Mamdani and Khan: Both mayors are ‘utterly appalling’

An article last week in the online site of Time magazine by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, well illustrates the growing crisis of misgovernment of our greatest cities. He saluted the election in New York of Zohran Mamdani as mayor, as a fellow Muslim triumphing over what he called “a rising tide of anti-Muslim hatred”. It is difficult to see this in the aftermath of Mamdani gaining 50.3 per cent of the votes in a city where Muslims are not more than five per cent of the population. “Sadly, this is an experience I know all too well,” wrote the thrice-elected mayor of London. This rising tide appears to be lapping at their ankles.

There is absolutely no comparison between these elections. Freakishly, the initially-favoured candidate in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York was the disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, forced to resign his office in midterm because of allegations of groping women and of having been responsible through Covid mismanagement for the deaths of hundreds of elderly people who were inadequately sheltered from Covid sufferers in homes for the elderly. Against such a punching bag of a candidate, in a city where the Democratic primary is tantamount to election, (other than where there is a very strong Republican such as Fiorello LaGuardia, Rudolph Giuliani, or Michael Bloomberg), Mamdani is an articulate and presentable young face and a skilful campaigner who had a natural advantage over such a spavined old wheel horse like Cuomo.

According to the London mayor, who obviously knows no more about New York than the average Londoner does about Ulan Bator, it “took courage” for Mamdani to express  “pride in his faith”. No it did not, New Yorkers don’t care what religion anybody is or if they have any religion and to judge from electoral results, Londoners do not either. The claim that Sadiq Khan and Muslims in New York have gone through whole lifetimes of discrimination is a little hard to sustain given their present electoral status.

Sadiq Khan, as is his frequent practice, attacked President Trump. He has been doing this for many years and has accused the president of being a racist and a misogynist and a reactionary of dictatorial tendencies. Obviously there’s no truth to any of this and when Trump had the mayor disinvited from his state dinner at Windsor Castle tendered by the King, and referred to him in an address to the United Nations as an incompetent and bigoted mayor, he acted sensibly and justly towards a carping municipal popinjay who had led and encouraged anti-Trump demonstrations when he visited London in his first presidential term.

As if he were a peer of the President of the United States, Khan wrote that ”it is hard not to read these outlandish claims (of Trump) as a symptom of a deepening fear among President Trump and his allies that, in places like London and New York, this form of toxic politics does not work”. No, it would be entirely mistaken to come to any such conclusion. Trump’s politics are not particularly toxic and have been endorsed by the American public though not the majority of New Yorkers. He contradicts those who endlessly complain that the white Christian majorities in the West are oppressive, overprivileged, and covered in collective moral shame. Khan falsely claims that he hears ”a growing chorus of commentators and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic attacking cities for their liberal values”. And he abandons reason itself in attacking ”the same old authoritarian solutions – from deporting hundreds of thousands of legal migrants by removing the right to remain, to deploying the National Guard to clamp down on dissent”.

Of course, Trump does nothing of the kind: He only deports illegal migrants who evidently have no right to remain and he only deploys the National Guard domestically to uphold the law and reduce crime. It is understandable, since Sadiq Khan has presided over a huge upsurge in violent crime in London that he would consider the insertion of additional numbers of law enforcement personnel to be an unjust suppression of violent criminals going about their activities to be a “clamp-down on dissent”. The mayor of London claims to “worship a different God”.  He is no more proficient a theologian than he is a commentator on the politics of New York: Practicing Muslims, Christians, and Jews all worship the same God and the Muslims even recruited the Archangel Gabriel to announce the Prophet.

What we have here are two abominably inadequate municipal politicians elevated in very different circumstances in two very different cities. Not five per cent of their electors are concerned with their sectarian affiliations. Mamdani sought “a worldwide intifada”, denies the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, opposes private property, and wants to seize the wealth of the most successful in order to buy the votes of the disadvantaged. It is a racist and Marxist programme that is irreconcilable with American democracy and the American ethos of free enterprise and avoidance of the outright subornation of the electorate. Because the governing Democrats in New York are so decayed and steeped in incompetence and corruption, they were unable to find a respectable candidate. The disaster about to be inflicted upon that city by its mayor-elect will undoubtedly solve the problem.

The problem in London will not be solved so easily. In terms of the safety of citizens and the reduction of congestion in London’s streets, the mayor has been a complete failure. He is elected by the far Left majority in the city proper and particularly the large Islamist faction within it. What London needs is an in-gathering of the near suburbs to make the municipal electorate more representative of all those who come into London every day and not just those who live within its present borders. New York’s problems will be self-solving; London’s are not. Both these men are utterly appalling but their religion has nothing to do with it.

Note: Following last week’s comments here on the terrible biases of the BBC and particularly its deliberate and defamatory splicing of a speech of President Trump, it is a pleasure to see that both the director general and the chief of news of that network have been forced from their jobs.