London Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced £34,000,000 for new green energy and solar initiatives in London, despite blaming police budget cuts for the massive growth of crime in Britain’s capital city under his tenure.
The budget — less than 10 per cent of which will go towards providing “improvements [for] boilers, heating controls and insulation — is the latest sign that the Mayor is not serious about tackling crime in the city, preferring instead to blame Conservative government budget cuts than saving lives in the capital.
The money could instead pay for over 1000 extra police constables, though Khan’s City Hall has earmarked the cash for green energy pet projects. The news comes as the European Union ramps up pressure on cities across the continent to bring down pollution levels.
Following a Breitbart London article on the drastic rise in crime across the city, Khan’s office pledged just £10,000 a year for schools to be issued “knife wands” to catch students taking weapons into schools, but admitted there was no means of measuring the success of the project.
From the years 2015/16 to 2016/17, homicides in London rose by 27.1 per cent. Youth homicide jumped 70 per cent. Serious youth violence was up 19 per cent. Robbery was up 33.4 per cent, while home burglaries rose by 18.7 per cent.
Theft went up by over 10,000 incidents in a year, up 33.9 per cent, and there were more than 4,000 additional knife crime incidents under Khan than under his predecessor, a rise of 31.3 per cent.
Rape in the capital rose by 18.3 per cent, while there were 2,551 incidents of gun crime, representing a rise of 16.3 per cent on the previous year.
The Mayor has continuously blamed central government “police cuts” for the problems faced, but statistics reveal London only lost around 1,000 police officers (3 per cent) in the past year, reducing the workforce from 31,343 to 30,379 — a number which could easily be plugged by switching City Hall’s priorities from green energy projects and/or anti “hate crime” initiatives.
The Mayor previously told Good Morning Britain that he was unable to track known extremists and terrorists. When asked by host Piers Morgan for a rationale for this, he responded: “I’ll tell you why. Let me tell you why. Because the Met police budget roughly speaking 15 per cent to 20 per cent is funded by me the mayor the rest comes from central government. If the Met police budget is being shrunk and reduced, they’ve got to prioritise and use their resources in a sensible, savvy way.”
But the Met’s prioritisation has been roundly criticised in the past year, with dozens of Britons having been arrested for “hate crimes”, and the force boasting over 900 police officers “dedicated to investigating hate crime”.
Freedom of Information requests revealed that some 3,395 people across 29 police force areas around the country — 13 refused the requests, two released unusable data — were arrested under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another”, in 2016.
The prioritisation comes despite a fall in the number of prosecutions for “hate crimes” on the back of a spike in reported incidents.
In 2017 a report found London to have become more dangerous than New York City, with an overall rise of 19 per cent of violence against the person, and a 19 per cent rise of sexual offences. Despite this alongside a number of terror attacks, Khan declared London to be one of the “safest global cities in the world”.
Of the £34m announced today, just £2.5 million will go to poor homes to assist with electricity bills, helping only “hundreds” across the city of nine million people.
£10m will go to “commercial boiler scrappage”, with another £4.5m going straight back into another government body — Transport for London (TfL) — “to expand their solar power usage and install energy efficiency measures across a variety of TfL owned buildings including bus stations and office buildings”.
A further £3.5m will go to a “Decentralised Energy Enabling Project” for other government bodies to source more energy locally.
Boroughs receiving funding for the small number of homes to be assisted include Islington, Croydon, Kingston and Lewisham, three out of four of which are massively Labour-voting areas and Labour-run councils. Islington is one of the wealthiest areas of Greater London, and is represented by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as well as Shadow Cabinet member Lady Nugee (Emily Thornberry).
Raheem Kassam is the editor in chief of Breitbart London
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