London Assembly member David Kurten grilled London mayor Sadiq Khan on his decision to plough tens of millions of pounds into a “Green New Deal” while violent crime spirals at Mayor’s Question Time.
“Of course everyone knows the number one issue facing London at the moment is spiralling violent crime; we’ve got to do something about it,” said Kurten, formerly of UKIP, now of the minor Brexit Alliance political group and an indepenent London mayoral candidate.
“Your budget does have some things in it which are going to give a little bit more money to the police, but one thing you said this morning, which I think is allocating money to the wrong place, is you said you’re going to put £50 million into a ‘Green New Deal’ programme to tackle a non-existent ‘climate emergency’.
Kurten said that money could have “paid for up to 800 extra police officers” and demanded to know “why have you decided to put £50 million into some programme that doesn’t seem to have much detail attached to it, and it isn’t going to do anything when you could be putting it into increasing the numbers of our police to keep our streets safe?”
I ask Sadiq Khan why he plans to spend £50,000,000 on a 'Green New Deal' rather than using it to pay for extra police officers in London to combat violent crime. https://t.co/TnLkkR72dP
— David Kurten (@davidkurten) February 24, 2020
“We’ve got climate change delayers and climate change deniers in this Assembly,” Khan answered tersely.
The Labour politician insisted he could not “invest in the police with a one-off payment, because it’s gotta be recurring, because you can’t make police officers redundant” — although why the £50 million could not be recurring, or at least invested on a one-off basis in improving police equipment or the like, was not entirely clear.
The answer also implied that the climate emergency could be solved with a one-off payment of £50 million, although the conversation and demands for incredibly large amounts of money around the climate change industry make clear its proponents do not believe that is true.
Khan boasted that “since I became Mayor… we’ve raised council tax to the maximum allowed” and claimed the extra money had been used, at least in part, to fund new police officers — but soon moved back to the subject of the “climate emergency”.
“[W]e face an existential threat,” he insisted.
“We either accept that there’s a climate emergency, or like you [Mr Kurten], we don’t. I accept there is a climate emergency, I accept there is climate change… my question to you is very simple: are you gonna be the first generation that does something about it, or the last generation that doesn’t?”
Khan's London: 16-strong Knife Gang Singles Out White Victims https://t.co/4SXAZD8KkW
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) September 27, 2019
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