Sir Sadiq Khan personifies everything Britain’s extreme right dislikes

The fury directed at the knighting of the Mayor of London highlighted the bankruptcy and the menace of nationalist conservatism

It was yawningly predictable, but no less illuminating for that. New Year honours were bestowed on others whom they might have railed against, and on some whose national significance has been far smaller. But the usual suspects exploded into their usual rage over Sadiq Khan being made a knight.

We should, perhaps, congratulate the Daily Mail for rounding up a couple of London Conservative MPs to quote, given that so few of them exist – just nine out of 75 in the capital, following their party’s general election hammering in July. And with the absence of self-awareness that has characterised the Tory response to being gigantic losers, they called Khan’s gong a “reward for failure”.

Also invited to share his wisdom with the world was the Harrow Tory councillor who raised a petition against Khan getting the honour. He told the Mail it was “a kick in the teeth for millions of Londoners”. Well, it’s a point of view, but it neglects an inconvenient fact – last May, rather more Londoners voted for Khan to once again be their Mayor than preferred that same Harrow councillor’s Hatch End ward Tory colleague, the inept, unacceptable Susan Hall.

What explains such orchestrated howling against a Labour politician whose job comes with a quite limited range of hard powers, and who is well-enough regarded by the capital’s electorate to have been given a historic third term? What is it about him that drives persons of a Daily Mail persuasion out of their minds?

It begins with a mixture of misjudgement and misrepresentation to which the Tories and others on the British right have become hopelessly addicted, soaring to breathtaking heights of self-delusion over the past couple of years.

Two issues in particular have excited the ire of what we might call the post-Brexit, Rule Britannia tendency. One of those is crime, which has repeatedly and erroneously been proclaimed as uniquely prevalent and problematic in London, with Mayor Khan pronounced guilty of failing to tackle it.

The other is Khan’s further expansion of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to cover the whole of Greater London, a move which inspired sustained, almost daily right-wing media venom before and for months after its introduction, and prompted Hall to make a pledge to abolish it a centrepiece of her mayoral bid.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the second ULEZ enlargement, the belief that it contained the seeds of electoral destruction for Khan had no basis in mathematical fact. Pre-election, Hall herself brandished figures which showed how small a proportion of London households, almost half of which don’t even have a motor car, were set to be eligible for the daily anti-pollution charge. She waved the damp squib regardless, convinced in her own mind that it was a smoking gun.

As for Khan’s policies and record of delivery, criticisms can be grouped into two categories. In one, which doesn’t get enough attention – this noble website’s output being a shining exception – there are reasonable debates to be had about their wisdom and efficacy.

On planning and housing, for example, there are arguments worth listening to, especially now that economic conditions have brought the construction sector to a near halt, that his London Plan is too detailed and demanding on developers, and that his “threshold approach” to affordable housing provision in private sector schemes, whereby those offering less than 35 per cent get a going over by City Hall, is now resulting in fewer affordable homes being built rather than more.

On road transport, a good case can been made – and has been by LondonTravelWatch – that the bus service should urgently be given much higher priority. Behind his spreading of the ULEZ beyond the north and south circulars lay a judgement by the Mayor that the benefit of accelerating air quality improvement for all outweighed the financial harm to quite a small minority of private vehicle-users, many of them not well-off. It can be decently contended that he got that balance wrong.

With policing and crime, though, the constant clamour that Khan has “failed” and that the capital, thanks to him, has become the hellhole portrayed in last year’s ludicrous Tory election campaign videos, betrays a baleful ignorance, wilful or otherwise, about what crime statistics mean, why different forms of offending rise and fall, and what any Mayor of London can do to make a difference.

London’s Mayors, in their role as the capital’s Police and Crime Commissioner, are held responsible for the performance of the Metropolitan Police Service, but they don’t lead or run it – the top brass of the Met does that. Neither do they control, say, the competitiveness of local drug markets, where a readiness to engage in ultimate viciousness underpins the bleakest examples of the wide range of offences compiled beneath the data heading “knife crime”.

What Mayors of London do is set priorities and a budget for the Met, and hold the Met Commissioner to account. If Khan’s critics think they can perform those duties better, they need to make a better job of telling Londoners how. Their efforts would have more credibility if they accepted that the Met’s human resources have become reduced and misshapen by years of cuts imposed by their own party, and did less carping about Khan increasing Council Tax to compensate.

But, of course, there is a bit more to the endless targeting of Khan than differences about policy and philosophy. And that brings us to the second, and uglier, category of attack on him.

The Tories and their cheerleaders long ago calculated that making a big display of beating up the Mayor would pay dividends for them nationally. That was, to a significant degree, a product of an obsession with London as a symbol of so much that the post-Brexit, Rule Britannia Right so viscerally dislikes.

In such eyes, Khan could hardly personify that hostile view of London more completely. He is both a Muslim and a metropolitan liberal. Perhaps most maddening of all for his more fervent detractors, he is those things simultaneously, combining them effortlessly and without apology in the face of claims about him that range from the shallow and irresponsible to the very sinister.

For that feat alone, he deserves his knighthood. As for his Conservative opponents, they should spend less time pointing fingers at Sir Sadiq and more taking a good, hard look at themselves.

Photo from Mayor of London’s Bluesky profile.