Sadiq Khan’s £4M Bottom Line

An article this weekend in the Monocle Minute, a daily newsletter from the high-end magazine Monocle, one of the publications produced by the interesting Tyler Brûlé (not many people have been shot twice in Afghanistan and lived to speak about it) reports that a certain Mr Khan of London is seeking to name the six lines of London’s overground system. Khan says that “these names should reflect London’s historic diversity”. Just sit back and watch folks. This promises to be hours of fun.

Specifically, he says he wants—at the bargain basement cost of four million pounds—to “put some of our forgotten people and places back on the map”. As the author of the piece says: “there are probably pretty sound reasons why the three most recent names given to London train lines have all taken the consensual cop-out option of honouring royalty (Victoria, Jubilee, Elizabeth).” I can do little better than quote the author as follows: “An epic – and epically tedious – culture-war squabble looms, though there will be a certain bleak amusement to be derived from the spectacle of angry dingbats threatening to boycott a railway line for being unacceptably woke.”

This is not going to be an easy task. After all, there simply cannot be enough otherwise abled, same sex attracted people of colour to go round. Well, certainly not enough of them who have done anything notable. Mind you, if whingeing about oppression ever became an Olympic sport I am sure we’d have quite a few gold medallists.

Let’s first consider some of the non-contenders:

Salman Rushdie – as a modern proponent of free speech who has suffered a great deal for his art, surely Salman Rushdie deserves to be honoured in perpetuity. Naming things after people at least prompts the ignorant to ask who they were, to find out and consider their deeds. He is ‘of colour’ and is now visually impaired, thanks to last year’s four-decade late attempt to fulfil the fatwa against him. But Mr Khan may fear that he will encourage the pea-brained mullahs in Iran, his co-religionists, to demonstrate their disfavour by stringing up a few British citizens in Azadi Square or even to release a few suicide bombers on the streets of London. I think we can rule out Salman Rushdie.

Bomber Harris – he was responsible for the almost total destruction of the German capital Berlin, unlike Mayor Khan who is in the process of doing that to the UK capital, London. But his reputation has taken a severe downturn of late, and many think he may have gone too far in his efforts. Some also say the same thing about Bomber Harris. I think we can rule him out.

J.K. Rowling – the woman who has got more kids reading than any modern author surely deserves recognition. After all, she even features a train, the Hogwart’s Express, in her stories. But, alas, she dropped a clanger by stating the blindingly obvious about how men who claim to be women are still men. This shocking truth upset a crew of luvvies who made their millions out of her work, and she is now less popular than Voldemort with a certain mentally deranged sector of society referred to as the Trans Taliban. So, it’s a no to J.K. Rowling.

On the other hand, a few of the contenders:

Mary Seacole – nobody quite knows what she did and, even reading her autobiography (and I have) it is not entirely clear. She was, even by her own admission, not a nurse (she described herself as ‘doctress’) and made money serving exclusively the wounded officers in the Crimean War. She is presented as the black equivalent of Florence Nightingale, but there is a slight problem here in that she did not consider herself to be black, she considered herself Scottish and referred to black people using the ‘N-word’. But she was black, that’s good enough and we simply don’t have enough buildings named after her.

Yasser Arafat – for services to peace in the Middle East he received the Nobel Peace Prize and that’s good enough for me. The Nobel Prize committee never make mistakes as exemplified in their award of the Peace Prize to the World Food Programme, which doesn’t feed anyone, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which hasn’t, and Barack Obama who sent more troops into Afghanistan than Donald Trump. Oddly, the latter is not on the list despite being ‘of colour’ (orange).

Bono – surely for services to comedy, Bono deserves his railway line. There is no topic too woke, left-wing and worthy to which he will not sign up. As if they did not have enough problems in Ukraine, he has even performed there. He’s a right laugh. What’s more, he is visually impaired, or claims to be, and wears his ridiculous yellow spectacles to combat photophobia. Maybe he is photophobic, in which case, I’d advise him to stay indoors and spare us all from his voluminous virtue signalling.

Gary Lineker – what more needs to be said than ‘because he is black’. His twenty-day stint (about a month according to Gary) housing a refugee seems to have convinced him and many of his ilk that he is some kind of latter-day saint. Meantime, the thousands of people in inner cities who genuinely have to live in close proximity to refugees complain, but they are all racists. I think Gary is a shoo-in.

Whatever the process and whoever is duly elevated by having a railway line named after them, I am sure it will be the topic of several articles to come. Sadiq Khan has two more years in office, his last. I, for one, will miss him.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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