In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News’ James Delingpole, London mayoral candidate Laurence Fox said that the British capital has never had a worse mayor than Sadiq Khan, highlighting his assaults on British heritage and his “horrendous” record on crime.
Speaking to Breitbart London on the campaign trail in Sutton earlier this week, Reclaim party leader Laurence Fox referred to Khan as ‘Sadiq Turpin’ — a reference to English highway robber Dick Turpin — because, Fox claims, Khan “steals from the poor and buys himself new Range Rovers”.
“It’s astonishing his upgrade in spending on his own little coterie of mafia bosses,” Fox said, possibly in reference to Khan’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, which will “review” London’s statues and historical monuments at a reported cost of £1 million.
The London mayoral candidate, who was endorsed this week by Brexit leader Nigel Farage and Reform party leader Richard Tice, called on the leftist mayor to “stop tearing down all our statues”.
“London on its own is a capital city that reflects Great Britain. It is really important that it does and stays the same, it’s not just any city on earth where you get a woke mayor” who can tear down its history, Fox added.
Mr Fox went on to lambast Khan’s record on crime, saying: “it’s horrendous; all of it is up hugely and it’s down to woke mayoring… he’s not long away from saying knife crime is up because its racist”.
The Reclaim leader, who has called for an automatic five-year sentence for merely carrying a knife on the streets of London, said that he would also consider a five-year community service requirement to improve run-down communities.
“Everyone in life is confronted with choices, you can’t politicise something like knife crime,” Fox said.
“It’s like, no, stop stabbing people, it’s unacceptable no matter what your skin colour is,” he added.
During Sadiq Khan’s tenure as the Mayor of London, which was artificially extended by a year after elections were cancelled in 2020 due to the Chinese coronavirus, homicides in the British capital have passed the hundred mark in each of his years in power.
Prior to his election in 2016, there were 9,700 knife crime offences record during the 2014/15 period. This had risen by over 50 per cent by the 2019/20 period, when 15,600 in 2019/20 were recorded.
2019 also saw the highest number of homicides in the past ten years, with 150 people were killed.
That same year, teenage stabbings hit an 11-year-high.
Last year, shootings in London also rose by over 8 per cent to 288, despite the country’s draconian gun control restrictions and the city spending the majority of the year under strict lockdown regulations. There were 126 homicides, 15 of whom were teenagers.
Laurence Fox has called for the recruitment of 3,000 new police officers to tackle the crime wave in London, as well as proposing the implementation of a “broken windows” policy — famously enacted by former New York City mayor turned Donald Trump ally Rudy Guiliani, who is widely credited with reducing crime in the American financial hub.
The idea of a “broken windows” initiative is that if police enforce basic laws more strictly, such as someone breaking a window, then other crime will fall, too.
“Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other,” Giuliani explained in 1998.
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