Sadiq Khan has accused the Conservatives of using misinformation and “lies” in their campaign to unseat him as London mayor after they deleted an online video using scenes of a panicked crowd at a New York subway station to criticise his record on crime.
The ad, posted on Monday on X in support of Susan Hall, Khan’s rival for the London mayoralty in the 2 May election, showed people rushing through New York’s Penn station after false reports of gunfire in 2017.
The caption on the video claimed “London under Labour has become a crime capital of the world”, and showed an emoji of a red rose – the symbol of the Labour party – wilting and shedding its petals.
“It is quite staggering we have a Conservative candidate aspiring to be mayor of our great city just doing our city down. I think it is unpatriotic always just slagging off the capital,” Khan said, in his first public reaction.
“But I’m afraid it’s another example of my fear materialising, which is this election from the Conservative party will be one where there is misinformation, where there are lies and in this case clearly where this is a video that is not of our city. It is New York.”
The video was withdrawn and replaced with another where the Penn station clips had been cut after commentators spotted that the video about London showed scenes from New York.
Originally, the scenes from Penn station had been shown in black and white, and overlaid with an ominous American-accented narrator saying: “A 54% increase in knife crime since the Labour mayor seized power has the metropolis teetering on the brink of chaos.
“And in the chaos, people seek a desperate reprieve.”
Full Fact – an organisation that checks information in the public sphere – said it was unable, without a copy of the original video, to do a check that would meet its threshold for fact checking
But Chris Morris, its Ceo, told the Guardian: “Our political leaders must know they can do a lot better.
“Parties have the chance to turn around all-time low levels of trust in politics if they contest the coming elections honestly, transparently and on the facts. Misleading and false content won’t win votes, but will further degrade our democracy.”
While the Conservatives have sought to attack Khan on crime by claiming that it has soared under his time as mayor, a Guardian analysis has shown that the reality of his record on crime is more nuanced.
According the Crime Survey for England and Wales, someone is less likely to be a victim of crime in London than they are across the country as a whole. In the capital, 14.9% of people experienced a crime either to their person or their household in the year ending September 2023, compared with 15.7% nationally.
When it comes to specific types of crime, such as antisocial behaviour, the same survey shows London has one of the lowest rates. In the year to September 2023, 26.4% of people said they had witnessed or experienced antisocial behaviour, compared with 34.2% across England and Wales.
Only three police forces scored lower. That figure is also down compared with September 2019 levels, when 44% of people had witnessed or experienced antisocial behaviour (compared with 39% nationally).
