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Murad Qureshi, left and London Mayor Ken Livingstone |
Wrong to suspend Mayor Ken
Murad Qureshi suggests that the Standards
Board of England are way off the mark in their attempt to sanction
Ken Livingstone
LONDON Mayor Ken Livingstone has worked tirelessly for Londoners;
increasing the number of police on our streets, investing in
our transport system and preparing for the 2012 Olympics.
It is surprising therefore that the Standards Board for
England should attempt to remove the Mayor from office for the
offence of using “insensitive and insulting behaviour.”
This body was originally established to prevent the sort of
financial wrongdoing that characterised Lady Porter’s regime
at Westminster City Council in the l980s.
Far from identifying financial corruption, the standards board
has ended up regulating the use of language and to do this it
uses the vague and uncertain concept of “behaviour that
brings an office or authority into disrepute.” And the
trouble with the concept of disrepute is that it can be made
to mean whatever you want it to mean.
It may or may not be appropriate for the regulation of behaviour
in a gentlemen’s club but it should not have greater sway
than the decisions of ordinary voters as to who should hold
public office.
In my view, the Standards Board for England is a completely
unnecessary waste of time and taxpayers’ money and should
be abolished.
The police and the courts should be the instruments by which
wrongdoing in local government is dealt with.
Indeed, the Standards Board has itself recognised this by reviewing
the code of conduct and recommending to government that outside
of official duties the code “should be restricted only
to matters that would be regarded as unlawful.”
And yet the Standards Board continued its case against the Mayor
when both they and the government had decided to change the
rules so that such a case could never be brought again.
A cross-party alliance is forming at City Hall to try and block
the suspension. The GLA standards committee is required to rubber-stamp
the decision of the Adjudication Panel to bring it into effect.
The Lib Dems are concerned about the way the GLA’s own
standards committee has to abide by the results of the Adjudication
Panel and UKIP is very uneasy about the way the Adjudication
Panel, an unelected and unaccountable body, suspended an elected
politician from office.
And support for the Mayor has come from some surprising areas
– Tory Mayoral candidate Steve Norris attacked the judgement;
the Telegraph said it was for Londoners to sling him out, not
for some para-judicial quango to anticipate their wishes and
the Guardian wrote that there was no excuse for the adjudication
panel to take it upon themselves to ban the Mayor of the UK’s
capital city from performing his duties for a month.
So the Standards Board of England needs to explain how a unelected
board of three members can suspend an elected Mayor from office.
This lacks creditability and the Mayor is right to appeal to
the High Court. There is a worrying tendency to focus on such
matters rather than what it was set up to do.
This summer Parliament is due to review of the Standards Board
of England and by its actions its power will probably be curtailed
and told to focus on local government corruption and financial
embezzlement.
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