FOR the effects of Zohran Mamdani office as Mayor of New York City, look to Sir Sadiq Khan’s term as Mayor of London. Khan is a similarly woke, socialist, Muslim, South Asian, male hypocrite, with no prior executive experience. With Khan’s advice, Mamdani can surely ruin New York faster than Khan ruined London (less than nine years).
Shortly before the election, Khan said: ‘There’s a reason why there are some people who hate London and hate New York. There’s a reason why they demonise London and now indeed New York. Why? Because we are progressive cities, we are liberal cities, we are multicultural cities, and we’re incredibly successful. We are the antithesis of nativist, populist commentators and politicians. The fact that in New York you may elect somebody who’s a Muslim is neither here nor there.’
Mamdani exploits the same identity politics. He celebrates himself as Muslim, South Asian, Indian, African (he was born in Uganda), and immigrant (he naturalised in 2018). On college applications, he claimed to be both Asian and African American.
Khan said that Mamdani is ‘doing something that I know a lot about, which is reaching parts of your city that are underserved, reaching people that hitherto feel as if politics isn’t for you’.
Last Tuesday, Mamdani claimed victory for ‘those so often forgotten by the politics of our city who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemen bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers, and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks, and Ethiopian aunties.’
No white people there.
Mamdani said: ‘We have spoken in a clear voice. Hope is alive.’
After the election, Khan said that ‘hope won’ in NYC.
Khan shows New Yorkers what to expect: privileges for the woke’s own under-privileged, while the wealthy flee; ever greener but more expensive, less safe, and less reliable transport; celebrating diversity in the police while ignoring exploding violent crime; complaining about violence against women (in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025) while failing to acknowledge Muslim rape gangs (the Metropolitan Police are now reviewing 9,000 previously dismissed cases).
Knife crime in London surged by 58.5 per cent in the three years to 2024. In London, at least 40 per cent of sexual assaults are perpetrated by foreign nationals (who make up a quarter of the population). Most women feel unsafe in London.
London’s police protect anti-Semitic marchers, but arrest counter-protesters for being ‘openly Jewish’.
Mamdani’s many grievances against New York’s police include the false charge that they are trained by Israel. In 2023, he told his constituents in Queens that the NYPD’s boots ‘on your neck’ are ‘laced by Israel’.
This year he repeatedly refused to repudiate the chant ‘globalise the intifada’.
Later in the election campaign, he accused his opponents of ‘Islamophobia’. Standing outside an Islamic Centre in the Bronx, he tearfully complained that his aunt felt unsafe travelling in a hijab after 9/11 (which makes one wonder whether he realises how unsafe non-Muslims felt at the time). His responses to pushback suggest not. In any case, critics accuse him of dishonesty, after discovering the woman was his second cousin, was photographed travelling without a hijab, and can’t confirm his story because she’s dead.
Mamdani does not show similar empathy for the largest metropolitan Jewish population in the world. In victory, Mamdani promised to ‘build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of anti-Semitism, where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong, not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power’.
So Jews get solidarity, but Muslims get power.
Mamdani will privilege the workless most, taxpayers least. He promises free bus rides, controls on food prices, frozen rent (for the two million whose rent increases are limited), free public housing, free child care, more teachers and fewer police, in favour of ‘a department of community safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crisis’.
In victory, Mamdani promised ‘a bold vision of what we will achieve rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt. Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis . . . a new age of relentless improvement’.
He thanked voters for ‘a mandate for change’ and ‘a new kind of politics’.
Mamdani claims to be making NYC ‘affordable’ and to be empowering ‘the working people’. But the greatest beneficiaries will be the workless and work-shy.
Similarly, London is increasingly a city for immigrants, welfare dependents and criminals. The Government relieves London by bussing illegal immigrants into remoter counties, where they enjoy more privileges than citizens, are accommodated in hotels, given spending money, free health care, food and entertainment, are allowed to roam freely and to work even though they’re not supposed to.
Meanwhile, working Britons are taxed to pay for privileges to which they are not entitled. This encourages net emigration of Britain’s wealthiest and most educated citizens. For example, a quarter of a million Britons live in Dubai. Since the Labour Government’s abolition of favourable tax treatment for non-domiciled residents, effective on April 1, about 3,790 company directors departed from Britain compared with 2,712 in the same period a year earlier. In October, London slipped out of the world’s top 20 IPO (initial public offering) markets to 23rd.
NYC is home to at least 123 billionaires and 12,000 millionaires, who can emigrate to neighbouring states much easier than a British millionaire can emigrate to another country.
In the primary victory, Mamdani claimed that democracy had been ‘attacked’ by ‘billionaires and their big spending, by elected officials who care more about self-enrichment than the public trust, and by authoritarian leaders who rule through fear’.
In election victory, he promised to ‘put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks’.
Meanwhile, he privileged the woke’s ‘under-privileged’, saying: ‘Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall, your struggle is ours too.’
This is unsustainable. In the long-term, the wealthy flee, the workless immigrate, tax revenues decline (as both average incomes and property values fall or grow slower than public spending), and government spends ever more than it takes in. We’ve seen this model in California and Britain, particularly London.
Londoners earn less than 60 per cent than New Yorkers on average, although a two-bedroom apartment costs 60 per cent more to rent in London, and the average property costs 60 per cent more to buy.
In 2016, when Khan took the mayorship, London’s budget surplus was £32.5billion. This year, London’s boroughs were short by £1billion. Their shortfall is expected to approach £5billion within four years.
New York City has run a budget surplus during Khan’s control of London. It is the most valuable metropolitan area in the world, accounting for 4 per cent of American GDP (the greater metropolitan area accounts for 8 per cent). But in August, New York City projected a budget deficit of $7.77billion (£6billion), growing to over $12billion (£9billion) in following years. The City blames increasing immigration and declining federal funding. That was before Trump vowed to cut federal funds if Mamdani won. And that is before Mamdani, from New Year’s Day, gets to raise spending and tax the wealthy.
For New York under Mamdani, look at London under Khan. And expect Mamdani to ruin NYC more swiftly than the nine years that Khan took to ruin London.
