London: a city of strangers

Donald Trump attacked mayor of London Sadiq Khan this week for doing a ‘terrible job’ of running a formerly great city. It is hard not to think the US president has a point.

Yes, London has long been – and remains – a global powerhouse. Economically, it continues to be a key hub for the world’s commercial and financial activities. And in almost every cultural domain, it still stands out. It houses some of the greatest collections of art in the world. Its theatre scene is second to none. And with more than 50 universities and colleges, it has the highest concentration of higher-education institutions in Europe.

Tourists continue to flock to London. It’s a treasure trove of architectural wonders old and new, from St Paul’s Cathedral to the Shard. It’s home to iconic sporting venues, be it Wembley Stadium, Lord’s Cricket Ground or Wimbledon. Kew Gardens houses the largest and most diverse botanical collection on Earth.

Indeed, there is so much that remains great about this city that it is tempting to dismiss those now saying that ‘London is over’ as doom-mongers. But there is a grain of truth to their often dystopian hyperbole. The capital may not be ‘finished’ or in terminal decline, as some suggest. But beyond its vast cultural attractions and the commercial dynamism of the City, it really is struggling.

Like other major cities, London finds itself in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, exacerbated by its utterly dysfunctional housing market. Youth knife crime is rampant in parts of inner-city London, as is gang-related violence in general. Theft and robbery are soaring, while a surge in shoplifting is crippling small businesses across the city. The London Underground is filthy, overcrowded and beset with anti-social behaviour.

London may be a playground for super-wealthy transnational elites. But it has become increasingly unliveable for a lot of less affluent families. Some are having no choice but to uproot themselves and make a fresh start elsewhere.

London’s increasingly dilapidated housing stock is a key problem. Houses and flats should be places of sanctuary, spaces fit for raising and nurturing the next generation. But that’s increasingly not the case here.

There are several factors at play in the capital’s housing crisis.

For a start, there simply isn’t enough housing and especially social housing to go around. According to the Trust for London, there are 300,000 people currently on London’s social-housing waiting list. This has been exacerbated by Britain’s historically high levels of immigration, much of it over the past two decades and much of it to London. Indeed, 48 per cent of London’s social housing is now occupied by a foreign-born head of household. (For the north-east of England, the figure is just seven per cent.) In London, social housing is simply not benefitting local, established communities as much as it should.

Furthermore, thanks to the shortage of housing, young, UK-born workers are now forced to live in extortionately priced, privately rented homes, often in the capital’s less-than-salubrious areas.

Then there is the sheer unaffordability of much of the capital’s housing. The possibility of buying a home is increasingly out of reach for many young Londoners. Instead they look on as the world’s ultra-rich buy up accommodation to bolster their property portfolios. This, in turn, drives house prices further out of the reach of even those on decent salaries.

London’s housing crisis has no doubt contributed to another serious problem confronting the capital – namely, the growing levels of poverty and deprivation. Research on the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) – a measure of a decent standard of living which takes into account access to social and cultural activities – has found that half of London’s children are now living below the MIS. What we’re seeing then is not a thriving city. Rather, it’s a place in which millions of its residents are living under considerable financial strain and are unable to enjoy the most basic of cultural experiences.

If that weren’t worrying enough, London is now also in the grip of a crime epidemic. Theft from a person – including stolen phones – increased by 41 per cent in 2024. During that same period, shoplifting skyrocketed, too, with offences up by 54 per cent in 2024 compared to the previous year. Over the same period, shoplifting in the rest of England increased by just 15 per cent.

The lack of effective neighbourhood policing means that thieves and shoplifters are far less likely to be caught than in the past. This crime wave is making life miserable for shopkeepers and the public alike. Indeed, thieves and shoplifters are becoming increasingly brazen. Some burst into stores with wheelie bins, suitcases and holdalls to clear shelves of items, while staff, subject to violent threats, are left to fend for themselves.

The seeming lawlessness of London’s streets extends beyond theft and shoplifting. Violent, gang-fuelled crime is also on the rise. Between March 2024 and February 2025, the Metropolitan Police recorded 15,182 incidents of knife crime, up by three per cent on the previous 12 months. The Met also recorded 1,958 gun-crime offences during the same period, up 32 per cent from the previous year (although the Met have claimed that changes in crime recording contributed in part to the increase).

There is little doubt that London is becoming a much more dangerous place than it was just a couple of decades ago. Data from the Office for National Statistics show that in the year 2019/20, London had the highest regional rate for police-recorded offences involving a knife or sharp instrument – at 179 offences per 100,000 people, compared with an England and Wales average of 82 offences per 100,000 people. In 2024/25, London’s rate stands at 188 per 100,000, double the England and Wales average of 91 per 100,000. A 2019 BBC investigation found that 16 of the 20 most dangerous places in the UK for serious knife-crime offences were in London.

Much of the increases can be put down to the glorification of violence among certain subcultures concentrated among London’s black, and especially Afro-Caribbean-heritage, communities. In these communities, younger people are disproportionately more likely to live in lone-parent households and are concentrated in relatively deprived parts of inner-city London.

Fatherlessness and relative poverty have been gifts for predatory violent gangs looking to recruit younger men and boys. Lacking a responsible male role model in the household, these youths invariably crave the sense of belonging and status that gang membership provides.

It is billed as Europe’s biggest street carnival, and it’s clear the Met now struggles to police it. Last year, 50 officers were injured. Such is the level of disorder that elderly residents living nearby are now being moved to the seaside for the carnival’s duration, as part of a scheme run by Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council to provide them with ‘respite’. It may have begun in the 1960s as a hippy-ish occasion, designed to improve race relations. But today the carnival embodies so much that is wrong with London.

Social cohesion is under severe strain. This is made considerably worse by the unchecked rise of Islamism in the capital. London is hardly alone among major European cities in this regard. The problem is that London’s authorities tend to downplay or even ignore the Islamist threat. Indeed, as ethnic tensions rise, London mayor Khan and others continue to insist that ‘diversity is our strength’.

This is a dereliction of duty on the mayor’s part. London has already been the site of several devastating Islamist terror attacks, such as the 7/7 bombings in 2005 and the London Bridge attack in 2017. It is also home to institutions and organisations that even Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East have placed on their own terror lists. Back in January, the United Arab Emirates put eight UK-based organisations on its local terrorist list, on the grounds of their alleged connections to the Sunni-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. The majority of these entities are registered to offices in London.

There is also the Islamic Centre of England, the trustees of which the Charity Commission has recently ordered to ‘provide rigorous oversight of future speakers and online activity by the charity among other actions’. Based in north-west London, the centre is strongly linked to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The increase in Islamist activity has gone hand in hand with the rise, after 7 October, in vehement anti-Israel and sometimes anti-Semitic sentiment in the capital. It has left many Jewish Londoners deeply perturbed. After the Hamas-led terror attacks on Israel in 2023, and the subsequent bombardment of Gaza by the IDF, there have been frequent pro-Palestine demonstrations infused with anti-Semitic sentiment. Support for Palestinian statehood and the right to self-determination is a noble cause. But the protests have frequently gone beyond support for Palestinian statehood. They have featured displays of pro-Hamas advocacy and the chanting of anti-Jewish slogans.

It’s not just the Israel-Hamas war that is spilling over on London’s streets. Thanks to the rise in immigration, many more of the world’s conflicts are now playing out in the capital, too. Back in December 2023, members of the Eritrean diaspora fought out a sectarian battle in Camberwell, south London. Four police officers were injured and one was hospitalised. Eight people were arrested for offences including violent disorder, criminal damage, possession of offensive weapons and assault on an emergency worker. While there were conflicting reports on the reasons for the disorder, it later appeared that those loyal to Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki were clashing with those who oppose the dictator and want him removed from office.

In July 2024, violence broke out between groups of men in Whitechapel, east London, over the turmoil in Bangladesh that culminated in Sheikh Hasina’s resignation as prime minister. The flare-up in Whitechapel caused injuries to two police officers, as the Met sought to form a barrier between the opposing crowds.

London is now a city on the edge. Intra-communal tensions are high, and sources of commonality and cohesion are few and far between. To many Londoners, priced out of homeownership and struggling to make ends meet, it feels like a city that is always serving the interests of others, from the global super-rich through Islamist troublemakers to illegal immigrants.

Some have attempted to gloss over London’s problems. Fraser Nelson, a columnist at The Times, recently said that it was ‘a better city than it was a decade ago’. Such claims will not resonate with those Londoners living on low salaries and in neighbourhoods riven by violent crime. Would Nelson be able to say this to the many mothers who have lost their children to the capital’s knife-crime epidemic? Could he seriously defend his position that London is a more cohesive and harmonious city than it was a decade ago? Surely not. It is now a hotbed of Islamist extremism and its Jewish community lives in fear of attack.

Still, we mustn’t give up and write off our capital, as some commentators have done. London remains a vital place, constantly capable of reinventing itself as it has done throughout its long history. It is still an economic and cultural force to be reckoned with. But it needs to start working for the vast majority of its residents, especially families who have lived in the city for generations.

To realise a better future for London, we need to sort out the crisis of immigration and the asylum system. We need to tackle the surge in crime. And above all we need to address the capital’s dysfunctional housing system. This will require radical solutions, such as building new homes and placing restrictions on who can buy and rent, prioritising UK nationals in London’s established communities.

Crucially, London needs a much higher quality of governance – whether that is from the UK government or the London mayor. It is a city that ought to be a source of immense national pride. A city in which the ancient and the new, the traditional and the modern, coexist side by side. There is nothing inevitable about London’s decline. Like the nation at large, it just needs leadership and vision – and commitment from its leaders to serve those who live and work here.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.