Why would you choose to make a city crappy? Plenty of cities don’t have much going for them. But when they do, it takes a certain amount of skill to actively wreck them.
Take London, for instance. Anyone in charge of our capital needed only to maintain it, if not improve it. Yet in almost a decade as mayor, Sadiq Khan has overseen a decline which is obvious to any resident or visitor.
That first sign of rot – the tolerance of minor crime – is everywhere. It might be graffiti on the Tube. Or it might be the fact that it is risky to hold a mobile phone in the street or park a bicycle. Khan’s police aren’t interested in minor crimes such as phone and bicycle theft. And they’re not much interested in major crimes either, such as stabbings.
Yet somehow, it doesn’t matter. Khan was re-elected mayor last year, and this week he went off to Buckingham Palace to become Sir Sadiq.
It’s a similar story with Gavin Newsom in California. He has been governor of America’s most beautiful and prosperous state since 2019, and won re-election in 2022. Before that he was mayor of San Francisco, which should be one of the world’s most beautiful cities. But Newsom has a skill for wrecking everything he touches.
During his mayoralty, San Francisco became ever more dystopian. The rich would descend from unaffordable apartment complexes on to once-desirable streets where the ‘unhoused’ roamed around on crack and exposed themselves furiously. It became perfectly normal to walk down any road and think you must have been transported into a zombie movie, with the undead pushing around trolleys of their possessions. Under Harvey Milk in the 1970s, San Francisco famously cracked down on dog littering. By Newsom’s time as mayor the one thing you could say with confidence was that whenever you saw faeces on the streets, it didn’t come from a dog.
Yet from the time of his election as governor, Newsom tried to roll out his San Francisco model across the state. The policies that had done for San Francisco and then did for Los Angeles include (in no particular order) incentivising illegal migrants to come into the state, ensuring that homelessness is encouraged and home-ownership punished, legalising just about every mind-altering substance known to man and presenting law enforcement as the enemy of the people.
If you encourage lawlessness you can be seen to be doing it for all the right reasons
Of course Newsom did all these things under the same glorious cover that Khan wears – that great cloak of left-wing ‘compassion’. Law enforcement is easy to present as lacking in compassion. Making a city a ‘sanctuary’ allows politicians to present themselves as ‘kind’ and filled with ‘empathy’. Saying that illegality cannot be allowed is ‘mean’ and ‘unkind’. Promote mass illegal migration? ‘Healing.’ Try to stop it? ‘Divisive.’
Most of the problems in America, as in Britain and Europe, can be chased down to this asymmetry. If you encourage lawlessness you can be seen to be doing it for all the right reasons. If you encourage following the law you will be portrayed as doing it for all the wrong reasons. Allow people to break the law on a grand scale and there is no punishment. Try to mop up that mess and you will be the bad guy.
So it is with the stand-off between Newsom and Donald Trump. Conservative estimates suggest that between ten and 12 million people entered the US illegally in the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency – almost doubling the number of illegals in the country. Trump has already fulfilled his campaign promise of sealing the southern border, so that the number still breaking into the country via that route is effectively zero. But he is also intent on fulfilling his campaign promise of removing the people already in the country who shouldn’t be. He and his border tsar, Tom Homan, have made it clear that they are prioritising the removal of the more than half a million illegal migrants who are thought to have criminal records.
On a good day the Trump administration has managed to deport around 800 illegals. But you can do the math yourself on how long it would take to complete the task. At the current speed, assuming there are no more legal or physical challenges, Trump and Homan might be able to deport all the illegal migrants with a criminal record by 2027 or 2028. If they want to deport the millions who came in between 2020 and 2024 alone, President Trump would have to remain in office for years, if not decades. Which is not actually a proposal.
The unrest that broke out in Los Angeles this week was not even the result of Homan’s team simply detaining illegal migrants. They were seeking people who were engaged in criminal activity. But the unwiser parts of the American left decided to assume their normal position. They blamed law enforcement for causing the problem and pretended that the resulting violence was peaceful. All this as the public could see footage of masked left-wing activists spitting in the faces of policemen and throwing stones at them.
Now Trump has sent in the National Guard and Marines and told ‘insurrectionists’ that ‘if they spit, we will hit’. Newsom, Hillary Clinton and other Democrat bigwigs are pretending that it is Homan, Trump and law enforcement who are the bad guys, while the people burning cars on the streets and looting the local Apple store are merely reacting to the provocation.
Which brings me back to that central imbalance of our time – in the US as here. Why is the person who caused the mess allowed to be presented in the kindliest light, while the people trying to clean up after them must be portrayed in the crappiest?
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