Reform UK’s candidate for London mayor is starting as she means to go on – hammering her party’s message – hotly disputed – that the capital has become lawless under Labour’s Sir Sadiq Khan.
Laila Cunningham claims that shoplifting has become a “form of shopping” in some parts of London, that the “social fabric” has broken down between the public and the police, and that the sense of danger in some areas is reminiscent of 1980s New York.
Many question this, with debate raging on social media between those like Cunningham who paint a bleak picture of the capital, and others such as the television presenter Kirstie Allsop, who believe that accounts of “unsafe” London are hugely exaggerated.
“The number of men losing the plot because I refuse to condemn London as an unsafe place to live and get about in is extraordinary,” Allsop said on X, formerly Twitter, earlier this week. “I don’t feel unsafe.”
While the crime statistics do not bear out all of Cunningham’s claims, it is clear that Reform wants to make it a central plank of their election strategy.
Rising star due to outspoken views
Cunningham is a former CPS prosecutor and Westminster City councillor who defected to Reform last year from the Conservatives.
Her outspoken views on crime, migration and other issues have made her a rising star for Reform activists, and at a press conference on Wednesday, party leader Nigel Farage unveiled her as Reform’s candidate for the 2028 London mayoral election.
At this, Cunningham said there would be a “new sheriff in town” and promised an “all-out war on crime”.
Other pledges include scrapping the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) and building more houses in the capital.
Speaking to The i Paper, Cunningham said that her message to Londoners would be: “Is London better for you now, or is it worse? And if you want more of the same, then keep voting Labour.”
She accused the Labour incumbent Khan of acting like a “bystander” on crime and claimed that Londoners had lost faith in the Metropolitan Police.
“We have 32,000 police officers in the Met. I don’t see any of them on the streets, and I’m a walker, you know, I do about 20,000 steps a day in London,” she said.
“People have given up on seeing them and given up on them investigating a crime.”
The number of men losing the plot because I refuse to condemn London as an unsafe place to live and get about in is extraordinary. I have no idea why they so passionately want to malign our capital city but it is deeply disturbing.
— Kirstie Allsopp (@KirstieMAllsopp) January 6, 2026Critics challenge her rhetoric
Critics have challenged Cunningham’s portrayal of a crime-ridden capital, pointing to the fact that murders in London in the first nine months of 2025 were the lowest since monthly records began, while knife crime offences in the 12 months to August 2025 were down seven per cent.
In response, Cunningham said: “[Khan] will quote that the murder and homicide rates have gone down. Yes, it has, and it’s fantastic, but that’s such a small section of the crime that affects people daily. Thankfully, homicides are not massive in number in London, thank God. But you know, there is knife crime, there’s rape. We’re living through a rape epidemic.”
Statistics released by the Met Police in July for the last three years showed the number of reported rape cases for 1st April 2022 to March 2025 as 2022/23: 9,099, 2023/24: 8,755 and 2024/25: 9,145.
Cunningham added: “I mean shoplifting in my area. It literally is a form of shopping… I have one manager in a Nisa supermarket who literally told me police are screening his calls, he thinks, because he calls so much.
“The social fabric has broken down between us and the police and the state.”Official figures showed that shoplifting in London rose by 54 per cent in 2024 compared with 2023, with 90,000 offences recorded in the capital, up from about 58,000 the previous year.
This is in the context of a record high in England and Wales with 530,643 reported shoplifting offences in the year to March last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), an increase of 20 per cent on the previous year.
Claims London is like 1980s’ New York
Cunningham said she wanted to emulate the “zero tolerance” strategy adopted by Rudy Giuliani as mayor of New York City from 1993 to 2001, saying some parts of London reminded her of the crime-blighted New York of the 1980s.
“I want to go back to Rudy Giuliani’s New York,” she said. “You know, I remember going to New York [when I was] younger and it felt dangerous. There was just like an air to it. And in parts of London, you do feel that. I do think there needs to be a zero-tolerance approach, because what happens is, shoplifting is a gateway crime.”
In New York, murders peaked in 1990 at 2,245 in a year. In 2023, the Met recorded 109 homicide victims in London.
After Cunningham was announced as Reform’s candidate, the Labour Party in London said that she had “made a habit of talking London down”.
Responding to the charge, she told The i Paper: “I don’t believe telling the truth is talking someone down. If I’m a doctor and I tell someone they’re ill, I’m not talking them down; I’m telling them the truth.
“If someone’s an alcoholic and you tell them ‘you’re an alcoholic’, you’re not talking them down, you’re pointing out there’s a problem and it needs to be fixed, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
Abuse for being a muslim
Cunningham, who has received racist online abuse for being a practising Muslim – her parents emigrated to Britain from Egypt in the 1960s – said she would not be running if she did not “love London with all my heart”.
“I’ve taken my fair share of hits online, I’ve been called all kinds of things from a traitor to the Middle East, to an Islamist, I’ve had it all thrown at me. I wouldn’t want to do this if I didn’t think London was worth fighting for, and the best city in the world,” she said.
On the abuse, she said: “It is difficult to take because at the end of the day, you know, I don’t want to be known as a British Muslim or a British Egyptian. I’m British. That’s it.
Cunningham is a former CPS prosecutor and Westminster City councillor (Photo: Carlos Jasso/AFP/Getty)“If we want unity in this country. We need to stop compartmentalising people into different groups, no matter what their sexual preference, religion or colour is… the left are very good at doing that.”
“Those [online] right-wing commentators, I don’t think they’ll be happy until everyone looks the same.”
Asked about the reports of Farage racially abusing classmates as a schoolboy – something which more than 30 school contemporaries have alleged, but which the Reform leader has dismissed – Cunningham launched an attack on the media.
“I think you’ve lost the conversation when you start pulling out random quotes from someone 40 years ago that are totally unproven,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll find something against me, you know, pull up something.”
Pollster give her an ‘outside chance’ of winning
In the last London mayoral election in 2024, Reform scraped just three per cent of the vote.
However, with Reform currently ahead in the polls nationally, pollsters expect the party to fare significantly better next time, with some believing Cunningham has an outside chance of winning.
Chris Hopkins, political research director at Savanta, said: “London’s always going to cause [Reform] difficulties, given its demographics. But they’ve got such momentum.”
A Savanta London mayoral poll this week put Labour on 32 per cent, the Tories on 20 per cent and Reform on 19 per cent. The poll was taken without any named candidates.
Hopkins said a victory for Cunningham was “not beyond the realm of possibility,” but that her chances would probably partly depend on who “the Tories end up picking”, as well as Labour’s own selection, with Khan yet to confirm whether he will run again for a fourth term.
“For all of the criticism that [Khan] gets – some of it is legitimate – for [voters] that are sort of more casual, he’s got name recognition and a name brand, and that does impact things more than the highly engaged group of people that don’t like him and will continue not to like him until 2028,” he said.
“If it becomes a bit of a fair fight between a new candidate standing under a Labour banner with all of the governmental baggage that may still be there in two years’ time, potentially another incredibly poor Conservative candidate versus a Reform candidate… it could be a really, really interesting race.”
Chris Annous, an associate at the More in Common think-tank, said he was more “sceptical” about Cunningham’s chances.
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“Reform underperforms in London compared to other parts of the country. So at the last general election, it won nine per cent of the vote in London compared to the 14 per cent it won across the nation… You need to have a very big national lead for them to be competitive in London, and they don’t really have that.”
He added: “That being said, I’m not saying there’s no opportunity for them in London. Because fundamentally, if you look at the polls and speak to people from focus groups, people are very disgruntled with the Mayor of London when it comes to crime and affordability. So if they were to focus on those issues, which they seem to want to do, then there is an audience there for them.”
Both pundits said that this May’s local elections in London would be a “litmus test” for Reform’s chances in two years’ time.
Cunningham said that one of the reasons her candidacy had been named so far in advance was so she could lead Reform’s campaigning in the capital for May’s local elections.
“The message really starts on May 7,” she said. “The mayoral [election] is a long time away. And the reason why we went early is because I would be spearheading the [locals] campaign, because we actually think we have a chance, we’re going to win a few councils hopefully.”
She added: “London is going to know that Reform has landed.”
Statistics challenge Reform’s crime claims
Reform’s argument that crime in Britain is out of control is not borne out by the statistics.
While some forms of crime – such as shoplifting and snatch theft – are up considerably, the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that over the past 20 years, robbery is down 60 per cent, bike and car theft have halved, burglary is down by two-thirds and violent crime has halved.
Figures indicate that knife attacks have been falling for two decades (Photo: Jacob King/PA)The figures are backed up by statistics on hospital admissions for assaults in England – including by knives and firearms – which are also down by close to half since the turn of the millennium.
Despite most experts saying that the Crime Survey is the gold standard for crime statistics – because most crime has always gone unreported to the police – Cunningham claims the opposite.
Speaking to The i Paper in September, she said: “The Crime Survey is not accurate. It’s a survey, so you’re surveying people, right? We went on police recorded data, which is actual crimes that have been recorded, and that paints a much more accurate picture.”
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