page_title: Sadiq Khan
section_title: Political image and views
hierarchical_section_title: Sadiq Khan / Political image and views
caption_attribution_description: Español: El presidente argentino Mauricio Macri durante una charla de parte de la fundacion Clinton Global Initiative. English: Argentina´s president Mauricio Macri at the Clinton Global Initiative foundation.
context_page_description: Sadiq Aman Khan is a British politician who has served as the Mayor of London since 2016. He was previously a Member of Parliament for Tooting from 2005 until 2016. A member of the Labour Party, Khan is on the party's soft left and has been ideologically characterised as a social democrat.
  Born in Tooting, South London, to a working-class British Pakistani family, Khan earned a law degree from the University of North London. He subsequently worked as a solicitor specialising in human rights issues and chaired the Liberty advocacy group for three years. Joining the Labour Party, Khan was a Councillor for the London Borough of Wandsworth from 1994 to 2006 before being elected MP for Tooting at the 2005 general election. Under Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Khan was appointed Minister of State for Communities in 2008, later becoming Minister of State for Transport. A key ally of the next Labour leader, Ed Miliband, he served in Miliband's Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, Shadow Lord Chancellor and Shadow Minister for London.
context_section_description: Writing for The Spectator, the political commentator Nick Cohen described Khan as a centre-left social democrat, while the journalist Amol Rajan termed him "a torch-bearer for the social democratic wing" of the Labour Party. The BBC describe Khan as being located on the party's soft left. In an article for Al Jazeera, the Marxist commentator Richard Seymour described Khan as a centrist, while Matt Wrack, the General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, characterised Khan as belonging to "that part of the Labour Party that was in government under Blair and Brown". The journalist Dave Hill described Khan as a social liberal.
  Khan has described himself as a "proud feminist". In April 2019, Khan joined the Jewish Labour Movement. He criticised the Trump administration's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Khan said that the British government should apologise for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in British-ruled India. Khan condemned the plans for a protest march against the Narendra Modi's government over India's treatment of Kashmir. 
  Khan considers himself as a practising Muslim. He quotes from the Quran and hadith when discussing terrorism. He received death threats from Islamic extremists after voting in favour of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act. He was also threatened by the far-right group Britain First, which in 2016 threatened to take "direct action" against Khan where he "lives, works and prays" as part of an anti-Muslim campaign.
  Journalist Dave Hill has said that Khan was "savvy, streetwise and not averse to a scrap", whilst also describing him as having a "joshing, livewire off-stage personality" which differed from the formal image he often projected while onstage.
  Khan used to perform stand-up comedy before running for Mayor, including a ten-minute money-raising Stand Up for Labour routine. Comedian Arthur Smith stated that Khan could become a "good club-level comedian one day". During the 2016 Mayoral campaign, Goldsmith referred to Khan as "a caricature machine politician... the sort of politician who justified peoples' mistrust in politics", as evidence citing Khan's U-turn on supporting Heathrow expansion.
  Another rival in the 2016 Mayoral campaign, George Galloway of the Respect Party, referred to Khan as a "flip-flop merchant" and a "product of the Blairite machine".
  There has been an ongoing political feud between Khan and US president Donald Trump since 2016, when Khan criticised Trump over his proposed "Muslim ban" and Trump responded by attacking Khan a number of times on Twitter over the next several years. Shortly before Trump's 2019 state visit to the UK, Khan compared Trump to "European dictators of the 1930s and 40s". Upon arrival, Trump responded on Twitter by calling him a "stone-cold loser" and comparing him to another mayor he also targets, Bill de Blasio.
  On 9 June 2020, Khan said that he believed some statues of slavers in London "should be taken down", and established the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm to do so.
caption: Khan with former president Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative, September 2016
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "4928", "Image ImageLength": "3280", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D4", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2016:09:19 12:09:47", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "308", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 3, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "1016", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1130", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6791", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/160", "EXIF FNumber": "63/10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "4000", "EXIF SensitivityType": "Recommended Exposure Index", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2016:09:19 15:55:01", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2016:09:19 15:55:01", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "915241/125000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "331919/62500", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "24", "EXIF SubSecTime": "60", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "60", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "60", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4928", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3232", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "984", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 2]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "24", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "High gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}