KNIFE CRIME
However Khan’s personal tenure has not been with out its controversies, significantly over final 12 months’s growth of an Extremely-Low Emission Zone into the biggest pollution-charging scheme on the earth.
The each day toll on the most-polluting automobiles prompted a fierce backlash in outer boroughs of Larger London, with anger on the additional monetary burden throughout a cost-of-living disaster.
Khan has additionally been criticised for failing to familiarize yourself with excessive ranges of knife crime and since final 12 months, his dealing with of huge weekly pro-Palestinian protests.
Born in London in 1970 to folks who had not too long ago arrived from Pakistan, Khan was the fifth little one out of seven brothers and one sister.
He grew up in public housing in Tooting, an ethnically blended residential space in south London, and slept in a bunk-bed till he was 24.
His modest background performs nicely in a metropolis that’s pleased with its range and loves a self-made success story.
Khan nonetheless usually recollects how his father drove one in every of London’s well-known pink buses, and his mom was a seamstress.
He’s a helpful boxer, having learnt the game to defend himself within the streets in opposition to those that hurled racist abuse at him, and two of his brothers are boxing coaches.
He initially wished to turn into a dentist, however a trainer noticed his present for verbal sparring and directed him in direction of regulation.
He gained a regulation diploma from the College of North London and began out as a trainee lawyer in 1994 on the Christian Fisher authorized agency, the place he was finally made a associate.
He specialised in human rights, and spent three years chairing the civil liberties marketing campaign group Liberty.
He represented Louis Farrakhan, chief of the Nation of Islam motion, and Babar Ahmad, a mosque acquaintance who was jailed in america after admitting offering assist to the Taliban authorities in Afghanistan.
HIGHER AMBITIONS?
Khan joined Labour at 15-years-old when Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp.
He turned an area councillor for Tooting within the Conservative-dominated Wandsworth native borough in 1994, and its member of parliament in 2005.
He nonetheless lives within the space along with his lawyer spouse Saadiya and their two teenage daughters.
Labour prime minister Gordon Brown made him communities minister in 2008 and he later served as transport minister, changing into the primary Muslim minister to attend cupboard conferences.
In parliament, he voted for homosexual marriage — which earned him dying threats.
As mayor, he vowed to concentrate on offering inexpensive houses for Londoners and freezing transport fares, however — like many in energy all over the world — noticed his agenda engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic.
He’s London’s third mayor after Labour’s Ken Livingstone (2000-2008) and Johnson (2008-2016), with widespread hypothesis he might finally attempt to observe his predecessor and turn into prime minister.
