President Donald Trump has said British hospitals are a “sea of blood” due to the rate of stabbings and knife crime across the country.

In an interview with Good Morning Britain‘s Piers Morgan, President Trump was asked about gun crime in the U.S. He hit back at Morgan, pointing out the UK’s abysmal record of violent crimes involving knives.

The President said: “In London you have stabbings all over. I read an article where everybody is being stabbed. They said your hospital is a sea of blood, all over the floors.”

The POTUS discusses gun violence with @piersmorgan. He says unarmed civilians are 'sitting ducks' and don't stand a chance when faced with 'bad guys' with guns. He adds if people were armed during the Paris attacks 'it would have never happened'.#GMBTrump pic.twitter.com/UI9L56Ifgh — Good Morning Britain (@GMB) June 5, 2019

President Trump’s comments are not unreflective of the reality in Britain. THe month of May saw the 100th fatal stabbing of the year so far when a 32-year-old man was stabbed to death in Middlesborough.

One senior doctor, Professor Chris Moran, the National Clinical Director for Trauma at NHS England, described how services in the NHS were being put under massive strain due to the surge in violent crime, which was delaying operations and waiting times.

“It’s having a significant increase in acute services in the NHS and then a knock-on effect in elective care because you end up canceling surgery to operate in these cases, a knock-on effect on general practitioners who are having to try and pick up the pieces,” Prof Moran said.

He also told the Daily Mail that in some cases, police had to be called to watch over patients in their beds as gang members were attempting to come into hospitals to kill victims they had already attacked to “finish the job”.

The highest number of stabbings took place in the multicultural capital of London, led by Mayor Sadiq Khan, with over 30 fatal stabbings this year alone.

President Trump had been engaged in a war of words with Mr Khan, partly over the London mayor’s handling of crime in the capital, and had said: “[Khan] is a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me.”

Knife Crime Epidemic Causing ‘Ripple Effect’ Across NHS https://t.co/WUWPVB00CI — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 15, 2019

Mr Khan is widely perceived as having lost control over crime in the capital, with a report by the Greater London Assembly Conservatives showed that under Mr Khan’s tenure, knife crime has risen by 52 per cent, robbery by 59 per cent, and gun crime by 30 per cent.

The United Kingdom is witnessing a surge in violent crime more generally. The latest figures by the Office for National Statistics showed that England and Wales had seen violent crime rise by nearly a fifth (19 per cent) from the previous year with 1.6 million incidents reported, an average of 4,384 every single day.

A breakdown of the figures showed that knife crime has risen by six per cent from the previous year, with 40,829 instances involving a “knife or bladed object”, an average of 112 each day in England and Wales alone.

The number of homicides was also up by six per cent, with four in ten involving a blade.

In an ironic instance of such crimes, the balloon of President Trump as a baby that has been flown over London in protest at the President’s visit was itself stabbed on Tuesday, with a pair of cosmetic scissors.