Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has been “a complete failure” on knife crime, too preoccupied with “trendy identity politics,” George Galloway claims. He’s also labeled the UK Home Office’s chicken box initiative as “gesture politics.”

Scottish firebrand Galloway, speaking after a man was stabbed outside the Home Office in London on Thursday, leaving the victim with facial injuries, hit out at Khan for his alleged inaction on the knife crime epidemic currently blighting the English capital.

The mayor of London is a complete failure… He’ll turn up to any trendy identity politics cause, but I’m afraid he’s absent without leave on the single biggest problem facing Londoners today.

Galloway, a former Labour MP, contends that Khan has wrongfully focused his attention on air quality in London rather than keeping the streets of the capital safe.

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He also branded the Home Office’s new strategy to curb knife crime, by putting anti-stabbing messages on boxes of fried chicken takeaways in several restaurant chains in England and Wales, as “an utterly risible waste of public money.”

It’s utterly ridiculous. Not worth the chicken box that it’s written on. It is a part of what is becoming endemic throughout Western countries. [That of] gesture politics rather than finding actual solutions to problems.

Galloway did not see any links between the knife crime initiative and Thursday’s stabbing, even if there was an uncomfortable irony about the timing. He claimed yet another incident of this kind was no real surprise to him as “there is no day that passes in London without someone being stabbed.”

It comes after a 16-year-old boy was knifed to death in an estate near Regent’s Park in London on Monday night. His death marked the 90th murder investigation opened by Scotland Yard this year. Fifteen of the capital’s victims have been teenagers, 14 of whom have been fatally stabbed.

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