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Will Jones
Dr Will Jones is Editor of the Daily Sceptic. He has a PhD in political philosophy, an MA in ethics, a BSc in mathematics and a diploma in theology. He lives in Leamington Spa with his wife and two children.
In a recent speech at a ‘disinformation summit’, Sadiq Khan claimed that social media posts drawing attention to London’s rising crime rate – knife crime, shoplifting, mobile phone theft, violence against women and girls – were disinformation. This is gaslighting and itself disinformation, says Toby in the Spectator.
I disagree with Sam Leith’s recent piece entitled ‘London hasn’t fallen’. He took at face value Sadiq Khan’s claim in a recent speech at a ‘disinformation summit’ that social media posts drawing attention to London’s rising crime rate – particularly knife crime, shoplifting, mobile phone theft and violence against women and girls – were either mis- or disinformation and were probably posted by bots, presumably based abroad. But is that true?
Khan himself is guilty of spreading misinformation about knife crime. In 2024, the mayor of London’s claim that “knife and gun crime, homicides and burglary have all fallen since 2016” was challenged by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which pointed out that while knife crime with injury involving victims under 25 had fallen, total knife crime had increased significantly since 2016.
Khan’s most recent speech relied on data supplied by research he’d commissioned himself and which was carried out by a research unit in City Hall. This purported to show that ‘London in decline’ narratives on X have grown by 150 to 200 per cent in the past two years, while migration-related narratives are up by over 350 per cent. The culprits include “extreme right-wing groups”, pro-Kremlin or pro-Beijing agents of influence and MAGA-aligned keyboard warriors. Khan demanded that Ofcom take enforcement action to protect Londoners from these bad actors. …
What the mayor and his researchers fail to acknowledge is that some of the anxiety about crime in London reflects things that are actually happening. Between 2016 and 2023, knife crime rose 54 per cent in London. Robbery rose 57 per cent over the same period. Mobile phone thefts rose from 91,481 in 2019 to 117,211 in 2024. These are not fabrications by Vietnamese bot farms. They’re official figures.
Then there are the concerns about violence against women and girls committed by people who have entered the country illegally. When this issue has been raised by London Assembly members, Khan’s stock answer is that there are no data to suggest this is a growing problem in the capital. That’s true, but only because the police only seem to include information about the immigration status of criminals on a case-by-case basis.
Based on the data that are recorded elsewhere, the picture suggests these concerns may be well-founded. Foreign nationals make up 10.9 per cent of the population but accounted for a quarter of sexual assault convictions and more than a fifth of rape convictions in in 2024. The Baroness Casey audit confirmed that in Greater Manchester, 52 per cent of suspects in multi-victim, multi-offender grooming cases were of Asian ethnicity, against a local population that is 21 per cent Asian.
By commissioning research that reframes public anxiety about crime in London as mis- and disinformation, Khan is gaslighting his critics.
Worth reading in full.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
