Like London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Zohran Mamdani is no centrist.
Zohran Mamdani’s recent conversation with Sadiq Khan should instill fear in the hearts of the average New York City voter. In the weeks since he defeated Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary in June, Mamdani has reportedly “been in touch with a number of progressive mayors,” including London’s.
During a “warm and collegial” phone call, Khan reportedly advised the young socialist from Queens to shift to the center. After winning the primary by pledging rent freezes and free buses, he urged Mamdani to reassure moderates in the same way that Khan himself did in 2016, after routing his fellow left-wing opponents before defeating the Conservative candidate in the London mayoral race.
Although Khan is not a leftist in the same sense as Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his tenure in London shows his alleged “centrism” can be just as damaging.
Keeping people safe is a basic responsibility of an elected leader—a test Khan is failing. London has a terrible knife problem. Almost one-third of the 50,000 violent and sexual crimes with knives reported in England and Wales last year occurred in the capital.
Khan, as mayor, oversees the capital’s police force, which has the power to stop and search people in order to remove weapons from the streets. But he echoes Mamdani’s progressive views on law enforcement, such as demanding that police be defunded and opposing increased stop-and-search because he believes it involves racial profiling.
In 2021, the number of youths killed in London reached an all-time high—30 people aged 13 to 19. Twenty-seven of those victims were killed with a knife. Black Londoners are disproportionately represented in knife crime statistics. Despite making up 13% of the population, black men account for 53% of fatal stabbing victims and 45% of offenders.
New Yorkers who want to explore Britain’s largest city are likely to be robbed. A total of 33,900 thefts were recorded in the year Khan took office. By last year, that number had risen by 96%.
Visitors to London also face the risk of robbery at knifepoint, because many crime hotspots—Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, and Covent Garden—are frequented by tourists. The capital had nearly 17,000 knife crime offenses last year, with more than half being robberies targeting expensive items such as mobile phones. Just last week, a man was fatally stabbed in central London while attempting to defend himself against a knife-wielding mugger who was trying to steal his Rolex.
While New York is the city that never sleeps, London is a city that likes to go to bed early. During the week, it’s incredibly difficult to find anywhere to drink after 11 pm. More than 3,000 pubs, bars, and clubs have closed in the city since 2020. Additionally, high energy bills and higher rents and business taxes, along with an increase in the minimum wage, have contributed to helping London become one of the most expensive places to drink in Europe. If Mamdani’s “$30 by 30” pledge to raise New York City’s minimum wage goes into effect, expect to see bars close across the five boroughs.
To boost London’s dwindling nightlife, Khan named Amy Lamé as its “Night Czar.” Instead of meeting with politicians to cut taxes and liberalize licensing laws, she has focused most of her attention on progressive initiatives such as trans awareness and protecting queer spaces. Despite her six-figure salary, almost half of the nightclubs in the capital have closed since Lamé took office in 2016. Rather than building, as she describes it, a 24-hour city, she went viral when disgruntled tourists started the #LameLondon thread, tweeting photographs of the capital’s mostly empty streets.
Mamdani seems intent on enacting the same kind of left-wing policies instituted by Lamé and Khan. He intends to spend $65 million to make New York a sanctuary city for gender-affirming care for minors and adults. Meanwhile, he has advocated for abortion-on-demand, contraceptive access for illegal immigrants, and the decriminalization of prostitution.
But when the U.K. has followed the radical approaches adopted by blue states in America, it has been disastrous. Americans familiar with California’s criminal justice reform history will recognize the scenes they find in British stores. Expensive items are either chained to the wall or locked behind glass counters. Like California’s Proposition 47, Britain has effectively given legal sanction to shoplifting. Stealing items worth less than £200 is considered a summary offense, which means that criminals are not prosecuted.
As a result, shoplifting rose 54% in London last year, compared to 2023. To cover the costs of theft and security, British consumers effectively pay a 10-pence “crime tax” on every transaction. When asked why shoplifting has grown so common, Khan suggested the cost of living and, bizarrely, that there were “lots of shops.” When items are stolen, retailers are forced to hike their prices or close entirely. Contrary to popular opinion, poverty doesn’t cause crime. Rather, crime causes poverty. Mamdani’s Soviet-era vision of state-run grocery stores will not deter people from stealing.
Mamdani must be viewed within the context of mass immigration, which brought him and his family to the United States when he was young. While his mayoral campaign was mostly populist, he ran based on identitarian issues. To appeal to New York City’s nearly one million Muslims, the Millennial has focused on Gaza. He has also won over Latinos and Asians, two communities that are typically hostile to the Democratic shift toward divisive racial policies. Although Khan is widely regarded as a moderate, he has similar views to Mamdani on identity politics.
Within the mainstream media, Khan is hailed as the world’s first Western Muslim mayor. Now the press is swooning over the 33-year-old as the first Muslim nominee for mayor of New York City.
Mamdani’s first test will be how he responds to the recent shooting in East Midtown Manhattan that killed four people, including one NYPD officer, and left another critically injured. Public safety is always a concern for voters, particularly at the ballot box. During the primary, however, Mamdani rarely mentioned the topic. If he wants to prove he has thoroughly abandoned his extreme ideas on law and order, he must stand with and support America’s largest police department.
A word of warning to Mamdani: his tenure in Gracie Mansion may be cut short. When things get bad, even the progressive residents of major cities eventually seem to wake up. This happened in San Francisco when voters recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin. You may offer all the wonderful, free stuff in the world, but as the utopian vision fades, people want secure streets and cheap groceries.
New York City has suffered under Democratic misrule in recent years, but no one has advocated for reforms as radical as Mamdani. One thing is certain, if Mamdani emulates Khan, he will wreck another of the world’s great cities.
