“London Has Fallen.” Little did I imagine, when I sat on the sofa with my friend Tanya gorging on Quality Street and enjoying the latest instalment of Gerard Butler’s heroically average action-movie series, that the film’s title would come to sum up a major strand of global political propaganda.

In this line of thinking, London serves as an object warning of the sort of hellhole the white, English-speaking cities of the United States could turn into

In this line of thinking, London serves as an object warning of the sort of hellhole the white, English-speaking cities of the United States could turn into

London, to judge by a network of anonymous social media accounts and blowhard Maga podcasters, is now a dystopian hellhole where there are no-go areas for non-Islamists, the murder rate per capita is higher than Lagos, you need to be Snake Plissken to use the Tube between Mornington Crescent and Chalk Farm, and the police will arrest you for saying “God Save The King”.

Research published by City Hall presents evidence that this isn’t just a random meme: it’s a co-ordinated propaganda effort. With the help of analytical tools used by the National Cyber Security Centre, researchers have established that posts about London have risen by seven per cent in two years, and “London in decline” narratives have gone up by 150-200 per cent.

These are coming, the researchers discover, not from the concerned citizens of Clapham but from from Sri Lankan-based troll-farms, Vietnamese Facebook networks, and Nigerian bot webs mimicking UK media. Here’s an AI-generated video purporting to........

© The Spectator