London's Crime Wave Affects Us All

Even if you don't live there, Khan's dreadful management of the capital has dismal reverberations

Another doom scroll, another video about lawless London.

The latest was the despicable case of dad of two, Blue Stevens, who was fatally stabbed putting up a brave defence against muggers snatching his Rolex watch.

It has gotten to the stage Londoners simply won't wear signs of wealth in affluent neighbourhoods such as Mayfair. Flushed with private members clubs, Michelin starred restaurants and 5 star hotels, Mayfair has become a feeding ground for ruthless gangs who stop at nothing to get their prize.

The UK's third richest man Sir Richard Ratcliffe told the press last year he has stopped wearing a watch in London for fears he will be targeted. And he's not alone. I sat opposite an ex politician at a meeting the other day and commented on his whimsical digital Casio. Rather than being a vintage throwback, it was a cheap perfunctory timepiece bought specifically to avoid any altercations. These have now become the daily life choices for residents of the UK's capital city.

But while this may seem easy to brush off in The Shires as Big City Crime, the lasting effects damages the whole of the country. This is why.

While America went through its broken windows phase in New York city, where lawlessness became synonymous with the beating heart of the American dream, American tourism and wealth finds hubs across the country, from Florida to California and beyond. A nation of America's expanse has major international airports and centres of commerce constellated across its states. San Francisco is the tech hub, Orlando has Disney World, Texas dominates oil and gas, the Grand Canyon draws tourists to Arizona just as the Niagara Falls invites hoards to the Canadian border.

But in the UK, one destination acts as the nexus for them all: London. While tourists may be coming to photograph the Cotswolds, or migrate up to The Highlands of Scotland, where of course our own depleting oil industry limps along, almost all international visitors come via London, often factoring in a few days in the capital. When it comes to our biggest industry and greatest contributor to GDP, in the form of a world leading financial centre, nowhere else gets a look in. London attracts 20.3 million overnight stays annually, compared to the second destination city of Edinburgh with just over 2 million. What happens in London has a lasting effect on a vast sum of those coming to Britain for business, or leisure.

It is arguably very difficult to scratch London out of the equation. For a nation of our size, it is the shop window.

Despite the inclement environment for investment in the UK anyway, with the world's highest energy bills and a tax system that makes The Old Testament look like easy reading, London is still a go-to for investing, and making, money.

So when London penalises it's visitors with muggings, hooliganism, the cultural erosion of mass migration and crumbling services, it affects us all. And to many who either live, work, or regularly visit London, the rising costs twinned with spiralling criminality are beginning to tip into the negative. The bad stuff heavily outweighs the good.

When Samuel Johnson stated if you are tired of London, you are tired of life, he was on to something. And too many people are now tired of life in the capital, but for foreign visitors this quickly morphs into being fed up with coming to Britain. Full stop.

London represents a quarter of the entire country's GDP, far outstripping any other region, in a way that is disproportionate but also reflects an island nation of our size. 11,300 millionaires have fled the capital in the last twelve months alone. Higher than any other city in the world bar Moscow.

This includes 18 centimillionaires, or individuals with a net worth of 100 million or more, and two billionaires. The capital has lost at least 12% of its high net worth individuals in just a year, which will have a significant impact on business, but also Treasury revenues.

While a host of other factors play their part, including a disastrous Chancellor and over regulation, the fact that London increasingly represents the 7th circle of hell to visitors also plays a significant role, although as yet, to my knowledge, this has not been financially quantified.

Yet it stands to reason that when knife crime breaches its inter-gang confinements and finds fatalities amongst ordinary people, and overall crime affects 105.8 people among every 1000, or more than one in ten, you fast realise that this simply cannot be sustainable not only for Londoners, but for the economy writ large.

In the year ending March 2024, London recorded 938,020 crimes, with violent and sexual offenses the most common type of crime, accounting for 257,000 cases, or 22.4% of all documented offences, likely to be far lower than the true figure.

As someone who used to live in Nairobi, or ‘Nairobbery’ as it was once dubbed, dodging assaults is part and parcel of every day life. Yet most tourists coming to Kenya spend vanishingly little time in the capital and instead head to safaris and beach resorts. But perhaps on some level, this is factored in for foreign visitors, while in the UK, it never really has been. Until now. Most embassies now actively warn against pickpocketing, mobile phone and bag snatching, and the ever present spectre of terrorism. And it should come as no surprise that tourist hot spots are also the targets of criminal gangs. Trafalgar square recorded over 3000 crimes over the past year, including 1,200 thefts, with tourists, and in particular women, being targeted for their vulnerability.

It both breaks my heart but serves and evidence when I see floods of videos besmirching London for its fall from grace. And I worry what this means not just for those of us who work in the capital but for our international reputation as a nation of relative stability and freedom. The theft epidemic alone in London, with brazen shoplifting often by steal-to-order criminal cartels, costs the capitals retailers £16.8 million. Every. Single. Month.

Expanded to an annual toll, that’s over £200million every year. It is no wonder big retailers are closing down, leaving apocalyptic high streets dominated by dodgy candy shops, vape stores and souvenir vendors, all who have suspect business legitimacy and could well be fronts for more sinister criminality.

Yet the London Mayor and his cohort seem to brush over such criminality with obfuscation, massaged statistics and gaslighting, with the focus tediously centred around a phantom disproportionate affect on marginalised communities. Be that as it may, although I loathe getting into the racial filter when it comes to adverse affects of degradation, this unnecessary energy completely misses the economic toll of antisocial behaviour and crime which affects the country's potential prosperity. When New York Mayor Bill De Blasio took a ‘broken windows approach’ to crime in his city, with his policy being snuffing out bad actors at entry level, turning the Big Apple's reputation and fortune around, our own Mayor in City Hall takes an opposite approach. Where De Blasio took on marijuana smokers, Khan wants to shield them, with an ambition to decriminalise weed because it largely affects the black community in terms of prosecutions. Where De Blasio sought Vision Zero, reducing pedestrianised zones in a bid to combat crime, Khan is going to adapt our signature shopping thoroughfares into car free zones, which I fear will kettle the rough sleepers and scooter thieves exactly where the majority of visitors congregate. Labour has decriminalised homelessness, which on the surface sounds noble, but I fear will usher in a mushrooming of tent cities already springing up around London. Meanwhile fare evasion on buses and tubes impacts TFL, whose books are already an indebted mess, with a £130million annual toll that the struggling infrastructure network can ill afford without going cap in hand to the Treasury for extra support.

And then there is you, Dear Reader. Where once upon a time you may have looked forward to a night at the theatre in the West End, or gallery hopping, or simply immersing yourself among the wonders of our great capital city that your ancestors sweated blood and tears to build, it often feels like our very own London has been taken off us, squandered, handed over to those who will never understand its heritage, beauty, history and significance. And that breaks my heart.

We have three years to wait until we can hope to oust Khan, and my worry is he is now the champion of the growing demographic of London residents who don't hail from its Boroughs and beyond, that his re-election, at least in times past, feels like a foregone conclusion.

But mark my words. When London falls, it's a sign that our once great nation is sinking in the quagmire of decline that will drag the rest of the country down with it.