“London Has Fallen.” Little did I imagine, when I sat on the sofa with my friend Tanya gorging on Quality Street and enjoying the latest instalment of Gerard Butler’s heroically average action-movie series, that the film’s title would come to sum up a major strand of global political propaganda.
In this line of thinking, London serves as an object warning of the sort of hellhole the white, English-speaking cities of the United States could turn into
London, to judge by a network of anonymous social media accounts and blowhard Maga podcasters, is now a dystopian hellhole where there are no-go areas for non-Islamists, the murder rate per capita is higher than Lagos, you need to be Snake Plissken to use the Tube between Mornington Crescent and Chalk Farm, and the police will arrest you for saying “God Save The King”.
Research published by City Hall presents evidence that this isn’t just a random meme: it’s a co-ordinated propaganda effort. With the help of analytical tools used by the National Cyber Security Centre, researchers have established that posts about London have risen by seven per cent in two years, and “London in decline” narratives have gone up by 150-200 per cent.
These are coming, the researchers discover, not from the concerned citizens of Clapham but from Sri Lankan-based troll-farms, Vietnamese Facebook networks, and Nigerian bot webs mimicking UK media. Here’s an AI-generated video purporting to be reportage and shared by a network of bots. Here’s a TikTok stunt relabelled as if it’s real. Here’s an eight-year-old snatch of footage from a warzone, now claimed to be showing a Somali jihadist decapitating a granny outside the Muswell Hill branch of Gail’s yesterday afternoon.
“Extreme right-wing networks,” it’s reported, “as well as pro-Kremlin, pro-Beijing and Maga-aligned groups are behind a substantial amount of ‘co-ordinated and inauthentic’ anti-London content. UK-based extreme right-wing groups were responsible for as much as 39 per cent of content about phone snatching and knife crime.
At the more ostensibly respectable end of things, there’s by now an established genre of Daily Telegraph column describing how the columnist spent an unaccustomed afternoon walking a few hundred metres through Soho quaking with fear. The columnist passes chip shops with funny-looking foreign names, hears people chatting in languages he didn’t recognise, and is eyeballed by “surly” or “menacing” young people (adjectives do a lot of work here), some of them, terrifyingly, wearing hooded tops. At last, gratefully, they sink into their seat on the homeward train swearing “never again” and take out their laptop to write their column.
I suspect the terror these columnists describe (the same columnists, usually, who used to deride as snowflakes people who claimed to feel unsafe anywhere other than London) comes directly from their consumption of this mad nonsense online, and of course feeds right back into it. This all gives much innocent pleasure to readers who live outside London and enjoy feeling horrified by this sort of thing; and causes those who live inside London to giggle immoderately and mutter “Okay, Jan” or “silly sausage”. But who do these hysterical fantasies tend to serve? It’s weird, isn’t it?
Why, I find myself wondering, do these online propagandists and their useful idiots in the press have such a bee in their collective bonnet about London? If you’re China, it grieves me to say, you probably have bigger fish to fry than the UK. We’re not even, these days, a specially good proxy for Europe. France and Sweden have much juicier tales of intercommunal violence and/or urban decay available.
The Russians, given, do seem particularly irked by Britain – maybe because of our early and relatively robust support for Ukraine, and our subsequent though relatively limp attempts to sanction the Russian oligarchs who used to park their dirty money in London and send their mistresses shopping in Bond Street. But my hunch is it’s a MAGA thing, primarily.
The Chinese just love to stir any pot going, and the Russians reflexively push any idea they think will help divide the Anglosphere. But these pots are stirrable because the white nationalist crowd in the States consume horror stories of London’s decay with such enthusiasm. It has a symbolic resonance. Britain is seen as a cradle of Western democracy. London, in this line of thinking, serves as an object warning of the sort of hellhole the white, English-speaking cities of the United States could turn into were they to adopt the dreaded European multicultural model.
It shoots the fox a bit if the answer is…not a hellhole. It’s not that London is a failing city that drives them out of their tiny minds. It’s that it’s a succeeding one. Here is a very large, prosperous, relatively peaceful town with a very mixed population in terms of race and creed, and where a brown Muslim guy has served as mayor for quite some time without succumbing to the temptation to ban Christianity or set up a network of madrasahs.
It has many attractive amenities. The food is good. It’s a bit cheaper to see Hamilton here than on Broadway. If you want to stomp up and down outside our parliament waving flags and making a nuisance of yourself, they give you wide latitude to do so before hosing you down with tear-gas and bundling you into a paddy-wagon. There’s an extremely low chance of innocent passers-by being shot by the police. There’s crime, some of it violent, and some parts of town get sketchy in the small hours, sure: but so it is for every other big city in the world. To look at that directly and honestly would be a rebuke to their entire worldview.
So if London is, as I and most sane people who live here would contend, more or less okey-dokey, it must be shown to be otherwise. And in the absence of genuine facts and figures, or genuine footage of skirmishes in an ongoing race-war, or genuine viral engagement with the claims, those troll farms are going to have to go to work with botnets and AI. And so they do. But, like, wouldn’t it be better just to get a hobby?
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