London is in trouble and there’s no point denying it

A new high-status opinion just dropped: London is fine. From their converted Edwardian houses in the leafy suburbs where you won’t get a burger for less than 15 quid, London’s preening opinion-shapers have taken to X to say all is well in the capital. Ignore the ‘Trumpist’ talking points about London going down the swanny, they cry between glugs of pinot noir – life’s never been better! One envisions the grimaces of people on the other side of town when they see such hot takes pop up on their mobile phones that they cling to for dear life lest some wanker on a stolen Lime bike should snatch them.

The internet is fizzing with this big question: ‘Is London a shithole?’ What’s funny is that proper Londoners have this discussion all the time. Sometimes we say it is, if we’ve had a rotten day, and other times we’ll be squaring up to any funny-accented outsider who talks shit about our city. But now the London question, like everything else, has fallen into the doom-loop churn of the culture war. It’s become fodder for digital posturing. ‘It’s a crime-ridden hellhole’, says the Very Online right. ‘It’s fine’, say rich liberals in airy flats. Not for the first time, both are wrong.

The most wrong – or certainly the most annoying – are the ‘London is fine’ lot. There’s a Marie Antoinette vibe to their digital missives. ‘Let them eat sourdough bread!’, they might as well cry. It’s typified by Lewis Goodall of The News Agents, the podcast for rich, glum liberals still not over Brexit. London, he said, is being falsely talked down as a dreadful place where ‘crime is completely out of control… fare evasion is completely rampant… [and] the Tube is looking like Gotham City’. It’s all ‘exaggerated’, he says.

I’m going to put my neck on the line and propose that Mr Goodall’s London life is rather more plush and cossested than most others’. A couple of years back he told the Evening Standard he lives in Norbury, a very middle-class and – sorry, Lewis – soulless suburb in the south-east where crime is low and deprivation virtually non-existent. Apparently he feasts on ‘Gallic fare at Pique-Nique’ – no, me neither – and loves tucking into ‘pelmeni’ in Soho with his equally starry media pals. Thankfully, for thickos like me, the Standard explained what pelmeni is: Russian dumplings.

He does boxercise in East Dulwich. He loves gardening because ‘it’s the opposite of modern life’. He wants to ban cars. Right, so he’s that London. The other London. The London I didn’t even know existed until I hit my 20s. The London where you’re unlikely to encounter a crackhead on a night bus – mainly because you can afford Ubers – or a mumbling masked prick saying, ‘Gimme your phone’. Goodall’s co-host, Jon Sopel, agreed with him that London-bashing is a ‘Trump import’. That’ll be the Jon Sopel who lives in Belsize Park, gets to work via a ‘beautiful walk across Primrose Hill’, buys his suits from Richard James on Savile Row and tells anyone who’ll listen that ‘Duke’s has the best Martini’s in London’. I wonder where he skis?

Boil it down and this is just classist indifference. ‘My London is fab, so what are the rest of you moaning about?’ I bet all the overnight converts to the high-status pro-London position likewise live in parts of the city unsullied by kerb-mounting e-bikes and tinny music on public transport. They think they’re cocking a snook at the right but in truth they’re advertising their blissful disregard for their fellow Londoners who they must know live in different conditions. Brushing the crumbs of their Gallic dinners from their Savile Row suits, they say: ‘Wait, not all of London is like this? Oh well. Too bad.’

If these people ever stepped out of the media bubble that they mistake for a city, they might see that while London is not a hellhole it is a little broken. Try Harlesden. Or Tower Hamlets. I’ll take you to my birthplace of Burnt Oak if you like, which has seen better days. They don’t have pelmeni but they have some mean fried chicken. Everyone you talk to will have a lament about London. They’ll bemoan the crime, the unfriendliness, the dangerous dogs, the marijuana smell, the yapping teens, the rudeness, the inability even of their ailing nan to get a seat on the bus. They haven’t been brainwashed by Trumpist propaganda – they really do sense a fraying of the bonds that city life relies upon.

Some centrists wave around graphs showing crime has declined in London. They catastrophically miss the point. Sure, some crimes have fallen, but others have surged. Like shoplifting. There was a 54 per cent hike in that most grating petty crime between 2023 and 2024. But the point is not that London is the new Bogotá. It’s that it feels tetchy, acrimonious even, like a city of lonely, clashing souls rather than a collective of citizens. After a day of seeing people dodge the fare you just paid for, and being subjected to the noisy piffle of everyone’s FaceTimed conversations, and almost having your head taken off by some arsehole on an e-bike delivering dirty burgers to the feckless middle classes, you start to feel less like the citizen of a great city than the NPC in a videogame of someone else’s life.

The left underestimates at its peril how concerning such social fraying is for the working classes in particular. ‘Everyday insecurity hurts the poor much more than the rich who live calmly in their gated communities’, says Slavoj Zizek. There’s no denying it, he said: there are ‘clear signs of the growing decay of manners [and] of youthful gangs terrorising public spaces’. And it isn’t ‘reactionatory’ to talk about it. On the contrary, the slow-motion corrosion of the social oaths that make city life possible and good is a major ‘domain of dissatisfaction’ for working people, he says, and politicians should address it.

Too right. I say we reject both the denialism of the ‘London is fine’ elites in their morally gated communities and the doomerism of digital rightists who might realise London ain’t so bad if they ever bothered to visit. London’s still the greatest city on Earth. It’s just going through a rough patch as a consequence of the hyper-individuating lunacy of identity politics and the moral relativism of elites that too often turn a blind eye to bad behaviour. This mad, mettlesome, symphonic city can be fixed, but we really have to want it.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy