London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s office called President Trump’s comments “bigoted,” after the president appeared to make the false claim that London wants to “go to sharia law” and was a city that had “changed” under the mayor’s leadership.
“I have to say, I look at London where you have a terrible mayor — terrible terrible mayor — and it’s been so changed, so changed,” Mr. Trump said during his address to world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. “Now they want to go to sharia law … Both their immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe.”
While Mr. Trump used the word “they” without clarifying if he meant Khan and London, his comments echoed long running far-right conspiracy theories online linking Khan, who is the first Muslim to be elected mayor of London, to Islamic fundamentalism. There is no evidence that Khan has advocated for London to officially adopt Sharia, a system of religious laws that is used in some Muslim countries but not by the U.K. government.
“We are not going to dignify his appalling and bigoted comments with a response,” a spokesperson for London’s mayor told CBS News in an e-mailed statement Tuesday. “London is the greatest city in the world, safer than major US cities, and we’re delighted to welcome the record number of US citizens moving here.”
CBS News has reached out to the White House for comment.
A number of politicians in Britain came to Khan’s defense following Trump’s comments, including members of U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government. Khan is a member of Starmer’s ruling, left-leaning Labour party.
“Sadiq Khan is not trying to impose Sharia Law on London,” U.K. Health Secretary Wes Streeting said in a post on X Tuesday. “This is a Mayor who marches with pride, who stands up for differences of background and opinion, who’s focused on improving our transport, our air, our streets, our safety, our choices and chances.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks — made within a wider context of criticizing the immigration policy of European countries — revived a spat between Khan and the president that stretches back nearly a decade.
In 2015, Sadiq Khan roundly condemned then-candidate Donald Trump after he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” on national security grounds, following a terrorist attack in California. Early in his first term, Mr. Trump moved to restrict travel to the U.S. by residents of several mostly Muslim countries, though it did not explicitly ban entry to the U.S. by all Muslims.
That initial criticism has led to a colorful back-and-forth between the two over the years. Just last week, Mr. Trump said Khan was “among the worst mayors in the world,” and told reporters that he asked that Khan not be present at the banquet hosted by King Charles III during the president’s state visit to the U.K.
Mr. Trump has also often claimed that crime in London has risen dramatically during Khan’s tenure, including in last week’s comments to reporters, when he said crime in London was “through the roof.”
Overall recorded crime in London has increased by 31.5% over the past 10 years, with violent crime increasing by 40%, according to U.K. office for National Statistics data cited by CBS News’ partners at the BBC. Khan first took office as London’s mayor in May 2016.
But data from the Metropolitan Police shows that London had a homicide rate of 11.8 per million people in 2024. That makes the homicide rate in England’s capital lower than in a number of major U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., according to data cited by the White House.
