Join Britain’s fastest-growing independent political community which provides more than 90,000 readers with counter-cultural evidence, analysis, and debate that challenges the establishment. Our work is funded by our readers. Become a paid subscriber to unlock every article, join our live discussions Mondays at 7pm, our group chat, leave comments, and know you’re helping the silent majority.
When I took out my phone and fired off a tweet about my experiences in London, I didn’t expect it go viral and be read by 10 million people around the world.
But that’s exactly what happened this weekend when I shared a few observations on the way home after a day out in our capital city.
What did I say?
“All these things happened to me in London today.
I paid nearly £30 for a train ticket to take me into London from a town just 30 miles away —on a Saturday.
The first person I sat next to, I think from India, decided to have a FaceTime conversation with his friend on speakerphone so we all had to listen to it.
The train was late by 40 minutes due to unexplained “signalling issues”. It was also filthy.
I paid nearly £8 for a pint.
I offered a woman my seat on the tube without realising she was with a man who intervened and said, “no man”. He was not from the UK. I think he took my gesture as an insult.
I was asked for money by homeless people three times in one day.
I noticed several people who are paid to give information to taxpayers and tourists over the tannoy on London’s Tube cannot speak English properly.
A cabbie told me “London is dead most nights”, unless you are among the global high net worth set and the top 1%.
Restaurants are visibly struggling and often hideously overpriced.
I had dinner in a neighbourhood where the average rent is £3,663 per month while half of all local social housing has gone to people who were not even born in the UK.
I was constantly aware I should not get my phone out on the street as 80,000 were stolen last year.
I also discovered while checking that statistic that there were 90,000 shoplifting offences in London last year, up 54%.
My train back —delayed—was suddenly changed at the last minute with all passengers on board. They were told it would no longer be stopping at all stops.
I bought a tin of instant coffee on the way home and it had a security tag on it.
Maybe I’m in a bad mood and perhaps it’s amusing to think how somebody of my political outlook is “triggered” but to me there is a deeper point here.
London is over —it’s so over.
It’s a city that is now in visible decline, with deteriorating standards and no real sense of identity or belonging.
Going in and out of our once great capital city is a truly miserable experience.
Infrastructure is falling apart, as is the social contract.
I’ve been coming in and out of London since 1981.
I simply cannot remember a time when it’s been this visibly dire and when so many things just do not work as they should”.
While the tweet inevitably irritated London liberals who are unable to accept any criticism of their beloved urban paradise, it struck a chord with a larger audience.
At the time of writing, the tweet’s been shared 19 thousand times and has been liked, endorsed, by 100 thousand people, many of whom can clearly relate to what I said.
Funnily enough, one scene I had in my mind when I was writing the tweet was from the once-upon-a-time but no longer entertaining show, Sex and the City.
Filmed in 2004, the main character, Carrie Bradshaw, bumps into an old friend and prominent NYC socialite, Lexi Featherston, at a party for New York’s ultra elite.
Looking out at a crowd of upper-class, status-obsessed, high-achieving liberals who the American writer David Brooks once dubbed the ‘BoBos’ —Bourgeois Bohemians— Lexi Featherston, stunned the elite gathering by interrupting their bland party and delivering a damning indictment of their cosmopolitan paradise.
“This city”, she proclaimed to the elite class, the members of which were all as boring and predictable as one another, “used to be the most exciting city in the world. [But] New York is over. O.V.E.R. Over”.
While her complaint about New York had more to do with how a stuffy, health-conscious, fitness-obsessed and utterly boring elite was sucking all the fun and spontaneity out of a city that once had this in droves —a trend that can now be seen in most Western cities today—my complaint about London is shaped by other factors.
Particularly over the last decade, I’ve watched a toxic cocktail of rapid demographic change, mass immigration, and economic stagnation push our once great city into managed decline and make it completely unrecognisable.
And I’m not the only one.
Last week, writer David Goodhart referenced many of the same things that have been on my mind in a compelling and insightful essay for London’s Evening Standard.
A quarter-century ago, writes Goodhart, London was a booming metropolitan centre that for much of the political, media, and creative class was seen as a beacon of openness and opportunity for the rest of the country. He goes on:
“How times change. When it was recently estimated, in a report by Professor Matt Goodwin, that the white British population will become a minority in the UK in 2060, I heard nobody saying, “rapid demographic change is nothing to worry about, just look at London”.
He has a point, and not only because he cites my recent work.
Consider some of the truly eye-opening and sobering statistics in Goodhart’s piece.