Sadiq Khan is wrong about austerity and knife crime

There is something really ugly in Sadiq Khan’s description of stabbings in London as the ‘human cost of austerity’. What’s he saying? That being poor makes you a violent maniac? That being hard-up increases your likelihood of wanting to take a knife from the kitchen drawer and use it to slice some kid’s face? Does he really believe that individuals see things closing down — youth centres, libraries, mental-health programmes — and think to themselves: ‘This is bad. I’d better go out and stab someone in the neck’?

Khan’s new focus on poverty and knife crime is intended to sound sympathetic and progressive. But in fact it is incredibly dehumanising. It reduces poor people to the level of attack dogs who respond in a demented, murderous way to the stimuli of their everyday lives. No more after-school activities? Fewer mental-health resources? Less state spending on youth outreach? ‘Get the knives out, boys, we have to kill people now.’

Khan claimed this week that new research from City Hall, collated from police and ambulance figures, shows a ‘direct link’ between poverty and the knife-crime epidemic.