A tale of two crumbling cities. So, who’s the world’s worst mayor: London’s Sadiq Khan or New York’s de Blasio? It’s a close-run race...
UPDATE MAY 4 - 2024 - London's Worst Mayor in History Garners Enough Votes During the Two-Day Vote Count to Pull Off Re-election Victory.
May 4, 2024 UPDATE:
Sadiq Khan 'wins' historic third term on a meager turnout.
What a Win for Kahn. You do not need to be a citizen or register to vote to vote in London!
Khan's dishonesty in implementing ULEZ was extraordinary. His regime's woke anti-business policies during the current cost-of-living crisis and total disregard for public safety will accelerate London's economic demise.
Would the coming Tory General Election Strategy now be: 'WARNING: Look how the Labour Party and Sadiq Khan’s policies destroyed our capital city. Better not vote for Keir Starmer.' Will this new theme be a variation on the 2020 Corbyn 'Fear Porn' or simply Stockholm syndrome?
Many wonder why it took two days to tabulate the low-turnout vote; it must have been those pesky postal ballots. There is nothing to see here; look away.
Yep. Stockholm syndrome.
This article is worth a re-read.
Sept 11, 2020 - It’s my misfortune to have homes in two of the worst-run cities in the world. They’re both blighted by violent crime, poverty, drug-taking, & homelessness. What they also have in common is incompetent woke socialists as leaders.
I was born in Manhattan and lived through the many riots and rampant crime waves that swept through New York City decades ago. I have spent much of my adult life living in London and watched the rapid deterioration of the quality of life under the reigns of successive mayors. Why do modern voters on both sides of the pond accept these virtue-signaling liars who claim to push social justice as an enhancement to their patronizingly faux “woke” credentials?
Many generations have passed down a stark truth: all politicians lie. Well, why would anyone vote for any politician or party that continuously fails to protect or improve the lives of their constituents, repeatedly tells untruths, shifts blame, and refuses to accept responsibility for their failure? Because, like the UK prime minister, they grunt sexy three-word soundbites the majority want to hear, such as “Get Brexit done” and “Hire more police.”
The problem is power. Politicians can never have enough energy, making it far too easy for them to abuse the trust granted to them by the people to act on behalf of the people. The most egregious examples are New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and UK PM Johnson.
Bill de Blasio (born Warren Wilhelm Jr.) is a staunch uber-liberal Democratic Party operative who has been the mayor of New York since 2014. He championed the call to “defund the police” during his dismal bid to become the 2020 Democratic nominee for president, running on a platform of “Orange Man bad” before dropping out after regularly polling at ZERO percent among Democratic primary voters, including in his home state.
I’ve just spent two weeks in Manhattan, and I can officially declare that de Blasio has successfully converted the city into “Wokeistan”: a bankrupt, crime-infested, lawless, virtually uninhabitable hotbed of pay-to-play politics. De Blasio has supported the legalization of recreational marijuana in NYC while denying rumors he smoked some at his official Gracie Mansion residence, located on Manhattan’s fancy Upper East Side.
As Covid swept the city, de Blasio was virtue signaling his woke credentials, helping paint a vast Black Lives Matter slogan on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. Violent crime rates – specifically murder, arson, and looting – have rocketed to levels not seen since the 1970s. During the peak of this crime wave, de Blasio cut the NYPD’s budget by $1 billion, depriving the neediest low-income neighborhoods of desperately needed extra policing. How’s that worked out? Well, New York City shootings were up 166 percent in August this year compared to August 2019.
De Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, NYC’s First Lady, enjoys a staff of 14, for $2 million to taxpayers. In 2015, de Blasio placed McCray at the helm of the city’s $1.25 billion mental health initiative, ThriveNYC. ThriveNYC missed its financial targets during the worst mental health crisis and the Covid pandemic in its fiscal year ending July 2020. Homelessness is at epidemic levels in New York – you can’t walk a block without coming across several people sprawled on the sidewalk, often having passed out from drug-taking.
De Blasio’s incompetence stretches far and wide. Last week, he announced he had missed NYC’s budget targets and would be furloughing 9,000 employees and possibly laying off 20,000. Will his wife and her 14 staff be first in line? I somehow doubt it. This week, there were calls for him to be relieved of control over New York City’s Department of Education. Once again, at the last minute and while disregarding the welfare of all children, he canceled plans to reopen schools – a blatantly political move and all about hurting Trump’s re-election prospects.
So, how does that long and ropey track record compare with that of the leader of that other capital of Woke, London? Sadiq Khan, a soft-left member of the Labour Party, was elected mayor in 2016. In 2017, on his watch, there were five terror-related attacks in the British capital, which left 14 dead and 136 injured. The worst of these, in terms of loss of life, was the atrocity that took place at Borough Market and on London Bridge.
Responding to a question regarding the likelihood of future terror attacks in major metropolitan centers, Khan stated there was “no reason to be alarmed” and that “terror attacks are now part and parcel of living in a big city.”
The murder rate hit a decade-long high in 2019 under Khan’s reign of wokeness. In November of that year, a convicted radical Islamist terrorist named Usman Khan (aka Abu Saif), released from prison after serving only half of his 16-year sentence, murdered two and injured three before police shot him dead. Sadiq Khan commented, “I’m the mayor of the greatest city in the world, and one of our strengths is our diversity.”
He might be the mayor, but he’s been way behind the curve during the COVID-19 crisis. His crazy ultra-low-emission and congestion-charging schemes have helped kill the restaurant and retail trade in central London. Sorry, Mr. Mayor—that’s not how a political leader helps businesses recover during the capital's most severe economic depression. Suspend the charges until the pandemic ends and the economy recovers!
In New York and London, ideological extremists on the left push socialist agendas. In NYC, that includes defunding the police, decriminalizing and legalizing “quality of life” crimes, and setting policies of no-cash bail. This allows for a revolving door in the court process, which a senior New York City counterterrorism officer described to me this way: “By the time I’ve finished all my arrest reports and the accompanying paperwork, likely, the thugs I arrested are already back out on the street committing the same crimes that these thugs were arrested for only hours earlier.”
The system is systemically rotten to its core, and people such as George Soros contribute massive amounts of money to elect radical district attorneys and prosecutors who do not prosecute. In London, the showman ex-mayor of London turned PM Boris Johnson campaigned on a totally disingenuous promise of adding 20,000 police. In fact, even if achieved, that would still not bring the numbers back to what they were before his party slashed them.
This is all reminiscent of the crazy lack of enforcement that resulted in the lawlessness of the 1960s and early 1970s – and why knowing your history is essential. As we learned from those decades, severe crimes require severe laws and punishments. We need honest politicians who not only understand these principles but also make it a priority to protect the people they serve instead of safeguarding their slave masters, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, whose boots the politicians and fake-news media pundits lick in return for power and fat stacks of cash.