Say what you like about Sadiq Khan’s ‘banned hellscape’ – UK cities prove right-wing agitators wrong | Jonathan Liu
I I write these words to you from the jaws of hell. Here in my favorite north London café, among the bare lamps and £3.80 cinnamon buns, I take shelter from the stark horror of Sadiq Khan’s forbidden hell. Little children in strollers screaming for salvation. A Lime bike comes dangerously close to running a red light. Like the Romans, I see Blackstock Road frothing with a lot of blood, although from this distance it might actually be a discarded pastrami sandwich.
“Welcome to London, don’t forget your stab vest“,” reads a proposed billboard for a brand of vodka promoted by comedian Ricky Gervais. Gervais is angry that TfL rejected his advertising slogan, and rightly so, because this is the kind of generational intelligence that deserves the widest possible audience. It is, of course, one of the smallest inconveniences that the design was never actually submitted to TfL and only exists for the benefit of social media. Because when it comes to Metropole, you can say pretty much whatever you want and someone, somewhere will believe you.
I’ve spent almost two decades traveling up and down the country covering football, and one of the most striking insights has been how openly disparaging people outside London are about the issue. London is probably the only place in England where you can tell people where you’re from, and they’ll instantly feel empowered to tell you how terrible a place it is. Sometimes your interviewer will use the preemptive qualifying phrase, “It’s a great city, but…”, before launching into a tirade about traffic, the cost of West End theater tickets, or the dog poop his aunt once stepped on in 1998.
And allied with this is the misguided idea that being from London means participating in some kind of class privilege, a place where life shines and is effortlessly indulged. I met a Newcastle fan who assured me that there are three motorways linking the capital to Brighton. I’ve met many people who operate under the impression (“no, seriously, look it up”) that London’s buses are free. Here in Sadiq Khan’s forbidden hell, everything is expensive and yet everything is endlessly subsidized: a kind of practical joke at everyone else’s expense.
Of course, condescension in London is a phenomenon as old as London itself. But in the age of social media, where big platform owners have long been able to create their own reality as they go along, this kind of myth-making has real-world consequences. This is why Pollsters are constantly finding People say that London gets more than its fair share of public spending. That is why working-class Londoners, most of whom cluster in safe Labor seats, are perhaps the most politically disenfranchised group in Britain. For this reason, Khan, one of the country’s most moderate and least aggressive politicians, has to travel with a similar level of 24-hour security. To the king.
Witness the utter desperation among right-wing agitators and certain parts of the media to integrate Saturday’s horrific train attack in Cambridgeshire into a wider narrative. “Several stabbing incidents on a north London train“,” reads a headline in the Financial Times (later changed). “I’ve had enough, Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer.” Advance fumes on TalkTV in response to an incident that occurred nearer Lincolnshire than London.
In this regard, London appears to be part of a broader urban obsession among the global right, where the city itself is being recast as a malevolent and seditious entity, a well of violence and vice. The Trump administration’s deployment of federal forces into Democratic-run cities has been described as a war against an “invasion from within.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced Stadtbild A key component of his strategy of mass deportation is Cityscape, a deliberately vague phrase intended to incite fear of immigrants without referring to them directly.
Of course, for the right-wing demagogue, the demonization of the city is often little more than a convenient means of airing vile and impolite grievances. When Nigel Farage referred to London, Birmingham and Manchester in 2022 as “white minority cities” – Wrong as it turns out — he was simply saying out loud the part that the right had long been content to leave as subtext. Anti-urbanism has long been a first cousin of white supremacy, each feeding into the idea of an “authentic” homeland—the parts outside the city—of which the city itself is a kind of betrayal.
This is not an argument that can really be won with facts and figures. It is no surprise to note that knife crime in London is high, according to the Office for National Statistics It rose by only 1% Last year, this compares to 19% in Dorset, 31% in North Yorkshire and 51% in Suffolk. Or that violent crime in Washington, D.C., hit a 30-year low when Trump chose to unleash the National Guard, or that there is only one highway to Brighton. What anti-urbanists find objectionable about cities – often while they live in those same cities – is rarely a real concern about economic inequality or law and order.
Rather, it is useful to view right-wing populism as an attempt to address an increasingly complex world in increasingly simple terms. In contrast, cities are anarchic places: places of fluidity, freedom, and possibility, and places of chaos, cooperation, and conflict. And sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, but we embrace them nonetheless because in their forced intimacy, in their inexorable flow of ideas and influences and cuisines, they are the full expression of what it means to be human.
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Despite the pandemic, the cost of living crisis and the best efforts of the men with the flag to walk on the X, the percentage of the UK population living in urban areas is still growing at around 1% per year. Thus wishing the city away, dreaming of purifying it or returning it to an imaginary state of authenticity, is ultimately as useless as separating a cake back into its basic ingredients. Until you get stuck in traffic. Date someone of a different race. Eat all the food. Plunge into Sadiq’s forbidden hell. As has always been the case, and always will be, the city’s greatest defender will be the city itself.