Sadiq Khan has received more than 300,000 pieces of openly racist or racially-oriented abuse on social media since he was elected London mayor, with a recent surge in such messages connected to his plan to expand the city’s clean air zone, research has found.
The study, carried out by the Greater London authority, found that racist abuse against the Labour mayor, which peaked when he was targeted on Twitter by Donald Trump, has started to rise again this year.
In 2023 so far, the study found nearly 11,000 racist social media messages, almost as many as sent in all of 2022, with a particular rise in ones referencing Khan’s plan to expand London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez).
The trawl of social media found that racist or racialised abuse mentioning Ulez rose nearly 200% in the first three months of 2023 against the previous quarter, with almost 10% of all such messages now referencing it.
The zone, in which drivers of higher-polluting vehicles must pay a daily fee, already encompasses the boundaries of the south and north circular roads, and in August is due to expand to take in all of Greater London.
The high court was on Tuesday hearing a legal challenge by five Conservative-led London councils seeking to block the plan.
The analysis showed 57% of the Ulez-referencing racist abuse originated from outside London, and varied in intensity. The patterns indicated “that dissatisfaction about Ulez is either radicalising social media users or attracting the far right into online discussions about clean air policies”, the report noted.
The bulk of the racist or racialised abuse is aimed at Khan’s Pakistani Muslim heritage, with the content isolated by searching for messages linking the mayor to terms such as sharia law, jihad, or keywords like “Londonistan”. The report also included messages with the term “Khanage”, saying that while it is not in itself explicitly racist, it is often used in racist posts.
The trajectory of the messages overall show a significant frequency in 2016, when he was first elected mayor, following an election in which his Conservative opponent, Zac Goldsmith, repeatedly targeted Khan’s religion, a tactic condemned by some as openly racist.
The peak of the abuse happened the next year, coinciding with Trump condemning Khan on Twitter. Such was the scale of this torrent that overall since 2016, racist abuse originating from the US slightly outnumbers even that sent from the UK.
The number of racist messages remained high during Trump’s presidency, but dropped significantly from 2020 – but has now started to increase again this year, with Ulez one of the apparent triggers.
Another factor in the scale of racialised abuse has been India, the origin of almost 17,000 such messages in 2019 alone. This coincided with the re-election of the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi as India’s prime minister, and protests about Kashmir outside the Indian high commission in London.
Georgie Laming, head of campaigns at Hope Not Hate, which monitors far-right and extremist groups, said: “Sadiq Khan is subjected to strikingly high levels of racial abuse, which speaks to the vilification of Muslim figures in public life. Whilst opposition to Ulez comes from many sources, a small but vocal contingent has adopted a toxic and increasingly extreme anti-Khan angle. The involvement of individuals linked to the conspiracy theory-driven protests that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic and elements of the far right in anti-Ulez campaigning has fuelled the levels of abuse.”
