Maybe we shouldn’t be ‘annoying all the right people’

The trouble with Khanism

I’ve had a deep nerdy love of the Tube since I was a child growing up on the Central Line, entranced by the romance of the Underground network. 

I vividly remember the dark and dusty platform at Holland Park station, and its forbidding, haunted stairs, back when the Underground was incredibly dirty, crummy-looking and often unsafe. My brother and I used to spend whole afternoons riding the network just for fun, since in the late 1980s there wasn’t much else to do on a Sunday.

We even went on those bizarre, obscure lines you wouldn’t see on conventional maps, which were in that strange limbo state of being neither the Tube nor proper overground trains, including the North London Line, which in my memory was always empty and falling apart.

That stretch has since become part of the Overground network, but is now to be called the Mildmay Line, after a hospital which did much good work during the AIDS crisis. Mildmay is one of the more surprising names for the six new lines announced by the Mayor yesterday, while in contrast one could have predicted the arrival of the ‘Windrush Line’ with the certainty of a Swiss commuter. 

These ‘new’ lines, three of which have overtly political names, have received a generally negative reception but have at least managed to ‘annoy all the right people’. They are also typical of the style of politics employed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan and which explains at least some of the hostility towards him.

The Mayor endures a fair amount of criticism that he doesn’t really deserve. For example, the phrase ‘part and parcel’ is often used to attack Khan and his supposed complacency about terrorism and violence but the full quote, after an attack in New York in September 2016, is nothing like as damning as people on the Right claim to believe (and yes, I’ve been guilty of this).

Similarly, in many people’s minds every single stabbing in the capital is the fault of the mayor, when in reality he’s quite limited in what he can do and the Metropolitan Police is not fully in his control. Perhaps Khan’s record on crime is quite poor. Likewise his record on housing. But it couldn’t be said that the Mayor of London, who has a budget around 1% the size of his equivalent in New York (less than £1 billion vs $100 billion), is presiding over a city in any more decline than the rest of the country. On top of this, Tory attempts to attack his character have often been feeble and dishonest.

Britain, many people increasingly feel, is crumbling, for which the bulk of blame falls on the Government. I should also say that I broadly support Khan’s transport policies, but then I am in a minority-within-a-minority by virtue of being an urban conservative opposed to car dominance. (I bet you’ve never debated anyone like me before.)