Sadiq Khan: “Politicians need to be braver on immigration”

The Mayor of London on how Labour must change after the riots.

Photographed for The New Statesman by Tom Jamieson

Sadiq Khan has finally got what he wanted. For eight years, as Mayor of London, he was forced to contend with an often hostile Conservative government. On 4 July, two months after Khan won a record third term, this unhappy partnership ended: the Mayor, who has known Keir Starmer for more than 20 years – the pair worked together on legal cases – has a chance to collaborate with his Labour friend once more.

But when I met Khan, 53, at City Hall in east London, overlooking the Royal Victoria Dock, there was a darker hue to our conversation. For the Mayor, the recent riots revived painful memories of the past.

“I grew up in the Seventies and Eighties, so unfortunately that was with a knowledge of the National Front and the British National Party. I often got into fights with them [Khan learned to box as a boy for self-defence] and I went to protests and marched against them… What upsets me is there’s a new generation of Brits, my daughters’ generation, who have never experienced the overt racism we’ve seen recently. They’ve never experienced being targeted because of their faith and the colour of their skin. And that’s what upsets me and breaks my heart.”

Khan expressed his unhappiness at the nature of the debate that has followed. “When people say we’ve got to start talking about immigration it frustrates me because for the last 20 years it’s all we’ve talked about. I was first elected to parliament in 2005 when we had Michael Howard’s ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’”

In the Mayor’s view, “We’re having the wrong conversation on immigration. We’re accepting the premise of the thesis which is that all our problems are because of immigrants or the boats coming from Calais. And I think we’ve got to rebut that. Politicians have got to be bolder and braver at rebutting the misinformation and the disinformation on this.”

Does he disagree with Starmer’s explicit aim of reducing immigration? (Net migration stood at 685,000 in 2023.) “It’s really important that we train up locals to have the skills for the jobs being created. But there will still be massive vacancies: NHS, social care, the police service, hospitality, construction. What we should be doing is micro-targeting those areas where we need additional support.”

Khan also linked discontent over immigration – 66 per cent of voters believe numbers have been too high over the past decade – to austerity: “The mistake in the past was large numbers of people coming in without the public services to cater for them and the people already there. This government won’t repeat those mistakes.”

The Mayor is pragmatic about working with the new administration – “they won’t give us a blank cheque” – but says he’s had “more engagement in the last five weeks than in the last eight years”. He credits Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief of staff, with transforming relations. “I spoke to Sue about four times yesterday. It’s just great having a chief of staff that understands the importance of the capital city and the importance of metro mayors. Sue has been the game-changer in making the relationship with metro mayors easier, not because there was any bad faith on the part of Keir, his team or the shadow cabinet. But there just wasn’t bandwidth.”

What is his view of the reported tensions between Gray and Starmer’s chief strategist Morgan McSweeney? “I’ve spoken to Sue and Morgan regularly over the last year for obvious reasons. I found them both really collegiate, really good to get on with. I’ve been in meetings where both have been present, I’ve seen no evidence of any tensions.”

Khan defined his third-term mission as building a “greener, safer, fairer London” with more affordable homes. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner’s housing department recently declared: “The government is clear that recent delivery in London has fallen well short of what is needed.” A target of delivering 81,000 new homes has been set, more than double the 35,305 delivered in 2022-23.

“I welcome the government setting targets,” Khan said, but raised past challenges such as a lack of construction labour and government investment. “Some local authorities in London have been brilliant, some less good. I’ve said to them: if you’re not willing to give permission to a sensible housing development then I’ll take it over.”

Starmer and Khan are long-standing allies. Both lawyers, they worked together on cases including one challenging the first use of kettling by the Metropolitan Police at the 2001 May Day demonstrations. In 2015, Starmer endorsed Khan as Labour’s London mayoral candidate; in 2020 Khan returned the favour by backing him for the leadership.

“When you have been director of public prosecutions, you can have a very lucrative career afterwards,” Khan said. “I say this not to cause embarrassment to Keir, but he could have made a shedload of money. He didn’t want to do that: he chose to become the MP for the seat he lives in.”

Opposition to Brexit is one of the causes that has defined Khan’s mayoralty. But during the election campaign, Starmer said the UK would not rejoin the EU in his lifetime. Does Khan agree? “Well, I hope Keir has a very long lifetime! I don’t want any conspiracy theories about how long I want Keir to live for. But it’s not possible in the short term for us to rejoin the EU. I think referendums are once-in-a-generation issues.”

Unlike Starmer, however, Khan is prepared to leave the door open to rejoining. “In the medium to long term, there will need to be a conversation about whether we have a better future inside the EU or outside of it.”

This is not the only subject on which the mayor is prepared to depart from the government line. On the US presidential election, Starmer and the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, have remained studiously neutral in recent months. But Khan shows no such reserve. “I’ve been so impressed with Tim Walz. It just shows the judgement that Kamala Harris has in relation to her choice for vice-president. Compare and contrast that with the choice made by the other guy, in JD Vance.

“It’s obvious what my politics are. I’m a member of the Labour Party – we’re a social democratic party. I want the Democrats to win.” He added: “It’s no secret many Labour Party members go and volunteer for the Democrats during presidential elections. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Many of my staffers helped all three: Obama, Clinton and Biden.”

Khan, who is the most heavily guarded person in the UK after the King and the Prime Minister, with 15 armed police officers routinely on alert, recalled that “the last time we had a Trump presidency, as a matter of public record, there was a massive increase in hate crime towards me… I worry about what a second Trump presidency would mean for me and my family, but I’m not going to allow these people to cower me. It makes me even more determined to do my job.”

When asked about his future ambitions, Khan – who defeated the Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall by 44 per cent to 33 per cent – has often quipped that he intends to serve six terms. But on the day we met, he sounded a different note: “I may only have another three and three-quarter years to do this job, so I’ve got to use every single day. What I don’t want is to be like some of my friends after 2010 who were no longer in politics and said ‘if only I’d done this’.”

Will he stand for a fourth term? “Let’s wait and see,” he replied, abandoning any braggadocio. Sadiq Khan is a man in a hurry.