about the low political motivations of those who continually assert that London as a whole is a place where rates of crime, in particular violent crime, are exceptionally high compared with other places and continually getting higher due to the indifference or incompetence of the Mayor.

      The official crime statistics may well have shortcomings and can be misleading – these problems are well understood by criminologists – but, even so, they do not bear out any “lawless London” political and media narrative, particularly where violent crime is concerned.

      In my view, creating and perpetuating this narrative does nothing to reduce crime, particularly as it affects those most likely to be adversely affected by it – a point I make in my article.

      Moreover, no Mayor of London – Sadiq Khan or any other – possesses any great power to affect crime rates, which are influenced by a range of factors, some of which neither Mayors nor the Met may have much if any direct control over. They must respond as best they can.

      Why did the Mayor place a high priority on reducing offending against woman and girls in his 2022-2025 police and crime plan? Because he considered it particularly important for the Met to give that issue close attention.

      Nobody in their right mind pretends that crime is a trivial matter in London, including violent and/or sexual offending, or disagrees that more could and should be done to prevent it and to detect perpetrators. I am sure you are right to say that genuine and productive engagement with communities, especially those at greatest risk of being victims of crime, is key to making progress.

  2. Ali Husain says:

    Some facts for you:

    County lines has absolutely nothing to do with the sexual exploitation of young girls.
    These are entirely different issues.

    Country lines exploit children into forced labour aka modern slavery to sell and transport drugs.

    Grooming gangs exploit young girls by using a young attractive male to form relationships, sexualise, take their virginity, I introduce them to drugs and alcohol and them recruit them forcefully to work at organised child brothels.

    The perpetrators of county lines originally called it country lines as anything outside of London is termed by them as country, “we are going country bruv”.

    The government misnamed it and that name has stuck. Hall is the only person using the proper name.

    1. Dave Hill says:

      Thank you for your interesting comment, Ali.

      I am aware of what a “grooming gang” is.

      Clearly, the understanding of the Mayor of London, whose role includes being London’s police and crime commissioner and therefore working closely with the Met, is that the sexual exploitation of young girls is indeed an aspect of the form of criminal activity the Met calls “county lines”. It would appear, for example, from his answer to a question asked by then London Assembly member Florence Eshalomi (now MP for Vauxhall) in 2019 that this has been true of both the Mayor and London’s law enforcement bodies for several years.

      What you say about the use of the term “county lines” rather than “country lines” is interesting. However, I think it very unlikely indeed that Susan Hall saying “country lines” rather “county lines” reflected any deeper historical knowledge of the terminology in question on her part.

      Had that been the case, she would surely have said so, given that she never misses an opportunity to parade her unshakable conviction that her grasp of all issues relating to crime is superior to that of the Mayor.

      Furthermore, her default deference to the Metropolitan Police suggests she would, in any case, be most unlikely to knowingly use a term different from the one the Met uses at an in-public scrutiny meeting such as Mayor’s Question Time.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *