Originally published under the title “Dr. Johnson Was Wrong: For the First Time in 30 Years, I Desperately Want to Leave London.”
When I was growing up, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to live anywhere but London. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s quote was branded on fashion accessories, I recall: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”
Well, there’s an argument to be made about me being tired of modern life, certainly. But either way, Dr. Johnson’s quote simply doesn’t hold true anymore.
Today, London elects its first, demonstrably Islamist-sympathetic Mayor.
The mayoralty of the city is a farce to begin with, the product of a major error of Margaret Thatcher’s when she sought in the short term to deal with the socialists at the Greater London Council (GLC). Alas, she was not perfect.
And those same hard leftists have infiltrated London’s new institutions at every level. When Nazi-obsessive Ken Livingstone was in charge, he famously forced the Greater London Authority (GLA) – the institutional bastard child of the GLC – to order 40 copies of the hard-left Morning Star newspaper every day, probably doubling the paper’s readership overnight. He was a man who had battled against Mrs. Thatcher in the 1980s, and she foresaw his aspirations when she declared that he was keen “to impose upon this nation a tyranny which the peoples of Eastern Europe yearn to cast aside.”
London’s exploding population is almost 50 percent foreign-born.
And Sadiq Khan – crowned today the mayor of London’s exploding, almost 50 percent foreign-born population – is one of Mr. Livingstone’s old pals. He was known for stuffing the GLA with his cronies, but to help Mr. Khan in there eight years after leaving the office himself is some feat. Not least because he helped to enrage London’s Jewish population in the last few days before the poll by calling Hitler a “Zionist.”
But the voting is over, the ballots have been counted – including (probably) a whopping turnout of 400 percent in Tower Hamlets. London now has a Muslim mayor.
Does it matter? I find it a difficult question to answer.
Sadiq Khan narrowly won London’s mayoral election on Thursday. |
It’s certainly not what is chasing me away from the capital. That would be, to name a few reasons: the vapid new residents, the pop-up bars,” the horrendous new architecture that eclipses the finest parts of the city, the rising house prices, the pollution, the traffic, the social and cultural decay in general ... I’ll stop now.
But in being called a racist nearly all of one’s adult life, I have to self-examine sometimes. Am I a bigot, or a xenophobe? Would I care if Syed Kamall, or Sajid Javid, or Maajid Nawaz were London mayor?
No, no I wouldn’t.
My problem is I’ve seen behind the curtain. Probably unlike the hundreds of thousands of Londoners who ticked the box for Khan because it said “Labour,” rather than knowing anything about him or what he stands for – which I go into in some detail in this article.
It is not that Mr. Khan is a Muslim that upsets me. It is the kind of Muslim he is that upsets me.
It is not that Mr. Khan is a Muslim that upsets me. It is the kind of Muslim he is that upsets me. It is a kind of Muslim that is becoming normalised due to foreign influences and an inability for our Western leaders to face Islamisation and radicalisation head on.
No, I won’t sit idly by and pay my taxes and frequent London’s pubs, and let Mr. Khan reap the rewards of people like me who bring money and jobs and some semblance of moral and philosophical grounding to this city. I won’t do it.
London will be run (further) into the ground during his tenure. More mass migration, more expensive, stupid government projects combined with Labour’s ability to overspend at every turn (and lump me with the bill), and more PC-culture that tries to shut people like me up when I complain about it.
Lest we forget what the last Islamist-sympathetic mayor of a London borough did.
Dr. Johnson’s quote from 1777 actually begins: “Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London.”
A lot of things have changed since then, and in 2016 I would argue that you should find no man, at all intellectual, who is not willing to leave London.
N.B. Dr. Johnson also once remarked, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.” Again, I disagree. I find myself effectively only willing to love freedom-defending Americans (you may culturally self-identify if that helps) any more. Mankind, sadly, is neither manly, nor kindly, anymore.
Raheem Kassam is a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum and editor-in-chief of Breitbart London.
