Sadiq Khan Interview: ‘I Know I’m Clickbait, I Know I’m Being Monetised’
The London Mayor talks to Byline Times about how ten years of rising algorithmic online hate has transformed our politics and put his own safety at risk
IMPACT UPDATE: Byline Times investigations have forced the suspension of two Conservative local election candidates after revealing their far-right extremist posts
The weekend before Sadiq Khan was first elected as London Mayor in 2016, the Mail on Sunday ran a full page article about him, written by his Conservative opponent Zac Goldsmith, which was illustrated with a blown-up London bus. The headline, “On Thursday, are we really going to hand the world’s greatest city to a Labour party that thinks terrorists are its friends?” made its message crystal clear.
For Khan, who was bidding to become the UK’s first directly-elected mayor of Muslim faith, it crossed a dangerous line in our politics that he believes his opponents have never stepped back from.
“If you recall [Adam] we had a conversation in advance of that election in May 2016 about one of the reasons why we were nervous… was what impact this dog whistle, megaphone type of racist, anti-Muslim, Islamophobic campaign would have [on our politics]…” Khan tells Byline Times.
“At the time, that was the first outrageous campaign of its type which, rather than an exception, has now become normalised.”
In the end, Londoners rejected Goldsmith’s campaign, electing Khan not just once but three times. Yet for many on the far right, these victories merely became a symbol of how London had “fallen” to Islam
Chief among these was the US President Donald Trump. From early on in Trump’s first term, the US President repeatedly amplified and directed those attacks against Khan, using social media and interviews to accuse him of seeking to impose “Sharia law” on the UK capital. It is a message that has since been picked up enthusiastically by Trump’s followers on both sides of the Atlantic
Two years ago, the Trump-supporting Conservative Vice Chairman Lee Anderson repeated the sentiment, telling GB News that “Islamists” had “got control of Khan, and they’ve got control of London.”
At the time, Anderson was suspended from the Conservative Party by its then leader Rishi Sunak over his comments, before defecting to Reform UK.
Yet as Nigel Farage’s party rose in popularity, so too did the Conservative appetite for this particular form of Trumpian anti-Muslim politics.
Earlier this year, the Conservative Shadow Lord Chancellor, Nick Timothy, attacked Khan for holding Iftar celebrations in London’s Trafalgar Square, describing it as an “act of domination” by Muslims. Yet while Anderson had been suspended for his similar suggestion, Sunak’s successor Kemi Badenoch defended her colleague, insisting that he had merely been defending “British values”.
Watch Our Full Interview With Sadiq Khan
For Khan, who has repeatedly held similar events, not just for Muslims, but also for Jews, Christians and followers of other faiths, it felt like another line had been crossed.
“I say this in a respectful way, the British Muslims I speak to don’t seek to dominate,” Khan says.
“They seek to do good. We don’t seek to take over. We try to give back.
“And I’m worried about this mainstreaming of things that were on the periphery, not from the BNP or the English Defence League or from Stephen Yaxley Lennon, but from Her Majesty’s official opposition’s Shadow Lord Chancellor, backed up the next day by the Leader of the Opposition…”
“And it troubles me. It upsets me. It makes me angry”.
This mainstreaming of anti-Muslim politics has had a direct impact on his own safety.
Unlike Khan’s predecessor Boris Johnson, who felt safe enough to cycle freely around the city as Mayor, the constant racist threats against Khan and his family have forced them to surround themselves with a 24-hour security team.
“I’m not asking for sympathy,” Khan says.
“But it can’t be right, it can’t be fair that I require police protection. This can’t be right. I mean, I’m somebody who enjoys riding around, using the Tube, using buses, going for walks, going to the cinema, going to restaurants, seeing mates. It surely isn’t fair that I need police protection to do those things.”
Khan fears the treatment he has received as the UK’s most prominent Muslim politician will have a knock-on effect on those considering following in his footsteps.
“Now here’s the problem,” he says.
“The problem is, if you’re a young person, if you’re particularly a woman or an ethnic minority, a Muslim, thinking about politics, why would you put your head above the parapet? Why would your parents encourage you to do so, when they see my experience?
“It’s not great in terms of the experience I’ve had. And I say this in the context of having been friends with Joe Cox, I knew David Ames. The Mayor of Gdansk was assassinated, the former Prime Minister of Japan was assassinated. President Trump had a threat to his life. You know, that’s not normal in democracies and that shouldn’t be the price you pay to stand for office.”
Big Tech Target
One of the things that has changed since Khan become Mayor is the dominance of social media algorithms over our politics.
During his first campaign for London Mayor, the biggest media obstacle he faced was a series of critical newspaper sandwich boards plastered across the city by the now defunct Evening Standard newspaper.
Ten years on, and the city’s only dedicated daily newspaper has long since shut its doors. Yet it has been replaced by an increasingly deafening social media space in which London and its Muslim Mayor are routinely used and monetised by far-right accounts with huge global audiences.
The result is a massive proliferation of disinformation, says Khan.
“I think what we have now is an outrage economy.
“And this outrage economy is built on a division dividend. You can call it ‘decline porn’, and you have people and companies profiting from poison and division.
“So I recognise I’m clickbait. I recognise that I’m being monetised. But also London is being monetised in this outrage economy.”
Last year, Khan commissioned some research which uncovered the global nature of the problem.
“There are people in Vietnam and Sri Lanka making huge amounts of money from denigrating London, spreading disinformation. We know that there are Russian state-backed, Chinese state-backed, MAGA-backed groups amplifying this disinformation.
“We recently did some analysis. Thirty-nine per cent of negative stories around knife crime were pushed by the extreme far right. Twenty-five per cent of misogynistic stories dealing with violence against women and girls were pushed by the extreme right.
“And there’s two things happening which are both fascinating and scary and should be addressed.
“One is people monetising this outrage economy, the ‘division dividend’ that I talked about, across the globe. Secondly, people pushing this narrative for their own self interest, and you mentioned President Trump, let’s be quite clear, objectively speaking, if President Trump was here, he would say himself, ‘I’m a nativist, I’m a unilateralist, I’m a protectionist’. If you’re somebody who believes in mono-ethnicism, who believes in the superiority of Christianity, he’s somebody who’s nationalistic and he’s obviously got a problem with London. Why? Because we are diverse, we are liberal, we are progressive…”
“So if you’re President Trump or one of his supporters and acolytes and the coterie, you’re thinking, ‘oh my God, London is the antithesis of all I believe in’, and that’s why we’ve got a target on our back.”
Khan believes the Big Tech platforms hosting this disinformation need to be held to account.
“I think Big Tech is in danger of making the same mistakes as Big Tobacco,” he says.
“So Big Tobacco knew six decades ago that nicotine is addictive. Tobacco is a killer, makes you sick, causes all sorts of problems. Yet they hid that and advertised tobacco, got people addicted on this stuff.
“There was huge litigation which made sure they were culpable and liable. Well, actually, Big Tech is similar. It’s addictive. We know this from infinite scrolling. There’s been two cases recently in Los Angeles and New Mexico. We know they are monetising this division dividend. And we also know that some of the consequences of their amplification is the extremes. You know, people have been cited, groomed, radicalised, to do bad things. And I’ve written to the [managing directors] of all these big companies putting them on notice.”
Air Wars
It’s not just Khan’s political opponents who he has clashed with over the past decade, but his own party colleagues as well. In 2023 the Labour Party narrowly lost the Uxbridge by-election in outer London to the Conservatives, following a campaign in which Sadiq Khan was heavily criticised over his plan to extend the city’s ‘Ultra Low Emission’ vehicle charging zone to the outer suburbs. Faced with a surprise defeat in what should have been a winnable seat for the party, Labour’s leader Keir Starmer lashed out at Khan, publicly telling him to “reflect” on the scheme and cancel it.
The Mayor refused, pushing ahead with the policy in the face of opposition from his own party leader. The Conservatives in particular would go on to use it against him in the following year’s London mayoral election, with its then candidate Susan Hall committing to scrap the policy. The cameras used to implement the scheme were also attacked by extremists, one of whom would later be convicted for terrorist offences. Yet despite the controversy, Londoners endorsed Khan for a record third term.
For the Mayor, cleaning up London’s air had been a personal mission.
“I’m somebody who was healthy and fit but I ran the marathon and was diagnosed with what’s called adult onset asthma,” he tells Byline Times.
“I didn’t know it existed. And adult onset asthma is basically caused by air pollution. You can’t see a particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, nitrogen oxide, but it makes you sick. Children have lungs that are stunted forever. Adults can get asthma, heart disease, cancer, dementia, premature death. So I now know this. I can’t pretend I don’t know it. But the great news is, just like we caused air pollution, we can reverse it…”
“King’s College, when you were covering that election campaign told me, in 2016 it will take 200 years to bring the air in London within lawful limits. But the evidence was, there was this policy called the ultra emission zone, which could accelerate that, and we’ve done it, not in 200 years, we’ve cleaned the air up in nine years. So it’s a big, bold policy, but you’re right, the Conservative Party was against it, Reform were against it. UKIP were against it. The Lib Dems were against it. The national Labour Party were against it as well. But I’m quite clear what the evidence is, what my values are, and so I was determined to go ahead.”
Yet for some of Khan’s critics, the main problem with his mayoralty is not that he has been too bold, but that he hasn’t been bold enough.
While he went ahead with the Ultra Low Emission Zone in outer London, as well as plans to pedestrianise central London’s polluted Oxford Street, he stepped back from a far more radical plan to impose user road charging across the capital – something many experts believe is inevitable in the face of widespread electric car usage. He also pushed ahead with the controversial Silvertown road crossing in East London, despite campaigners warning that it would damage the very air quality he had committed to improve.
His critics also accuse him of doing little to tackle the issue of soaring living costs in the capital. In the ten years he has been Mayor, house prices have risen to unsustainable levels, with many primary schools now facing closure across the capital due in part to young families being forced to move out of the city to find affordable housing. With house-building rates also down heavily over the past ten years I put it to him that this is an issue he has failed to properly address.
“It’s really important to address the issue of cost of living, which is which has got worse in the last 10 years” he admits, before listing all the measures he has enacted since becoming mayor.
Khan points to his policy of offering all primary school children free school dinners, as well his freezes on the cost of travel fares and the Starmer Government’s plans for renters. Yet, for many Londoners still struggling to pay their rent, let alone buy their own home, this will feel like only mild compensation against the soaring costs they still face.
Khan’s Future
We are speaking to Khan in the run-up to what would prove to be a disastrous set of local elections for the Labour party in London. Across the city, Labour lost seats to both the Greens, Reform and even the Conservatives. In particular, the advance of Zack Polanski’s party did real damage to Khan’s party, taking control of key mayoralties and councils in Hackney, Lewisham and Lambeth.
In some ways our interview, held in advance of these elections, feels like a way to shift the blame for the coming defeats. Looking ahead to the results Khan told Byline Times that he was “angry” about Keir Starmer’s handling of the Peter Mandelson scandal, and believed it would damage his party.
“I’m sad, angry and worried about the May 7th elections,” he said.
“I’ve seen examples of great Labour councils doing great stuff – our ability to deliver free school meals, to build record numbers of council homes and reopen youth clubs with great Labour councils and some of those councils may not be Labour after May 7th, through no fault of their own”.
He added that “mistakes” by Starmer’s Government were overshadowing the good work of Labour-run councils in the capital and beyond.
“They have made mistakes, and so those mistakes mean, rather than over the last two weeks, they’ve been able to talk about the great delivery of Labour councils, they’ve instead been talking about Mandelson and that’s not good when you’re knocking on doorsteps.”
One of the areas where he believes Starmer has fallen short is in his approach to the Greens. The Prime Minister has been accused by some in his party of taking a dismissive attitude towards Zack Polanski’s party, urging voters not to embrace the “extremism” he believes they represent.
Khan told Byline Times that he believed this kind of language was counter-productive
“Don’t call green voters extremists. They’re not,” Khan said.
“They’re people who are progressives. They may not agree with us on all these issues, but we should try and court them and win them over.”
Citing his own work co-operating inside City Hall with Green Party members of the London Assembly, he said: “I think you’ve got to be very careful with language. After the next general election, I hope it doesn’t happen, but there could be a hung parliament. You think somebody who is in a minority party is going to want to form a government with you if have been you’ve been offensive towards them?”
One area where the London Mayor believes the Government could go further to reach out to progressive voters is on Brexit.
“The Labour Government and I don’t agree on the European Union. I think we should rejoin. I think it should be in the manifesto the next general election”.
Opinions remain bitterly divided in London about Khan’s legacy. For some he is a brave defender of London’s liberal values who has taken bold choices to improve the lives of Londoners. For others he is a disappointment who has failed to live up to his early promise.
Yet as we approach the second half of Khan’s third term, speculation is already mounting that he will finally step down, paving the way for a return to national politics. It’s a decision even those around him believe he hasn’t yet made.
When I put to him reports that he has been offered a peerage by Starmer, in order to stem his criticism of the Prime Minister, he artfully dodges the question.
“Well if it’s not in Byline then I know it’s not true. I only believe trusted sources so when I see it in Byline then I will know it’s true.”
Adam Bienkov is the Political Editor of Byline Times and Online Editor of BylineTimes.com. Do you have a tip or story? Get in touch with him at adam@bylinetimes.com
Good for Sadiq Khan in persisting with the outer London suburbs ULEZ zone despite disgraceful opposition by Starmer.
London has had problems with poor air quality since 13th century, due to its geography and climate: as a river basin where air inversions form, trapping cold air--full of pollutants--under warm air.
I remember the Great Smog of December 1952 when, for four days, the exceptionally bad "pea-souper" fog was so thick, yellow and polluted that inhaling it killed an extra 12,000 Londoners during the rest of that winter.
Going to school (aged 10) despite the smog, I sat at the front of a no.75 bus crossing the heath to Blackheath village in South London. Barely visible through the front window was a figure directly outside, walking in the road by the kerb, to guide the bus driver.
The 1952 Great Smog led to the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1958, with a range of measures to reduce coal burning and improve the quality of coal burnt--both in domestic fires and six coal-burning London power stations.
So Khan's managing to clean up London air with ULEZ zones to bring it within lawful limits--all within nine years instead of the 200 years predicted by King's College--is a really great achievement: preventing a lot of lung disease and saving numerous lives.
It's a pity Khan is not an MP, and eligible to contest Labour party leadership. As Mayor of London Khan has been responsible for the welfare of far more people and for longer than Andy Burnham.