London’s crime wave has been aggravated by bad policy and its housing crisis cannot be solved without controlling immigration, Christian conservative London Assembly member David Kurten has said, as he announces his run for mayor.

David Kurten — former teacher, and one-time party education spokesman who wrote the 2019 general election UKIP manifesto — tore up his membership card last week and will now run against Labour’s incumbent Sadiq Khan for London mayor as an independent.

He told Breitbart London on Monday that he had hoped the party would re-establish itself as a force for small-c social conservatism and had stayed on, longer than most, in hopes of guiding it in that direction. Despite being a driving force behind the party’s 2019 manifesto, Kurten said with regret UKIP was still as riven by in-fighting as ever, and with a Brexit-of-sorts looming on January 31st, a new form of post-EU political force emphasising the Judeo-Christian roots of British culture and a socially conservative political programme was overdue.

Trump Crushes Khan: London Mayor Has Done ‘Terrible Job’ on Terrorism, Crime https://t.co/baOUiDi0we — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 13, 2018

Giving a taste of the election campaign to come, Kurten was not shy in criticising the performance of incumbent Sadiq Khan, who as the Labour Mayor of London has presided over soaring knife crime on the city’s streets, while grandstanding on global issues well beyond the remit of the office. Kurten pointed in particular to Khan’s activism over U.S. President Donald Trump, implicitly condoning anti-Trump protests which culminated in the anti-American Trump ‘Baby Blimp’, images of which were flashed around the world.

On the subject of London’s ongoing crime wave — there is an average of 40 knife crimes in the city every day — Kurten cut through the ongoing dispute between Labour and the Conservatives over who was to blame for the city’s woes. While he absolutely condemned Khan’s failure to bring order to the streets, Kurten also noted the pressure against stop and search — the police tactic used to get knives off the streets but which critics claim is racist — had started with former Prime Minister Theresa May when she was home secretary.

A scourge of political correctness and left-wing dogma — he derides Mayor Khan’s policies as “globalist” and left-socialist — Kurten told Breitbart London: “London needs 6,000 extra police officers to increase police presence and fight crime on the streets.

“I would increase the use of stop and search to find people carrying knives, machetes, and other weapons and arrest them. There must be a zero-tolerance approach to carrying weapons and immediate custodial sentences for anyone caught. We must also end the culture of politically correct policing where politicians and police officers are afraid to mention let alone tackle some to the wider issues around knife crime, including drug trafficking, fatherlessness, and unprecedented new levels of violence associated with migrants coming from war zones.”

President Trump Roasts 'Dumb and Incompetent' London Mayor Khan https://t.co/VxEnsD7PhY — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) June 3, 2019

Another major concern for Londoners is soaring property prices and rents. This has been enormously enriching to more established generations who have seen their on-paper wealth grow with prices quadrupling in 30 years, turning middle-class streets into millionaire’s rows. While the political establishment has portrayed this surge in prices purely as a function of inadequate supply — the answer to which is building ever-more houses, a greatly profitable assessment in the eyes of volume house-builders — Kurten points to demand as being the ignored other half of the equation.

Because of this, Mayor Sadiq Khan’s pledges to make housing easier to get and more affordable for Londoners is completely incompatible with his frequently expressed views in favour of continued open borders with the European Union post-Brexit, Kurten said. A balanced approach of cutting immigration to London — the city’s population presently rises by over 100,00 a year and this is largely down to new arrivals rather than childbirths, Kurten claims — while making up for the housebuilding the city has failed to achieve for decades is needed, he said.

The election for London mayor will take place in the city on May 7th, 2020. The latest polling shows incumbent Khan holds a strong lead of over 20 points, followed by the Conservative candidate Shaun Bailey.