London is far from 'over'

I think it important to always ground any sort of political campaign or movement in truth, not necessarily for ethical reasons, but for the instrumental value of doing so. Any kind of messaging that misrepresents reality will always get found out or fail to resonate, as people will eventually catch on to the discrepancy between any kind of concocted narrative and the world as it is. Being dishonest or gratuitously hyperbolic in order to further your cause is a sure way to delegitimise anything else you might say or do.

It is on this basis – the greater effectiveness of truth over mischaracterisation – that I’m growing very tired of the ‘demoralisation slop’ that is often posted online, either in the form of hyperbolic accounts or selective videos, that are intended to elicit a visceral reaction and make a situation in a given city/country seem dire. Usually this content will be dramatically captioned ‘the West is OVER’ or something equally ridiculous.

The inefficacy of such content in the context of opposing mass migration to Europe has already been convincingly argued (amongst other prescient arguments) in the Amphora Substack here. As is pointed out:

The reality is that most Europeans living in large cities simply don’t see mass migration as an existential threat. They may occasionally witness troubles to public order, but it largely doesn’t affect their daily lives. You can call this denial, but it’s simply that the narrative painted by such videos isn’t materializing in the vast majority of public spaces and remains mostly isolated.

Therefore, what has actually been the result of this strategy? Demoralization, loss of credibility, self-corruption. Telling Europeans that their cities are overrun by migrants in the midst of a political system entirely dedicated to bringing more in, creates a sense of impotence and victimhood. Additionally, if you live in Paris or Rome and you see a “right-wing account” spamming videos of migrants pretending that the cities in question “have fallen,” well if you’re not terminally online you’ll probably stop listening to it and consider them to be propagandists.

Whilst the situation is far more advanced in the UK, and a representation of life as it actually is in the Yookay rather than the manufactured state narrative is an effective tool, I think something similar holds for the narrative that is sometimes advanced online about what a dire unliveable hellhole London has supposedly become. The problem with such a narrative, in short, is that anyone who lives in London will immediately recognise how wildly it misrepresents the city as it actually is, and therefore dismissively laugh off any broader claims made.

Which is not to say that London is without its problems – it obviously is. But those problems are then ridiculously exaggerated to the point of caricature. Yes, the tube can sometimes be inhabited by scary smackheads, but this is an exception, and most daily commutes go seamlessly. Yes, knife crime happens, but the people actually at risk of getting stabbed are mostly just gang members or those mistaken for them. For the rest of us ‘civilians’, with rare high-profile exceptions, the risk of getting randomly stabbed is minimal. And whilst there are plenty of areas that feel completely alien to the rest of England, there are plenty more that rank amongst the nicest areas in the whole country and broadly retain a feel that is quintessentially English. In London - the city of villages - it’s easy for locals to simply avoid spending any time in somewhere like Ilford or East Ham or Southall and so on, instead getting their impression of the city from time spent exclusively in the City, Marylebone, Clapham, Fulham, Nunhead, etc – places that range from ‘basically fine’ to ‘incredibly nice’.

Even those from outside London would find themselves bemused to hear that the city is ‘completely over’ or in no way resembles England. Visitors are unlikely to take a trip through demoralisation slop favourite Whitechapel Market, instead spending time in the West End, Primrose Hill, Knightsbridge, Hampstead etc. (this in itself is a damning indictment on the multiculturalist delusion that what makes London great is its diversity. Revealed preference suggest the inverse is true…). From such an impression of London, being told that the city is now ‘beyond saving’ or ‘a third world shithole’ or whatever just comes across as deranged and untethered from reality.

As such, ‘demoralisation slop’ of this kind is completely ineffective in precipitating any kind of political change, instead only serving as reliable engagement bait and setting up smug establishment liberals to fairly dismiss opponents as cynical fantasists. The truth is that London has enough problems as it is to mount a campaign against its current custodians without having to resort to fantastical hyperbole. There’s no need to pretend that Sadiq Khan has transformed London into a rainier Islamabad to argue that he’s a terrible mayor thoroughly deserving of being booted out of City Hall.

Within the sloposphere, Khan has been elevated to a quasi-mystical villain: an evil occupier of the mayoralty motivated by a mix of crypto-Islamism and treacherous globalism, gloating as he brings to ruin this once-great city. This narrative is completely counterproductive because it suits Khan; it allows him to characterise opponents as deranged racists and himself as the reasonable liberal technocrat, sensibly overseeing the governance of his city, keeping the cranks at bay. The truth about Khan is far more banal but also far threatening to him.

Khan is a notoriously smug, arrogant, unpleasant manlet who has utterly failed in his position. After almost a decade as Mayor, all the things over which he has political control have worsened. Housing is ever-less affordable, traffic has never been slower, no major public transport infrastructure has been started during his tenure (he couldn’t even secure the Bakerloo Line extensions, instead creating the ‘Bakerloop’ bus replacement service. Nothing better incapsulates his failure to deliver), and crime has become so bad that the city has gained an international reputation for lawlessness. In sum, his record is atrocious.

This should be the focus, not exaggerated narratives that portray the city as quasi-apocalyptic. The cudgel over which the likes of Khan should be hit with is that these politicians - who self-consciously present as the sensible grown-up custodians to deliver good governance - fail on their own terms. Khan has failed to live up to the basic leftish goals he set himself (affordable housing and transport, ‘protecting our young people from knife crime’, etc.) instead presiding over a gradual enshittification of the city whilst wasting time picking fights over ephemeral international issues. There is no need to pretend things are far more dire than they actually are to convincingly make the case that the political class to which Khan appertains and their ideas ought to be immediately swept into the dustbin of history.

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The demoralisation aspect of such content/narratives is also deeply unhelpful and counterproductive. It is ludicrous to write off London, of all Britain’s cities, as irredeemably Woke or too demographically changed to ever be liable for political capture. It remains possibly the country’s most naturally right-wing city, and even the current demographics do not preclude any party except Labour/nu-Left from winning political control of the city. The last two mayoral elections saw Khan win by around 200,000 votes on turnouts just above 40%, and both times to pretty atrocious opposition candidates. More competent candidates and campaigns could easily surmount that gap and turn London’s governance to the most right-wing of any major Western city.

To reiterate what was written in Amphora, many of the signs of London being ‘over’ that circulate around the sloposhere are trivially easy to deal with given the slightest amount of political will. Declaring a city ‘over’ because of permissiveness towards vagrancy and the presence of some aggressive smackheads in public is ridiculous given how, as Paris showed during the Olympics, these issues can be disappeared within a few days once politicians decided it’s worth doing so. And as for London’s broader demographic trends, as the Social Housing Phenomenon elucidates, it is large part the result of a gargantuan tax-payer funded project to ensure present outcomes. This, too, could be changed relatively easily given sufficient political will. This should be the dominant narrative about London – that it is a great city being terribly mismanaged by those squatting in City Hall and Downing Street – not the counter-productive demoralisation content that misrepresents the city as being too far gone and ‘completely over’.