New York, London, Paris: the great cities of the West have fallen

Telegraph

28-06-2025

New York is generally considered one of the greatest cities on earth, if not the greatest, as the classic tagline goes.
Never mind that in my view, it is stifling in summer and slushy in winter, a concrete jungle from which it often feels there is no escape thanks to a terrifying, erratic subway, an incomprehensible bus system, and all of it laid out on an alienating grid system suited to human compasses, not people.
Then there are the rodents and the cockroaches, the poorly-made housing, and the sky-high prices.
New York is no stranger to Leftism: byzantine laws around planning and tax have long been in place to defend the poor and the dispossessed, at considerable cost to the less poor and dispossessed.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, New York's Leftism was bound up with Ellis Island and its unique magnetism to waves of immigrants from the old world, including a hefty influx of Russian Jewish emigres, some of whom brought communist and socialist sympathies and trade unionism along with a furious work ethic.
It was they, plus later waves of East Asian and Hispanic immigrants, who made New York the 'greatest city on earth'. They made Broadway, Wall Street, the restaurants, the garment district, the art galleries, music studios and talk shows and museums the end of the cultural rainbow the world over. The barmy progressivism and the barmy ambition and creativity co-existed, with the result greater than the sum of its parts.
The historically unique alchemy of New York is now a poisonous swirl of evil forces. Always at the vanguard of culture, New York's likely next mayor – the proudly socialist, Palestine-obsessed Zohran Mamdani, 33, with a massive fawning celebrity following – shows that the toxic wind that began to blow after the killing of George Floyd has become a tornado. Mamdani's rise speaks to much damage already done.
His election will be the end of New York, at least for years to come. Let us start with his moral compass. In a famously Jewish city (home to the largest community outside Israel) Mamdani has piloted his way to the top as a proud signatory to the extreme anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Following the October 7 2023 Hamas attacks, he condemned Israel. He has refused to say whether he supports the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state and has refused to condemn such phrases, associated with brazen jihad, as 'globalise the intifada'. He casually and confidently uses such false terms as 'genocide' and 'apartheid' to describe Israel's treatment of Palestinians, New York Democrats cheering him on. Al Jazeera boasts that 'Mamdani's New York victory boosts pro-Palestine politics'. The Guardian crooned: 'Mamdani stood firm in his support of Gaza. The Democratic Party could learn from him.'
All of this matters for city governance. It positions Mamdani as favourable towards the types of grisly, illegal campus protests that took place last year, which in places openly praised Hamas and Hezbollah, left Jewish students either advised to leave campus for their own safety or barricaded in their rooms, outside of which they faced swastika grafitti and shouts of 'Zionists out'. There will probably be many more, and even worse, if Mamdani becomes mayor.
What would those fleeing the pogroms of Russia think of it all?
Beyond campuses, the Palestine mob will proceed emboldened on the streets. What would those alighting at Ellis Island in rags, fleeing the pogroms of Russia, think of it all?
Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Under this banner, his ticket includes promises to nationalise food shops, force rent rise freezes on already rent-controlled apartments, welcome illegal migrants to a city already unable to handle current rates of arrival, make bus travel free for everyone, allow tenants to hold landlords to ransom over inspections and other works, and build 200,000 new 'affordable, union-built, rent-stabilised' units over the next 10 years. He is going to throw hundreds of millions at making schools green to further the classic loony credo of 'climate justice'.
It's all mad. Who is going to fund all this in a city that now, apparently, hates business, capitalism and rich people? Mamdani was born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He should do some reading on socialist 'utopias'.
Mamdami's approach to crime is perhaps the most indicative of the end-times New York seems likely to find itself in. Instead of bolstering the police, who since George Floyd have famously retreated, leaving an epidemic of low- and high-level crime unpunished, Mamdani will create a Department of Community Safety. He was formerly a supporter of the 'defund the police' campaign and is reported as having referred to the NYPD as a 'rogue agency'. This man should not be mayor.
Like so many socialists who hate Israel, Mamdani – who used to produce rap videos before being a housing officer in the city – comes from high-falutin' academic stock, and the apple does not fall far from the tree.
His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Palestine-mad Columbia University. The elder Mamdani is celebrated for his writing on post-colonial theory: his 'works explore the intersection between politics and culture, a comparative study of colonialism since 1452… the history and theory of human rights, and the politics of knowledge production', according to his bio.
It is not hard to see where his privilege-hating son got his ideas from. They are the inheritance of life amid the anti-colonial professoriate of the Ivy League.
Should he be elected, Mamdani will become only the most eye-catching among a breed of politically demented city hall heads swiftly ruining great cities.
Sadiq Khan is Mamdani's London spiritual brother
Sadiq Khan is Mamdani's London spiritual brother: another woke, Leftist mayor hoisting himself high on the phantom spectre of endemic Islamophobia and social justice. Like Mamdami's possible New York, London is weakened by two-tier policing, a sense of unprecedented fear for safety among Jews and women, rubbish-filled streets, endless Tube strikes and pointless environmental gestures. Meanwhile rough-sleeping, shoplifting, and muggings are only getting worse.
Then there is Paris. Ahh, Paris. Truly a once-great, beautiful and important city which, like London, always put New York as a physical place in the shade.
But since its mayor, Anne Hidalgo, took over in 2014, it's become broke, ugly, dangerous and inconvenient: another would-be socialist utopia. Hidalgo, so intent on gestures of eco-radicalism, seems animated by a loathing for the lives of actual, hard-working people. Like Khan and Mamdami, she prioritises the comfort and ease of illegal newcomers over long-term city-dwellers. No wonder she is vying to become the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees. It would be the perfect role for her.
At any rate, to the horror of settled Parisians, Hidalgo has destroyed signature parts of Paris's architectural heritage, digging up 19th-century fountains, lamp-posts and benches and replacing them with plastic mushroom seats. She has ruled over the worst rubbish crisis the city has seen in generations. She axed half of Paris's parking spaces because they take up too much public space.
The blight of eco-obsessed socialist mayors used to feel distinctly European. The fact that American cities are electing people like this is particularly jarring. Just a decade or two ago, the American dream meant the very opposite of what people like Mamdani stand for. Karen Bass, the woke mayor of LA, and Michelle Wu, who has been peddling social justice ideology in Boston, my hometown, are two further examples.
Let us hope that this moment of destructiveness passes before it becomes impossible to resurrect our great cities from the embers of social justice zealotry left by the worst generation of mayors ever.