Published by The i paper (28th July, 2025)
When I was growing up in the suburbs of London half a century ago, the city was a symbol of our country’s post-war decline. Critics declared that Britain’s capital – with its crime-ridden streets, empty buildings, dire restaurants, dismal schools, declining docks and falling tax revenues – was doomed. And when I went into town with friends on filthy British Rail trains, we saw few signs of any ethnic minorities unless we ventured into “their” areas, such as Notting Hill, which was far from the smart enclave it is today.
It has been glorious to see my home city emerge from decay to erupt back into life and regain its greatness. The capital is a cultural and financial powerhouse – and the engine of Britain’s economy with the fastest growth, best productivity and highest number of businesses per capita. From the air that we breathe through to the city’s restaurants, schools and transport, there has been a dramatic surge in quality.
It is a stunning success – fostered by Margaret Thatcher’s “Big Bang” that deregulated the City of London – that should make the heart of any true British patriot swell with pride. Instead a torrent of loud voices on the hard right insist London is doomed again, portraying the capital as an urban hellhole. Reform UK Party leader Nigel Farage, who usually likes to pose as a man of the people, claims it is no longer safe to wear a Rolex watch since the “lawless” city is “in a state of collapse”. Tory tough guy Robert Jenrick says rampant crime makes the law-abiding majority “look like mugs”. Former academic turned nativist rabble-rouser Matt Goodwin keeps saying “London is over… a city in visible decline” with unsafe streets, mobile phones being stolen and demographic change due to illegal migrants. The writer David Goodhart fumes that London is “in danger of trashing its own brand”, its proportion of white Britons declining while “diasporas fight it out on our streets”.
This dystopian image – reliant on dodgy data, selective statistics and fickle personal anecdotes – is far removed from reality. London has big problems, of course, with pockets of deep poverty and a housing crisis intensified by both the city’s success – making it a magnet for migrants – and gross political failure in response. Although most of its streets are remarkably safe, there is rising concern over shoplifting and knife crime.
Yet for all its flaws, the city is a triumph of globalisation and tolerance. It has even bounced back from the Brexit disaster opposed by most residents. However, such is the toxicity of current political debate poisoned by the hard-right and their fascist fellow travellers that London – with its multicultural vibrancy and Muslim mayor – is being used as a weapon to drive division and stoke community tensions. This strategy – imported from America, where attacks on “deadly inner cities” run by Democrats are a key component of Donald Trump’s mendacious style of populism – must be resisted for our national wellbeing. Crime has crashed over the course of my adult life. The annual number of murders – the most devastating offence – has almost halved in London over the past 22 years, and that’s despite a population rise of nearly two million in that time.
Jenrick claimed “lawbreaking is out of control” after confronting a Tube fare dodger, then blamed mayor Sadiq Khan – yet evasion rates fell last year and prosecutions are at the highest levels for six years. Besides, there is nothing new about such problems; the previous mayor attacked such “parasitic scourges” back in 2011 before he became prime minister. Boris Johnson, however, used to celebrate the capital’s diversity. Now the Tories – terrified by Farage – target London in their misguided bid to shore up crumbling support. So Chris Philp, the shadow Home Secretary, promulgates a false claim that “48 per cent of London’s social housing is occupied by people who are foreign”. His frontbench colleague Neil O’Brien complains that barely one in five school children in London are white British before talking about “the traditional majority culture” that “doesn’t exist any more”.
Meanwhile, Goodhart absurdly complains parts of the capital fail his own “bus stop” test of integration – “Can you share a joke at a bus stop with a stranger from a different ethnicity about something you have both heard on national media?” – when 40 per cent of Londoners are foreign-born.
We are witnessing the appalling revival of unashamed racism in public discourse. There are jibes about hearing people talking in foreign tongues in a city where 300 languages are spoken. Some terms being used are almost meaningless: foreign-born, for instance, includes my Scottish father, since my grandfather was serving abroad in the army at his birth, along with the likes of Johnson and Rory Stewart.
Other data is deceitful – such as an oft-repeated claim there might be up to 600,000 illegal migrants in London. This is based on a contentious Thames Water study that led to newspaper corrections after headlines about one in 12 residents potentially being illicit; it turned out to include people with indefinite leave to remain, and to encompass areas outside London while also excluding parts of the capital.
Populists seek to find scapegoats who can be blamed for societal problems while offering no real solutions beyond their sloganising. Now the hard right has turned on London at a time when it feels our democracy is on the brink of sliding into a dark place. Yes, the capital – like the rest of the country – faces big challenges, including over the scale of migration and pace of change. It should not be used as a wedge to sow division, however, but as a source of pride. Britain’s comparative success at navigating modernity, after the amazing revival I’ve seen over my lifetime, was built on diversity, openness and tolerance.
So do not be deluded by the doom-mongers, hate merchants and pessimists: they display only contempt for their country when they attack its capital city.