They’re still at it out there. “Sadiq Khan getting elected as mayor tells you all you need to know about London!” declares a self-described royalist and Rangers fan on Twitter: “[it’s] Becoming a muslim/immigrant shit*****e!”. Here’s someone calling themselves Deadpool commenting at the Daily Mail: “How in hell did this guy get voted as London mayor. Ooh I forgot, no English living in London nowadays”. And meet a woman from Yorkshire, keen on opera, plants and reincarnation: “I’ve been warning what imho is #Londonmayor’s intention – London caliphate”.

Nearly eight months on from his election triumph in May, the London-born London bus-driver’s son, “proud feminist” and gay marriage backer continues to be accused of coming from another land bent on placing the capital under sharia law. Never mind that Khan’s swearing in as mayor was conducted at Southwark Cathedral and presided over by a Church of England cleric, or that his first official function as mayor was attending a holocaust memorial event in Hendon. And so what if he returned to the historic English cathedral the other day to celebrate Christmas “and our way of life here in this great city”? In the view of a “proud Briton” tweeting from Norfolk, his real plan for Christmas was to cancel it.

And another thing. Khan has vowed to “DEFY Brexit” by working on proposals for London-only work visas, not because he and the city’s business leaders believe this would help buttress its economy in the uncertain years ahead, but simply in order to “maintain the number of migrants entering London”. That was not the view of a social media crank but the Daily Express. The article crossed the Atlantic. On arrival at the website of the co-founder of something called the American Freedom Defense Initiative it was re-published beneath a headline in which the migrants it referred to were all Muslim, complete with a claim that Khan was eager to sustain their inflow because he has “close ties” to “jihadis, Islamic supremacists and Islamic Jew-haters”.

Bats in the belfry. The suggestion that London’s mayor, who for years has been an energetic champion of interfaith understanding and at the forefront of urging his fellow British Muslims to follow his example by participating in mainstream politics, is engaged in a secret plan to fill the British capital with foreign jihadists is poisonous, imbecilic drivel. But as 2016 has taught us, ignorant fantasists, loudmouth bigots and dirty propagandists anywhere in the western world can no longer be just laughed at and dismissed.

They get rewarded with newspaper columns and radio shows, because the conflicts they stir up are good for business. They influence elections. They even win them. In the UK, they and their opportunist fellow travellers prevailed in the EU referendum. As the year’s end approaches, they are crowing, smearing, jeering and gleefully anticipating a 2017 in which their triumphs will continue across the West. They are hell bent on wrenching Britain out of the EU as quickly and completely as possible and the bees in their bonnets buzz that leaving will be just the start of a glorious restoration, a cathartic national purging of all that they recoil from as unnatural and unclean.

That is the new mood encircling remain-voting London with its 300 languages, its ethnic and cultural “super-diversity” and its Muslim mayor, the son of migrants from Pakistan. On bad days the capital can feel, more than ever, like an island of social and economic liberalism, not to mention Labour Party strength, in a blue Home Counties sea and, since 23 June, amid a wider national ocean that is swelling with resentment and rage.

The referendum outcome cannot be explained by geography alone: both Birkbeck professor Eric Kaufmann and the British Election Survey team have shown how values, nostalgia and social psychology cut across spatial categories and those of income too; Scotland’s blanket “in” vote shows the limitations of any town-versus-country characterisation of the EU result, as does the fact that some of England’s other big cities voted strongly to remain (Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol) while others opted narrowly to leave (Birmingham, Sheffield, Nottingham). But British voters in no English big city region as a whole wanted to stay in the EU as heartily as London, which voted 60% to remain. Look at the leave margins in Bolton (64%), Oldham (61%) and Wigan (64%) and grasp why Andy Burnham, Labour’s candidate to become Greater Manchester’s first directly elected “metro mayor” next year, has been speaking up about doorstep concerns over free movement of workers.

Burnham’s stance and that of Khan, who says he voted for Burnham to become Labour leader in 2015, could hardly contrast more sharply, reflecting a highly fragmented UK. The “London is Open” campaign Khan launched the month after the EU vote was the start of a sustained drive to maintain the city’s status as a magnet for international visitors, labour, investment and trade. It underlines the differences in attitudes between the millions of Britons in the London metropolis and the majority of their compatriots.

In so doing, it also underlines how the capital and its Labour mayor represent so much of what Brexit Britain resents and fears. It is the city the then British National Party leader Nick Griffin ludicrously described in 2009 as “no longer British” and as “ethnically cleansed” of British people. It is the London Nigel Farage disparaged in 2014 as being like “a foreign land” because he heard languages other than English being spoken on a train from Charing Cross. What an irony it is that the UK whose independence from the EU the erstwhile Ukip leader so fervently craves is now likely to become even more reliant on “foreign” London, with its teeming immigrants, its “metropolitan elite” and that Muslim mayor, than it already is.

Dependency culture

Bear with me while I strap some armour on. I agree with Philip Hammond’s autumn statement remark that “for too long economic growth in our country has been too concentrated in London and the south east”. I’ve no quarrel with the government protesting that it’s time to narrow the north-south divide. When people from elsewhere complain that “London gets everything” I, a dedicated Londoner since migrating to the capital from a very different part of England 37 years ago, can see what they mean. I am uneasy about the capital inhaling ambitious young people from all corners of the land and only breathing them out when they retire to Surrey. So it is not with any cavalier, Big Smoke sneer that I break it gently to Leave Nation that Remain City is going to go on giving it an awful lot of what it needs.

Here’s something else the chancellor said: “London is one of the highest productivity cities in the world and we should celebrate that fact”. He went on to note that no other economically big league nation has such a massive output gap between its first city and the rest. He could have rubbed some noses in the detail: London contributes a massive 23% of the UK’s annual economic output; London has been growing half as fast again as the UK’s nations and regions as a whole; thinktank Centre for Cities has calculated that London contributes 30% of all UK taxes that are dependent on growth - such as on income, land and property – which is as much tax altogether as the next 37 largest UK cities combined; a report compiled for Brexit poster boy Boris Johnson when he was London mayor found that the equivalent of £2,500 per Londoner is exported to the rest of the UK every year.

So, even as things stand, the rest of Britain gets a hefty subsidy from the capital. Roads and bus services in Barnsley (68% leave), schools in Boston (76% leave) and health services in Blaenau Gwent (62% leave) are all helped by the contributions of a workforce that speaks 300 languages and around 40% of which was born abroad. Most especially, they are helped by London’s financial sector, habitat of “the bankers” whose industry and employees continue, like it or not, to do a lot to keep the UK and its people afloat.

It’s hard to see that dependency decreasing. London’s economy has proved more resilient than that of the UK as a whole to economic shocks in the recent past. It came through the last recession relatively unscathed, its business organisations are stoutly upbeat and Hammond has at least done some of the things, notably on affordable housing, the capital needs him to do if it’s to keep on propping up the rest of the country. Business rate revaluation, which will see increases in the capital and the opposite elsewhere, have been criticised by Khan and the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, yet may end up looking like the start of a national rescue operation. In the words of the Institute for Fiscal Studies: “It will contribute to the ongoing trend of the UK government becoming more and more dependent on revenue from London to fund services across the whole”.

But what if, as some detect, the capital’s power is already fading? Other European cities - Dublin, Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin, Amsterdam and more – have been making overtures to international City firms. Reports suggest that tens of thousands of Square Mile jobs could disappear if passporting rights – a mechanism enabling London companies to operate freely across the EU nations – are lost under the Brexit terms, an outcome thought increasingly likely as the prime minister makes immigration curbs her top priority. Companies in other sectors are putting investment decisions on hold until the departure deal becomes clearer. Construction has picked up, but it’s an industry heavily staffed by non-British EU workers. Whatever its hopes of sunny uplands ahead, the country cannot afford to let its capital decline. So while it might gratify some to metaphorically slaughter the London cash cow, Brexit Britain is going to have to keep on feeding and milking it.

Khan’s capital

When he crushed Tory Brexiter Zac Goldsmith to become mayor in May, Sadiq Khan did not expect to be spending much of the rest of 2016 and beyond coping with the consequences of leaving the EU. Having deployed his pro-EU views during the mayoral fight as part of depicting Goldsmith as a backwoods toff, he then played a prominent part in the remain campaign. This included keeping a promise to share a platform with David Cameron, despite the then prime minister having disgracefully joined in with the attempts to smear him as an apologist for Islamist fanatics. There was more to this than sticking to his word. Khan needed a working relationship with the then Conservative premier. He needed London to stay in the EU. The referendum outcome changed everything.



It had always been Khan’s intention to lobby national government for greater powers and resources, as his predecessors Johnson and Ken Livingstone had done – that’s par for the mayoral course. But Brexit has added urgency to that mission and with it some theoretical extra leverage. The Khan administration’s early dealings with Cameron’s ministers were encouraging: they seemed to get the point that London is different and that the country needs it to stay strong. Then came the dramas of the Tory leadership succession and a new government line-up under the mutely pro-remain Theresa May. Khan’s purchase with these has been variable, perhaps reflecting the new prime minister’s eagerness to break with the perception of Cameron and his coterie as London trendies, perhaps a lack of policy coherence on her part, perhaps her attitude to the London mayor himself.

As home secretary, May made her own small contribution to Goldsmith and the Tory media’s dishonest “extremist links” attacks. Of more relevance now are stories of her annoyance with her chancellor for meeting Khan prior to the autumn statement without her say so. Would a prime minister sure of her ground have reacted so strongly? Would one firmly committed to giving London more autonomy in the national interest have allowed her transport secretary, Brexiter Chris Grayling, to dump an agreement made between his predecessor and Khan’s to devolve control of suburban rail services to Transport for London, seemingly for reasons of politics and personal dislike?

On the other hand, Khan and his housing team are pleased with that autumn statement deal on affordable homes brokered with housing minister Gavin Barwell (who is also minister for London and a London MP). Maybe in time Khan will extract more. The autumn statement promised to eventually devolve the adult education and work and health programme budgets to London government, so that provision can be designed and precious resources used to best local effect. The wheels of Whitehall are moving very slowly, though. Khan would also like London to run its own post-16 skills training and, ideally, secure much more direct freedom to spend taxes, especially property taxes, raised from the capital in the capital in ways that he and the London boroughs see fit, although the latter in particular still seems a long way off.

He is, though, pressing on with developing the proposals that so inflamed the Express, for a London-only work visa which would enable London employers to continue to recruit workers from EU countries with ease. It’s not an outlandish idea: such “asymmetric” migration arrangements have been made in other countries, notably Canada. Khan is pleased to be sitting down once a month with Brexit secretary David Davis, with whom he apparently gets on well. They have things in common: a Tooting council estate upbringing is the most obvious; past concerns about controversial extradition treaties is another.

Meanwhile, he’s getting on with the business of exercising the uneven spread of powers he currently has. As he says himself, he’s only just getting started in a job where it takes a long time to get big things done. He’ll come under heavy opposition pressure from the first working day of the New Year, especially over the ambiguous phrasing of his fares freeze pledge and the detail of his first budget. London Assembly Tories think he’s better at politics than administration and will eventually come unstuck. Tactically, he’s been quite defensive, sharply so at times, determined to give nothing away. His question time performances have been bus parking exercises, executed rigidly. To extend the football metaphor, he’s been more of a Mourinho than a Klopp.

In some policy areas Khan could and could maybe afford to be bolder. In time, he might do well to become more expansive about the city of opportunity he wants to build, and a more complete advocate for those many Londoners struggling to make ends meet. That said, he and his team have been pleasingly workmanlike so far. Their know-how and industry come as a relief after Johnson’s showy but complacent and sometimes slapdash eight years. Just as he weighed up and defeated his rivals to become his party’s mayoral candidate and then did the same to Goldsmith to punishing effect, Khan has sized up the job of bossing City Hall from a starting point on the practical Labour left and proceeded with focus and energy. It’s a task for a pragmatist, an alliance-builder and a persuader. He’s addressing it with application and energy.

His election win and his efforts in post so far should not be undervalued by the progressive left (whatever that is these days). It may seem small consolation for being battered by Brexit, terrified by Trump and depressed by the consolidation of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. But it already serves as an example being adapted by Labour politicians seeking to become “metro mayor” leaders of other English big city regions next spring.

Burnham’s immigration intervention puts a clear distance on the issue between himself and his party leader. Meanwhile, Steve Rotheram, Labour’s candidate for the Liverpool city region and Corbyn’s parliamentary private secretary, has echoed a Khan election campaign slogan by saying he would want to be “the most business-friendly metro mayor possible”. Big city mayors may represent Labour’s best chance of surviving as a plausible party of national government.

As for everyone else, they will view Khan’s mayoralty much as they view London - with everything from delight to dislike, with some of the latter of the vicious variety triggered by places and people wrongly deemed irredeemably alien. Alas for those so afflicted, the country needs a thriving London. Its mayor can help that to happen, which is why, in 2017, Brexit Britain needs more success for Sadiq Khan.

Dave Hill’s book Zac versus Sadiq: the Fight to Become London Mayor can be purchased from the Guardian Bookshop or directly from the author.

• This article was amended on 3 January 2017 to recognise that voters in the area covered by the government’s Liverpool City Region devolution agreement of November 2015 voted narrowly to remain.