No, Sadiq, London’s decline isn’t ‘disinformation’

If the electorate isn’t happy with the way the country is going, you might assume this is down to social problems and poor governance. Not so for Labour politicians. According to them, the gullible British public must have been manipulated or misled by things they have seen or read in the right-wing media – especially online.

A case in point is the pint-sized culture warrior in City Hall, London mayor Sadiq Khan, whose city is not particularly happy these days. Concerns about crime and demographic change are long-standing in the capital. Recently, we’ve seen mobs of anti-social teenagers using the Easter holidays to loot supermarkets and menace shoppers in Clapham. Last week, a 21-year-old man was stabbed to death in Primrose Hill, the latest victim of gang violence that remains endemic. The borough of Tower Hamlets has essentially become Lutfur Rahman’s personal sectarian fiefdom, with UKIP marches banned, women prevented from partaking in fun-runs organised by mosques, and now a ministerial corruption probe over cash being ‘funnelled’ to Bangladeshi groups.

In the face of these alarming social problems, Khan instead warns that London is facing a ‘dark blizzard of disinformation’. Speaking at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit last week, he presented the findings of a City Hall report into the supposed scourge of disinformation today. The often-negative way London is talked about online poses ‘risks’ to ‘marginalised groups, democratic functioning, the economy’ and even ‘national security’, it claims, with London particularly ‘exposed’ to such narratives due to its ‘global visibility, diversity and political prominence’.

Funnily enough, all the disinformation ‘narratives’ it warns of are precisely the kinds of political arguments most damaging to a right-on Labour mayor who bluntly insists that Britain’s ‘diversity’ is its biggest strength. These include claims that London is ‘unsafe or in decline’, or that women and girls are at risk from sexual assaults by immigrants – ‘narratives’, which it admits, ‘often draw on real offences’. Apparently, it’s also ‘misleading’ to point out how vastly London has changed, as in claims of ‘“Islamisation”, demographic replacement or preferential treatment for particular groups’. Any suggestion that there might be two-tier policing of protests is also presented as malign and spurious.

Historically, the censorship Blob has tried to mask its authoritarian instincts by pretending that it is only worried about falsehoods, not political dissent as such. It has typically talked of ‘disinformation’ as being deliberate false propaganda, usually disseminated by a foreign power. Meanwhile, ‘misinformation’ usually refers to untruths shared by hapless dupes. Of course, it was always obvious that both were mere euphemisms for opinions people like Sir Sadiq didn’t want to hear. And now, they’re not even bothering to pretend.

Indeed, Khan’s City Hall report warns of ‘malinformation’ – information that, despite being ‘based on fact’, is used ‘out of context to support misleading conclusions’. So even information that the mayor admits is true is considered a threat if it leads people to the wrong conclusions. A footnote then gives the game away: ‘“Mis- / disinformation” is used as a shorthand for misleading or harmful information.’ So Khan and his cronies want political narratives censored – even if they are based on fact.

Worse, Khan suggests that it is online discourse that’s causing London’s problems, not his own soft-on-crime policies as mayor. Negative social-media commentary has put London in a ‘toxic feedback loop’, he claims, meaning that ‘as extremists erode trust in our city and its institutions, it gets easier and easier for them to twist online anger into offline violence’. So if there are muggings, stabbings or grooming gangs in London, these are actually the fault of outrage about them online?

We’ve seen this kind of bizarre, topsy-turvy reasoning before. In the run up to the Gorton and Denton by-election, Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer blamed the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing on the rhetoric of the right, accusing her Reform UK rival, Matthew Goodwin, of ‘dividing people’. These are extraordinary, ghoulish claims. In this warped world, the original problem the public is rightly aggrieved about is somehow caused by the subsequent outrage it generates online.

What follows inevitably from this mindset is the belief that the best way to solve social problems is through restricting what can be said. Tellingly, other speakers at the invitation-only disinformation conference included Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the notorious pro-censorship campaign group, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. This three-day summit was in truth a chummy, secretive gathering of leading lights of the global censorship industrial complex.

‘I see disinformation as preparing the landscape for corruption’, declared its chair, Alan Jagolinzer, while calling for lots more money to be funnelled to anti-disinformation crusaders like him and his chums. This was a gathering of snooty globalists who disdain free expression and believe that the only reason for the rise of populism is that they haven’t censored dissent enough. No wonder Khan felt right at home.

Sadiq Khan has been a disaster for London. The capital is dirtier, less safe and more expensive than at any time in recent memory. This creeping decrepitude isn’t misinformation, disinformation or malinformation. There is a simpler word for it: the truth.

Laurie Wastell is an associate editor at the Daily Sceptic and host of the podcast, The Sceptic. Follow him on X: @l_wastell.