Lamenting a 'lost' London is a populist scam

Claims that the capital has fallen into lawless decline with immigration as a main cause are false and unpatriotic

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Fare dodgers are a “parasitic scourge” declares the Mayor, after new figures show an increase in people using buses and tubes without paying, costing the city millions. A clampdown is announced.

Breaking news? Not really. The initiative I refer to was launched in 2011. The Mayor in question was Boris Johnson. And the action he unveiled 14 years ago was one of the more recent against people taking free rides on London’s public transport.

Here, for example, is a London Transport film from the 1980s about fare evasion on buses, some of it with aggravation.

That was London 40 years ago: more than 10,000 people prosecuted over a two-year period for not buying tickets for bus journeys alone.

Fare-dodging, then, is not a new phenomenon in the city. Neither, as Mayor Johnson’s “parasites” intervention showed, are periods of fresh action against it.

We are in such a period right now, though the difference from 2011 is that Transport for London’s latest push against fare evasion, unlike Johnson’s in that year, aims to build on a recent reductions in such offending – from about 3.8 per cent of passengers in the financial 2023/24 to 3.4 per cent between April and December 2024, according to TfL.

Yet some have taken to telling a quite different story about the issue and linking this to a much wider claim about the capital and, indeed, the country.

Introducing a recent short video of himself buttonholing fare evaders at Stratford station, Robert Jenrick, Conservative MP for Newark and shadow justice secretary, alleged that Sir Sadiq Khan was “not acting” against “lawbreaking” which he said is “out of control” and accused him of “driving a proud city into the ground”.

The video has been praised by some as demonstrating a can-do spirit on the part of a politician in touch with everyday concerns, though it failed to mention either the recent reduction in fare evasion or the new measures against it by TfL – whose board Mayor Khan chairs – which had been announced a month before the video went live.

Rather than do that, Jenrick used the video to bundle up the fares issue with other forms of crime, such as shoplifting. And on Times Radio, he said that during his visits to London he sees “on a number of fronts, London declining”. Unsurprisingly, he remarked: “It is Sadiq Khan who has been presiding over this”.

Narratives portraying “Sadiq Khan’s London” as descending into lawlessness are, of course, familiar. The Conservatives were very keen on them during last year’s general and mayoral elections (making themselves look rather foolish in the process and also losing heavily).

They are also favoured by others on the Right, such as the Reform UK councillor and ardent Brexit supporter, Darren Grimes. For Grimes, who terms himself a “proud northerner”, the “fall” of London has been ongoing for much longer.

Last month, seeking to illustrate this, he posted some old film clips of the capital in the 1950s, which look like the work of the tourist board. They began with a scene from a sun-drenched Soho Square (pictured above, from Saturday). Back then, the city was “peaceful, patriotic and pretty” according to Grimes. “What on earth happened?” he inquired.

He was, of course, implying that the place has been ruined by immigration. Yet London is probably safer and certainly more pleasant than it was in the post-war era Grimes portrays as golden. Back then, the capital was still scarred by the wounds of the conflict. As for Soho, it was entering its darkest days of vice, racketeering and exploitation (and that was just the Met). It did, though, also provide lots of joy and entertainment – largely thanks to immigrants (see below).

The populist scam that London has become “lost” or “fallen” because of immigration used to be largely confined to the Farage and fascist Right. Mayor Johnson, for example, aligned himself with the view that London’s cultural and ethnic variety was a strength, as demonstrated by its triumphant Olympics. He even advocated “earned amnesties” for irregular migrants.

Today’s Conservatives, though, seem keen to hitch themselves to the Reform bandwagon, not only by seizing every opportunity to invent a London “crime wave” – often with a questionable basis in statistical fact – but by linking it to immigration.

Jenrick, for example, made a point in his video of identifying barber shops used as money laundering fronts as being Turkish. This was in keeping with his well-established hardline anti-immigration stance and with Conservative policy more generally.

The other day, perhaps inspired by his front bench colleague, shadow home secretary Chris Philp, a London MP, upbraided in person people who had formed a “tent city” on the grass strip that separates the carriageways of Park Lane.

In the resulting montage, great play was made of those he approached being Romanian or Bulgarian and the urgent need to deport them should it turn out that they weren’t meant to be in the country.

Philp didn’t say as much, but gave the impression that he – in concert with the Daily Express – was unmasking a new and deadly moral cancer in the heart of the capital, literally between Mayfair and Hyde Park.

In fact, a previous Park Lane tent settlement was removed in October and the latest one has gone as well. Local Tory councillor Tim Barnes, I hope satirically, suggested the latter was due to Philp’s visit. The real reason was TfL securing a court order back in May. Reporting this at the time, the Standard noted that the site has been periodically used by homeless people “for around a decade”.

Likewise, panhandling has been a feature of that posh part of London for a very long time, with Romanians part of the mix only of late. This too was something Boris Johnson addressed during his time at City Hall.

In 2012, he announced that 10 Romanian cops had been brought in to help the Met, a move applauded by the Romanian ambassador. Those officers would be “a huge asset in cracking down on certain criminal networks” preying on tourists, Johnson said.

The Met commissioner of the time, Bernard Hogan-Howe, accountable to Johnson, noted that Romanians in London could be victims of crime too. But there was no such nuance in the Philp show.

His stunt was not his first go at blaming London’s problems on immigration. Earlier this year, inspired by a Reform-backing X/Twitter agitator, he made the false and inflammatory claim that nearly half of London’s social housing is “occupied by people who are foreign”.

What has changed is an increasing concentration by the Right in Britain as a whole on characterising immigration as the deep and founding root of Britain’s problems as a nation, including by linking it to crime and other social ills and by making super-diverse London, with its son-of-immigrants Labour Mayor, the focus of their attacks.

Conservative complicity in this extends to City Hall, where London Assembly Tory group leader and defeated mayoral candidate Susan Hall has been openly applauding Reform policies and politicians for months.

Fare dodging and the degeneration of the public realm are legitimate concerns – I would like to see more concerted, high profile action on those things. The trouble with the Right’s approach is that it is based on distortions, untruths and the lowest forms of scapegoating in the service of a nostalgic, authoritarian nationalism that would be bad for London and the whole country – a recipe for economic failure, the crushing of human potential, the erosion of democracy and corruption in the corridors of power.

Just look at Hungary. Look at the United States. Advocates of this approach style themselves as patriots. They are anything but.