A huge number of Brits agree with Donald Trump that London has ‘no-go’ areas, study finds

A third of Brits agree with US President Donald Trump that there are ‘no-go' areas in London, a new study has found.

Last week, Trump falsely claimed that 20 years ago ‘you didn't have crime in London’ and said that a ‘different culture’ had entered the UK capital.

In an interview with GB News, the US president said: “You have areas in Paris and London where the police don't want to even go in them, there's no law and order. They're afraid to go in them.

"They’re afraid to go in them. Either they’re afraid or they just don’t, you know, they don’t want to lose their life.”

It’s not the first time that Trump has made such claims, last year he told a gathering at the United Nations that London wants to ‘go to sharia law’.

A third of Brits think London has 'no go' areas (Getty stock image)

Despite London officials shutting down claims there are so-called ‘no-go’ areas in the city, a survey of more than 2,000 UK adults, carried out in March and published today, found that 34 percent of the public believe there are areas in London where sharia law dominates and non-Muslims cannot enter, making them ‘no-go’ places.

A slightly higher proportion (36 percent) disagreed with this and around a fifth of people said they did not know if this was the case or not.

The research, which was carried out by King’s College London (KCL), found that the public generally overestimates how much crime there is in the capital.

On average, people felt 30 percent of people in London had personally experienced a crime in a single year, while Londoners themselves thought it was 25 percent.

Both were much higher than the reality of 12.2 percent, KCL researchers said.

Of those surveyed, Reform voters had the most inflated view of the risk of crime in London, estimating it at 40 percent.

The research also found that the Muslim share of London’s population is estimated at more than double its actual size; on average the public guessed it to be 35 percent when in reality it is 15 percent.

The study found that people overestimate how much crime there is in the capital (Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images)

Reform UK and Conservative party supporters were more likely to overestimate the Muslim population of the city, at 50 percent and 40 percent respectively.

On the other side of the coin, Labour and Green supporters were less likely to recognise that some crime has risen, researchers said.

While violence and sexual offences have both increased in London, fewer than half of those parties’ supporters thought that either had gone up, compared with the majority of Reform and Conservative supporters.

Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the policy institute at KCL, said: “London has become a lightning rod in our national debate – deeply connected to arguments about crime, immigration and the direction of the country – with the sense that ‘London has fallen’ now a recurring theme in political, media and social media narratives.

“This study shows people don’t just have varying opinions about the capital; they’re working from different facts about it – with many being far too negative about the realities in London.”