Sadiq Khan is not a serious politician. By that I do not mean we should not take the vast amount of damage he has done to London over the last decade seriously. I mean that he is immensely comfortable saying things that he ought to know are utter nonsense to try to win votes.
I am not talking about issues where fair-minded people might reasonably disagree. Indeed, disagreement is the stuff of politics. Sometimes this entails politicians pursuing different approaches to trying to achieve the same or similar ends. For example most politicians will want to improve air quality or boost health outcomes or reduce crime, even if we have different ideas on how they might best be achieved.
However a serious politician would not claim with a straight face that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
To be clear, that does not mean there is no room to criticise Benjamin Netanyahu or the Israeli Government. You can legitimately believe that Israel was right or wrong to enter Gaza after the atrocities of October 7, 2023. A serious person could try to make the case that Israel could have done more to protect civilians in Gaza or that the Israel Defence Force (IDF) has done more than any other army to minimise civilian loss of life. However to casually throw about the term “genocide” is not something a serious person could or would do.
Genocide is acting with the deliberate and systematic intent to destroy a people. To even try to make the case that Israel’s intervention in Gaza is “genocide” would be to construct an intellectual scaffolding so rickety that it would collapse in a gust of wind. If Israel’s intent was to eliminate people in Gaza, why would it simultaneously seek to minimise civilian casualties by making phone calls and sending text messages to warn civilians in the buildings it plans to attack? Why would Israel drop leaflets, advising civilians to move away from Hamas operatives and IDF targets?
Despite this, last week Sadiq Khan told Channel 4 News “I do believe a genocide has been committed in Gaza. I think Netanyahu is responsible and as a perpetrator of genocide I think he’s broken the law.”
Sadiq Khan has been the Mayor of London for over ten years. He has repeatedly failed on his three key areas of responsibility: bearing down on crime, making sure Londoners and visitors to London can travel around the capital as swiftly, cheaply and safely as possible and ensuring the homes Londoners need are being built.
Instead crime is up by 26% since he became Mayor, he has presided over a record-breaking 156 TfL strikes, three times as many in ten years as occurred in the previous 16 years under Ken and Boris. And London has built nothing like as many houses as it needs. In spite of the Mayor receiving £8.82 billion from the previous Government to build up to 151,000 affordable homes, fewer than 90,000 of those affordable homes have been completed.
A decent Mayor would not have got himself into this situation, but if he had then surely his aim now would be to do everything possible to turn his rotten record around. That is not the approach Sadiq Khan has taken. Instead his focus has drifted ever further from the areas for which he is actually responsible.
As Mayor, Sadiq Khan represents nine million Londoners. He is well aware of the escalating antisemitism in our city. When he makes demonstrably untrue claims about the state of Israel he is fuelling that antisemitism and encouraging those who mistakenly believe he is a serious man to take him seriously. He should be utterly ashamed of his behaviour. As it is, as London’s foremost political representative, he shames us all.
Susan Hall is the leader of the City Hall Conservatives on the London Assembly and a former Conservative candidate for Mayor of London
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