Mayor Sadiq Khan: ‘You don’t make the UK more level by making London poorer’

Has the air gone out of London? For the seven years since the Brexit vote, the city has been out of favour — a punchline for politicians, a discarded pawn in talks with Brussels. EU workers have left, equity markets have sagged. The Metropolitan Police’s reputation has plumbed depths.

In his offices next to the east London cable car, the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, puts on a brave face. He insists London has shrugged off the worst effects of Covid and, to some extent, Brexit. “I think we’re back. If you look at public transport numbers at weekends, tourism and leisure is back.”  

Khan sees the city as half-full, not half-empty. Office workers are commuting at 80 per cent of pre-pandemic levels from Tuesdays to Thursdays. The Elizabeth Line, opened last year, now accounts for one in six UK train journeys.

But aren’t the Conservatives and Labour focused on investing in the north and Midlands? “You don’t make our country more level by making London poorer . . . Our competitors, I say this not in any way to cause offence, aren’t Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow. Our competitors are Hong Kong, Singapore, New York . . . All politicians need to reflect on the consequences if they just keep bashing London.”

It’s not just London under question; it is Khan himself. When he was elected in 2016, he was one of Britain’s most popular politicians. As a Muslim and second-generation immigrant, he was a global symbol of multiculturalism. Regular clashes with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson solidified his support. Khan was proudly anti-Brexit and occasionally a sane leftwing counterpoint to Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the Labour party.

But last year his approval rating among Londoners turned negative. Even some Labour supporters feel his mayoralty has gone flat. Rory Stewart, the former Tory minister who briefly ran against him, calls him “a sympathetic character, but not a chief executive. He has a tendency to blame the central government for failures rather than take direct responsibility.”

Khan attracts unjustified criticism: his team traces much online abuse to Trump fans in the US and Narendra Modi supporters in India. But arguably a bigger problem is that his signature policy — cleaning London’s air — is one that people can’t see.

Next year he’ll run for, and is expected to win, an unprecedented third term. His predecessors Ken Livingstone and Johnson mostly served under national governments of their own party. Khan’s hope is that, if Labour wins nationally in 2024, his horizons as mayor will open up.

“This anti-London animus isn’t going to go away overnight with a change of government. [But] the potential of working with a Labour government that’s pro-London is so incredibly exciting . . . When you speak to Ken Livingstone, he’ll say when he first became mayor the government was giving money away.” Khan vows not to be “a patsy” for Labour. “But the key thing about a Labour government is they’d give us the money we need.”

A human rights lawyer, Khan, 52, served as a transport minister under former prime minister Gordon Brown. He found the role stifling: “If you’re the minister for paper clips, you can only talk about paper clips.” Being an opposition MP was worse: “Thoroughly depressing.”

Khan’s skill was campaigning — he outmanoeuvred rival Labour candidates for mayor. The job itself was difficult to adapt to. “I’m a pugilist. Being a mayor is very different — it’s convening. I’ve had to change my temperament.”

Khan is among Britain’s most scripted politicians, falling back on prepared lines. He lists his record on home building: the most number of council homes being built since the 1970s (although still nowhere near the 50,000 or so London needs a year). Murders were lower last year than any year since 2014 (although much of his mayoralty has coincided with rises in crime, following national trends).

Air quality has improved: emissions of nitrogen oxides are a quarter lower than they would be without the Ultra Low Emission Zone that Khan introduced. That is personal: he was diagnosed with asthma at the age of 43, after running a marathon, and now takes tablets and uses a steroid pump twice a day. He is not backing down on his plan to extend the ULEZ to the whole of London in August: polluting vehicles will have to pay £12.50 a day. It is projected to cut nitrogen oxide emissions from cars in outer London by nearly a tenth.

“ULEZ isn’t a big thing on most people’s minds. It’s a big thing on a small number of people’s minds . . . In outer London, 85 per cent of vehicles are compliant and half of Londoners don’t even have a car.” 

Is the ultimate aim to charge drivers for every mile they drive? “Road use charging is interesting . . . If you get rid of the congestion charge, get rid of ULEZ, get rid of road tax, and charge people depending on how many miles they drive, how polluting their vehicle is, what time of day they’re driving, are there alternatives related to public transport, how many people are in the car, that’s potentially quite exciting. The problem is the technology’s quite a long way off.”

Khan is quick to blame others. Johnson left him “no inheritance”. Central government doesn’t fund enough house building.

He speaks to other mayors — “Anne in Paris, Eric in New York or Ada in Barcelona” — and is “green with envy”. “The mayor in New York gets to spend 50 per cent of monies raised in New York. We get to spend 7 per cent.” He wants more control over council tax and business rates, and the power to impose a hotel levy. He has also backed a six-month rent freeze, which he doesn’t have the power to implement.

London has few big capital projects in the pipeline. New trains are being built for the Piccadilly Line, but there’s no funding for signalling that would allow them to run more frequently. “It’s ridiculous.”

We’re meeting the day after a Tube strike. Khan, who normally commutes by Tube, cycled in on his electric Brompton instead. Campaigning for the mayoralty, he said he’d work to “make sure there are zero days of strikes”. What happened? He insists that, between 2017 and 2021, Tube strikes fell “more than 70 per cent”, even while 600 jobs were cut. But things changed when the government demanded a review of pensions as part of a Covid bailout. “It’s deliberately been done by a government which wants a fight with the trade unions.” Ministers also demanded research into driverless trains, a prospect that Transport for London has said is implausible because it would require widening of deep tunnels.

The day after the Brexit vote, Khan called then Bank of England governor Mark Carney. “He said the only people who have rung me today are you and [Nicola] Sturgeon. No one from the government had rung him.”

So what about Brexit? “Businesses in London complain of two big things: a skills shortage and a labour shortage. Some restaurants are doing no lunch sittings because they’ve not got the staff.”

Khan wants London-only worker visas. Failing that, he wants the government to commission regional, not just national, lists of occupations suffering shortages. That would allow hospitality workers to come to London, for example.

Will Labour leader Keir Starmer soften his refusal to rejoin the single market? “I’m sure he means what he says. But in the not too distant future, you’ll get more people talking about the elephant in the room — the extreme hard Brexit. We should be talking about the single market and customs union — that doesn’t mean going back in them.” The direction of travel is “going to be closer alignment”.

Humza Yousaf, another Muslim politician of Pakistani origin, is now Scotland’s first minister. That is “a source of pride to me”, says Khan. Do ethnic minority leaders receive more criticism? “Some of the criticism that I’ve received is clearly linked with my race and my faith . . . It’s an unfortunate problem with social media.”

Khan was instrumental in forcing out Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick in 2022. The recent Casey review found the force to be institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic. “I’ve been vindicated. I was the guy who was unhappy about how the [2021] Clapham Common vigil was being policed,” said the mayor.

He praises the “reforming commissioner” Sir Mark Rowley for having “no complacency, no arrogance, no defensiveness”. What concretely is Rowley promising that Dick didn’t? “A good leader shouldn’t have as a criterion for success how popular they are in the canteen,” says Khan, in a veiled dig at Dick. But, he adds: “You can’t escape the fact that we lost 20,000 officers across the country . . . That had an impact on quality and assurance, on violent crime going up.” 

Other than air quality, Khan lacks achievements that can excite London’s voters. He has commissioned a report on cannabis, although as mayor he has little influence over drug laws. Is he minded to support legalisation? “I genuinely have an open mind. I was surprised when I went to America and impressed by what’s happening in LA. I didn’t realise that the tax revenues were so huge. But I appreciate there are downsides.”

A third term would take Khan to 2028. He won’t rule out carrying on. “At least six terms, come on! . . . As long as you’ve got ideas, and you love your job, and people want to lend me their trust, then yeah. I genuinely think I’ve got the best job in politics.”

​Letters in response to this article:

A distinction Khan forgets in the levelling-up debate / From Roger Crisp, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK

Questioning London’s ultra low emission zone data / From Peter Fortune, Conservative Member, London Assembly, London SE1, UK