The populist Right exploits London crime

A dreadful killing in the capital is unsolved but when it comes to crime in the city the usual suspects think they know it all

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As I write this, the Met has said it is exploring a number of possible reasons why Blue Stevens, 24, was killed with a knife on a street in Knightsbridge last week. These include it resulting from an attempted robbery. A murder investigation has seen three men arrested. Detectives are saying it “may have been a targeted attack”. For now, that is all we know. Yet when it comes to crime in London, the usual suspects think they know it all.

Naturally, Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, reached for his megaphone as soon as the terrible news broke. “London is in a state of collapse,” he pronounced on kindred spirit Elon Musk’s X. “Crime is out of control.” And, of course, Susan Hall, well beaten in last year’s election for Mayor of London yet chosen by fellow London Assembly Conservatives to lead them, sounded off on the same note for LBC. “Nowhere is safe from the wave of lawlessness that has swept cross our city,” she raged, as if still running her hapless mayoral campaign.

Which spectacle is the least impressive? Farage’s opportunism, as gleeful as it is ghoulish, or Hall’s astonishing brass neck? Crime in London (or anywhere else) is a serious matter and its victims deserve better than being recruited to the causes of low charlatans and comedy avengers. Statistics about it need to be handled with great care, but those we have, with due caveats applied, are not consistent with portrayals of London as drowning in a tide of violence and theft.

London portions of the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which asks people about their experiences of crime and therefore captures those not reported to the police, are estimates compiled from quite small numbers of the sample’s interviewees. Approach with caution. That said, they do not suggest “spiralling” rates in recent years.

Offences recorded by the Met for April, May and June of this year show significant percentage falls in theft from the person, personal robbery and “knife crime” and a small drop in violence with injury across Greater London as a whole compared with the same three months of 2024. Not every trend has been in the right direction and the hopeful ones might not last. Again, though, the big picture is not consistent with that painted by Farage, Hall and their eager allies in the media.

How, then, do they justify screaming that the capital is a criminal hellhole? The question would be easier to answer if more journalists asked it instead of providing passive platforms for contestable assertions. But I think those politicians’ reasons are quite clear.

The contribution of “good old Nige” is easily explained – depicting London as “lost” and “fallen” is part of the populist Right’s wider strategy for winning national power, a barely-coded way of confecting a causal link between cosmopolitanism and decline – Farage is a Donald Trump fan, after all. The Tories, of course, are now a Reform tribute act, with Hall its seething personification. In attacking Sir Sadiq Khan because Met officer numbers might be reduced, her austerity amnesia is breathtaking.

There are, though, differences between the two. Hall has a long public history of dark enthusiasms that would be intolerable to a party of the mainstream centre-right if the Tories still matched that description. She is also rather funny in that distinctive, irksome way of people unable to see how ridiculous they are. I believe her indignation about crime and Khan is sincere. What she lacks is one iota of intellectual curiosity about the many reasons why crime rates fall or rise in different places at different times or why simply putting more “bobbies on the beat” isn’t a magic trick for forcing them down. She inhabits the iron bubble of “common sense” and has no intention of coming out.

Farage is more dangerous, and not only because the tainted brew of authoritarianism and nostalgia he peddles is currently more appealing to electors than the Tories’ tattered brand. As his notorious reaction to the Southport murders showed, he is more cynical than Hall and the colleagues who indulge her, more cunning too, and better placed than she, a London politician, to make a loudmouth display of depicting the capital in ways that work to his advantage, framing it for the country he aspires to lead as a once proud British city that immigrants have made dystopian.

The dreadful death of Blue Stevens has provided the populist Right with a new peg on which to hang that ugly old yarn about London – one they will keep telling for as long as they think they can profit from it. It misrepresents the city, harms it and does nothing to make it safer. But that won’t worry those for whom crime in London is not a problem to be solved but an asset to exploit.