A letter to Donald Trump, from London

You’ve decided, yet again, to attack London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan. We’ve got a lot of city mayors here in Britain, but for some reason you keep singling him out. This time, you’ve said he’s a “horrible, vicious, disgusting mayor”, who gets elected “because so many people have come in”. You took it a bit further still by saying London’s “a different place now”.

This seems to be scaring your supporters, badly. They think London is too dangerous to visit, or that we’re under Sharia law here now. They think we’re afraid to leave our homes, or that we can’t speak out on anything. Some Londoners might quietly be glad that some Americans aren’t visiting any more, but I know how much you hate “fake news”, so shall we have a look into some of that?

Everyone argues about whether or not crime stats are accurate, so let’s not get into all of the numbers. Let’s just look at homicides, because it’s pretty easy to know when someone’s dead, and it’s quite hard to cover it up or reclassify it. If we try to include assaults, violent crime, and all of that, we just get into statistical quibbles.

London had around 104 homicides last year. That’s 104 more than anyone would like, but let’s put that number into context – New Orleans, for example, had 124 homicides last year. That might make London look just a little bit safer than New Orleans, but here’s the thing – more than nine million people live in London, but only 360,000 live in New Orleans. That means you’re about thirty times more likely to be killed living in New Orleans than you are here.

I didn’t just cherry pick there. The murder rate in New York is about four times higher than London’s, while Chicago’s is almost twenty times higher. Your own city of Washington DC has a murder rate nearly 25 times higher than ours. It’s not just Democratic-run cities, either: in fact, no American city with more than a million people in it has a lower murder rate than London. We are way, way safer here than almost anywhere in the US.

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In fact, we do better all round. Despite everything you’ve heard – and sometimes said – about the dangers of “socialised medicine” and “NHS death panels”, on average we live longer in London than you do anywhere in the US. 

Our overall life expectancy here is 81.4 years – a figure that probably looks pretty low to a 79-year-old President, I’ll admit – but that’s better than any US state. Hawaii has the best life expectancy in the USA, and it’s 79.9. In Florida, the home of Mar-a-Lago, it’s 76.1 years, and that drops all the way below 71 years for anyone living in Mississippi. Hey, what do you think of “Move to London and live another decade” as a slogan. Think it could catch on?

None of that fixes the culture war stuff. Some of your supporters like to post photos saying “no alcohol zones”, usually with a mosque in the background. You’ve got us here, we do have laws banning carrying open containers of alcohol on lots of our streets. But… so do you. They’re called open-container laws, and most of your cities and states in the US have them. Most of them are stricter than ours, to be honest. You still have dry counties, for pity’s sake. And have you ever tried to get a drink in Utah on a public holiday? Good lord.

Your guys do have a point that we arrest too many people over speech issues. It’s hit more than 1,000 a month, and that’s too many. But it’s worth doing the follow-up: most of these people aren’t even fined, let alone jailed. 

Part of the reason why it’s got so high is that your on-again, off-again best buddy Elon Musk doesn’t enforce moderation rules any more on X, so when someone makes an obviously racist post targeted at someone, they can’t just get it deleted – leaving the police as the only fallback. 

Could you get on to him about that, please? It’s kind of a pain in the ass for us, so if you got him to fix it, that would be great. Our police definitely have better things they should be doing.

Finally, I feel like we should tackle the Sharia Law thing. Except I don’t really know what to say here. We live in a city where pubs happily sit alongside mosques, with basically no trouble in either direction. Sadiq Khan is a Muslim mayor who has led London’s Pride marches on many occasions, and who fundraises at LGBT parties. 

He’s on good terms with our Christian leaders. If there’s a secret plan at play here, he’s leaving it really late: this is his third term as mayor. You might not like the UK’s immigration policy, but Sadiq Khan is a mayor. He’s no more in charge of our borders than Zohran Mamdani is in charge of yours.

Anyway, what’s the big deal? Your White House seems extremely relaxed about its buddies introducing Sharia Law. You’ve palled up with dictators in the Middle East who enforce Sharia Law all the time, banning women from public life, executing gays, suppressing free speech, all of it. 

You’ve just changed your whole strategic doctrine to say that the US is a-okay with dictatorships. Why can an Emirati dictator do what they like, but the people of London don’t even get to choose our own mayor? Is it because the dictators do better business deals than we offer? That seems a bit unfair – we can’t all be billionaires. Cut us a little slack.

If I was in a nasty mood, I’d say that your constant attacks on London look more like the uninformed, racist rants of a low-information cable news viewer, who’s never seen the world and never had his stereotypes challenged. But you’re the president of the United States, you’ve got a direct line to every leader in the world, and the best intelligence agencies to give you the best possible information. 

So… there must be a better explanation, right? On behalf of millions of us living here in London, I’ve gotta ask: what gives, mister President?

Yours,

James