London Doesn't Need to be 'Liberated'

Trump's allies are manufacturing a moral panic to influence the next election.

I’ve lived in London for the majority of my life. So when I first heard the US President proclaim that it was a crime-infested warren of scum and villainy, that people were being “stabbed in the ass or worse,” and that mayor Sadiq Khan was ‘importing criminals’ en masse, I immediately knew he was absolutely full of it. There’s an ideological, manufactured outrage campaign about Britain’s capital, and Donald Trump is seemingly the tip of that spear.

It was good to hear the Met Police Chief Mark Rowley take the claims head-on this week. It’s all “complete nonsense,” he said, accusing the president of trying to “rubbish London” purely for political reasons. “The homicide rate in London is lower than every single US state. It’s lower than all of their big cities.” Perhaps Trump, the President of a nation where it’s become normal for people to regularly slaughter each other with assault weapons, should turn his focus closer to home.

I spent four years living in Austin, Texas - and I don’t want to disparage the place. It’s an eclectic young city with fantastic food, culture, and music. But living there, I was awoken at night more than once to the sound of drive-by shootings. My university allowed students to carry concealed handguns on campus. Private security agents guarded pharmacies and liquor stores with heavy-duty automatic rifles. Austin was (and still is) safer than most American cities - certainly much less trigger-happy than Dallas or Houston - but London has always felt more normal, a far more trusting and secure place to move through.

I also don’t think it does anyone a service to pretend London is perfect. It’s absolutely not. We’ve still got moped thieves snatching phones, knife crime is a real problem, and fraud and cybercrimes run rampant. But all the data shows the capital is safer than much of the rest of England and many other similarly-sized cities in Europe and elsewhere. The trend in general has been positive: London is broadly safer than it has been anytime in the past half-century. At the very least, we can definitively say that Trump’s hyperbolic framing is a ridiculous distortion of reality.

And yet, in right-wing circles, the President’s grotesque portrait of London is taken as gospel. Nigel Farage has spent months warning that London’s crime will induce total “societal collapse.” Tommy Robinson, GB News, and anonymous ‘X’ accounts with roman statue profile pictures hysterically lament the ‘fall of London’. And their manufactured moral panic is working: a recent YouGov poll shows 51% of Britons incorrectly think London crime is increasing, while just 7% accurately claim that it’s decreasing.

It doesn’t take a forensic eye to see what this is really about: immigration. London is one of the most diverse cities in the world, a monument to multiculturalism that flies in the face of the hard-right’s obsession with racial purity. Many on the right today, knowingly or not, have internalised the ideas of Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt - they believe that different ethnicities fundamentally cannot coexist. London, a prevailing counter-example to that easily debunked argument, must therefore be discredited and demonised. These aren’t people that reframe their worldviews when presented with new facts. You can rely on them to double down.

We saw a version of this during Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for Mayor of New York City. Mamdani branded himself as a champion of multiculturalism: “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he said in his victory speech.

Right-wingers across the Atlantic were apoplectic. They painted Mamdani as an “enemy combatant” (in the words of Trump sycophant Laura Loomer) that would usher in an ‘Islamo-Marxist’ dark age. He must be the product of some nefarious fifth column of Muslim foreigners, they claimed, the head of a sinister plot to turn New York into crime-ridden communist London (again, London is much safer than NYC). They repeated their Nazi dog-whistle: ‘Western civilisation is being destroyed from within.’

In Britain, the ultimate goal of this fear-mongering campaign is simple: get Nigel Farage into Downing Street. Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently urged viewers to switch off the BBC and turn to GB News - which conveniently just launched in the USA. Sir Paul Marshall’s US channel tells Americans that Britain is a fallen civilisation in need of “liberation” from crime, multiculturalism, and its own voters.

Marshall himself, speaking to ‘MAGA’ loyalists at the US launch of GB News, reportedly asked attendees to “come and save us.” That “we need to make Britain great again,” and we need to “tell the story of what you’re doing to turn your country around.” Other speakers reportedly “discussed a budding transatlantic alliance that could help propel Farage into Downing Street.” Would you be surprised to learn that Farage himself delivered the keynote speech?

Let’s call this what it is: a manufactured moral panic designed to justify foreign interference in our elections. A smokescreen to legitimise the installation of a right-wing strongman. “Saving Britain” doesn’t mean making our streets safer or our lives better. It means dismantling a pluralistic society that embarrasses their worldview, and replacing it with something smaller, angrier, and easier to control.

London doesn’t need to be liberated. It needs to be defended from lies, from imported paranoia, and from politicians who would rather conquer a frightened country than serve a confident one.