The insanely dishonest Tory attack ad

The insanely dishonest Tory attack ad on Sadiq Khan looks like a sign of what's to come

"Fact" blares the Tory tweet, followed by the outright lie that London is now supposedly "a crime capital of the world" and an absurd and profoundly deceptive video attacking London.

London is not a crime capital of the world, it’s actually rated as the 14th safest major city in the world according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Safe Cities Index, but the lies and deceptions don’t stop there …

It’s astonishing how many lies and deceptions the Tories fit into just 100 seconds of video. See how many you can spot for yourself, and compare with the list of lies and deceptions I’ve compiled below.

⚪ London’s police do not answer only to the Labour Party, they are accountable to the Home Secretary (currently a Tory) and the London Mayor. Who could forget the Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel ordering the Metropolitan Police to attack a Women’s peace vigil after a Met officer kidnapped, raped, and killed Sarah Everard?

⚪ London is not "a blueprint for how Labour intends to run the country". Like almost all of the elected Labour city mayors, Sadiq Khan is much more keen on left-wing policies like nationalising public transport, alleviating child poverty, and building social housing than Keir Starmer and the right-wing ghouls he’s surrounded himself with.

⚪ Ulez "enforcers" do not dress in black and do not cover their faces with masks. The pollution reduction system is highly automated via cameras, which keep getting vandalised by criminal gangs "dressed in black” and "faces covered with masks", who have been praised for their criminality by senior Tories like Iain Duncan Smith!

⚪ The expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone so-called "tax on driving" was actually dreamt up when Boris Johnson was London Mayor, and later implemented by Sadiq Khan. They’re cynically attacking their political opponents for implementing their own policy!

⚪ Ulez is not a blanket charge on all drivers. Almost all petrol cars manufactured after 2006 are compliant, and literally every car made after 2015 is exempt from the charges. Plus there are exemptions for certain historic cars too.

⚪ Ulez does not force people to "stay inside or go underground". Even if we assume the use of poetic licence of "underground" referring to the tube, it’s still inaccurate because the data reveals that far more people travel by other means (bus, overground rail, tram, cycle, walking) than on the London underground network.

⚪Crime is not rising in London, it’s actually been falling across most crime types, and the London crime rate remains significantly lower than various other places in the UK.

⚪ If the Conservatives really cared about the causes of crime, they’d condemn former London mayor Boris Johnson for closing down over a hundred London police stations, and laying off thousands of London cops, wouldn’t they?

⚪ Anyone who has been to London at any time since the pandemic will know how absurd it is to claim that "London’s citizens stay inside" and that "the streets are quiet".

⚪ London is not "quieter at night than it used to be", in fact the Night Tube and improvements to London night bus services mean that it’s more of a 24 hour city than it’s ever been, and by far the best served night time economy in the country.

⚪ The Labour mayor did not "seize power" he was democratically elected twice, winning huge landslide victories over his Tory rivals both times.

⚪ Knife crime has not increased 54% since Khan became mayor, in fact it was almost the same in the last full year’s statistics 2022-23 as it was in his first year in charge 2016-17, and if anyone is to blame for the spike in knife crime that did happen before the pandemic, perhaps it was Khan’s predecessor who laid off so many police and closed all those police stations?

⚪ Sadiq Khan does not propose decriminalising all "illegal drugs". Even the screenshot in the Tory scare video refers only to decriminalisation of cannabis.

⚪ If Sadiq Khan wants to decriminalise cannabis, that’s a good thing which would allow the police that survived Boris Johnson’s layoffs to concentrate on more serious crimes.

⚪ If the Tories actually gave a damn about reducing the drug death rate, then they’d actually be pushing for Khan to decriminalise more drugs than just cannabis. This is because it’s prohibition that drives up drug deaths by leaving the market in the hands of unscrupulous criminals, and stigmatising public health solutions like drug testing, drug prescription, consumption rooms, and rehabilitation.

⚪ And what does "the scales of justice remain tipped in favour of the darkness" even mean?

⚪ Additionally the Tories hastily deleted the first version of this scare video because it included a video clip of New York Metro passengers fleeing a gunman!

Who is the target audience?

This scare video is ostensibly part of the Tories’ London Mayoral campaign, but hardly anyone who actually lives in London is going to recognise this dark and deceptive portrayal of their own city.

The American narration makes it seem like one of those deluded "Fox News Facts" segments painting the UK as some kind of terrifying shit hole to their American audience, and it’s especially absurd hearing an American voice railing against proposed cannabis decriminalisation in the UK when so many US states have not just decriminalised weed, they’ve actually legalised the sale of it.

It’s a foreign voice telling us how shit our own capital city is, and it’s clearly aimed at people with very limited grips on reality. It’s actually quite unclear whether the Tories are trying to scare tabloid-addled Tory voters in the Home Counties by attacking London like this, or pandering to the American far-right.

A sign of things to come

During the 2019 general election the Tories spent literally £millions injecting propaganda lies into people’s social media feeds. 88% of their Facebook targeted ads were found to contain lies.

The Tories also set up a load of shadowy companies to bypass campaign spending limits, and to illegally plaster anti-Labour attack ads all over the streets of scores of marginal constituencies.

The Electoral Commission did absolutely noting about these social media lies, campaign spending bypasses, and illegal postering campaigns, so we should brace ourselves for more of the same, but even worse.

Why on earth would they give up on blatantly lying and cheating when they suffered absolutely no consequences for it the last time around?

We know the Tories are sitting on a £15 million election war chest donated by the political extremist who called for Diane Abbott to be killed, and fifteen million quid will pay for an awful lot of these sinister and highly deceptive attack ads to be pumped directly into people’s social media feeds.

All that’s left to wonder is whether the British public will be dumb enough to fall for the same sinister Tory propaganda tactics again, like they did in 2019.

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