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Friday, February 24, 2006

Ken Livingstone

I was surprised and disappointed about the decision to suspend Ken for one month. I think his behaviour was insensitive but I don't think it merits suspension.

A little worrying when unelected bodies start overruling elected politicians, don't you think?

"""A little worrying when unelected bodies start overruling elected politicians, don't you think?"""

Very much so. As Ken said, they only way to get him out should be if the voters reject him or if he commits a crime.

People often complain that politicians are dishonest. Well, when a politician speaks is mind and is punished for it, what do they expect?

'A little worrying when unelected bodies start overruling elected politicians, don't you think?'

As an aside, are judges elected?

Regs, Shaggy

"are judges elected"

Nope. They're appointed (or raised from their coffins when needed by means of a blood sacrifice - I'm not sure which).

S.

Unless Livingstone has actually committed a crime, the power to punish should have been given to the London Assembly following an independent enquiry. The judgement also doesn't look good on the Board of Deputies of British Jews and could have an impact on the London Jewish community. Having said that, Livingstone should have shown some restraint dealing with the journalist and should have issued an apology. It is wrong that someone who is elected to head a city with a population the size of most European countries should accuse a Jewish journalist of being a Nazi. Livingstone should have shown some maturity, swallowed his enormous pride and apologised to the journalist. He has chosen to turn a silly argument into a battle of wills with Associated Newspapers and it was inevitable he would be chastised. There is a time and place for these fights; they should not be carried out on a doorstep outside a party.

First off I tend to agree with Ken that his remark was not offensive. He was responding to the hack's statement that he was simply doing his job. When someone employs a variant on the 'I was only following orders' defence, it's a legitimate comparison.

Secondly, what on Earth is this Standards Commission's remit? They seem to be like some new version of the spanish inquisition. If a councillor is on the fiddle, or saying things calculated to arouse racial hatred then the Police are the ones to call. Equally councillors, unlike MPs, are subject to the normal laws of libel. The entire model code of conduct is variously, vague, ridiculous, unnecessary or intrusive. It is, if councillors blogs are any reflection, generating thousands of frivolous, medacious or politically motivated complaints. It should be confined to the scrapheap and those provisions (if any) which need to be preserved should be brought within the ordinary civil or criminal law. The only good thing about Ken's case is that it has brought this problem to public attention. An acquaintance of mine who was elected as a county councillor for example was forced to step down from his local community coucil because these standards johnies ruled that he was barred from speaking or voting on any planning matter the community council had considered. How is this supposed to promote best practice or higher standards in local govenance?

Of course there is a positive aspect if you put yourself in the position of the Regional Secretary of the Greater London Labour Party. Their biggest electoral asset now has nothing better to do for the next month than campaign like fury for the London local electons in May with no danger of being distracted by 'irrelevancies' such as Tube strikes, olympic arrangements, or the myriad of other contingencies that can throw the best key campaigner grid off balance.

"An acquaintance of mine who was elected as a county councillor for example was forced to step down from his local community coucil because these standards johnies ruled that he was barred from speaking or voting on any planning matter the community council had considered."

I thought the district councils determined planning matters, not county councils (I've not heard of a community council). Also, there are plenty of councillors who have to declare an interest in matters in which they have a private commercial interest - a good thing, in my mind. However, this should not mean he is forced to stand down from the council. A county council has power over education, policing, highways, etc. If he was barred from speaking on planning matters, then he would be able to speak and vote on these matters. Alternatively, he may have been accused of abusing his position in some way which was not strictly criminal but went against local authority codes. Nevertheless, I don't think you are telling us the whole truth.

With regards to Livingstone, I think the code seems quite vague on the issue of bringing his public office into disrepute and perhaps there needs to be some greater clarification. Of course, Livingstone could have just apologised and none of this had to happen. It was his choice, he knows the system, he knows the rules, he took the gamble and he lost. Now London will have to face the consequences.

Dan,

I live in Wales. We have unitary authorities. Community Councils are parish councils by another name - though this particular one covers a small town. Its not a hassle his no longer being a councillor. He still goes along to meetings and they hardly ever vote anyway so far as I understand.

I think i am telling the truth, the fact is that this code and the interpretations put on it are hopelessly vague and inconsistent. The point i was intending to make in my example was that the whole charade is petty, pointless and a waste of your money and mine. Most of the instances are, as per the example, so trivial that no-one can really be bothered to make a fuss or go to judicial review (as i understand Ken is). Bloody good for him I say and if he's saddled with costs i'll happily paypal a tenner in his direction.

The key principle surely must be that unless a councillor has acted criminally then the only people with the right to sack her/him are the electorate that put them there in the first place. I can think of plenty of councillors with horrendously offensive opinions who I despise, but who nevertheless seem to regularly get returned by their electorate. I may not like it, but that's democracy.

Just to take issue while i'm at it with a point raised elsewhere. It's not the severity of the sentence that's the issue. If Ken had been suspended for one day or one minute it would still be wrong. No law has been broken, no offence committed. It is perverse that someone elected democratically, with a mandate from her/his constituency enjoys less personal freedom than a private citizen!

Dave: Thanks for putting me right on the issue of Welsh local authorities. I was not aware that there was a difference between English and Welsh authorities, apart from the Welsh Assembly, although the English local authority system is also a khichri of different systems - unitary, mayoral, county, district, parish, metropolitan borough - which often makes the local council seem inaccessible and confusing. This is another problem with local authorities, aside from the vague codes of conduct.

In the town I used to live, the Tories decided to launch a hate campaign against the Liberal Democrat parish mayor. She was disabled so the Tories decided to lodge a complaint with the benefits office, so she would be investigated for fraud and publically humiliated throughout the year of her term as mayor. The benefits office found she had committed no crime, but the Tory councillors were never reprimanded for their vindictive behaviour. Then when she was chair of the planning or housing committee at the district council, she made the mistake of holding a site meeting with other councillors and a developer without informing the planning officer. Again, another complaint from the Tories this time to the ombudsman and again they made all the effort to publically humiliate her. She received a mild rebuke from the ombudsman. It seems that codes of conduct can be used as a political tool by political adversaries to undermine each other.

However, there appears to be little intervention in relation to local authority bureaucrats. I've seen corruption at work in local authorities, with decisions made by planning officers that are highly irregular and inconsistent. One instance that affected me was when a planning officer was "minded to approve" the demolition of a large Victorian house near where I was living and the construction of a block of flats without adequate parking facilities. Just a few months before hand the planning officer had objected to an extension of the same house by the previous owner as the house was located in a conservation area! This particular developer rarely gets an application turned down, while everyone else struggles to get permission for a loft conversion. After residents put up a campaign against the house's demolition, the planning committee over-ruled the planning officer. But he was not reprimanded and no-one actually investigated the issue for fear of Britain's draconian libel laws which are designed to protect the rich and powerful.

I was once threatened with libel action after I spoke out on behalf of children in the care of my local authority who had told me that they had been sexually abused in care and that foster parents were not properly assessed, with some having convictions for sex crimes. At the time I was 17 and was serving on the local Youth Council. The council officers tried to intimidate me with endless phone calls instructing me to withdraw all allegations and tell them the names of those who had spoken to me. I refused, so they threatened the local press that they would sue if any of my comments were published. Sure enough, the issue was covered up. Who would a journalist believe more: a kid with a story of local authority abuse or a council official with letters after their name and a whole lot of political power? Would a local hack risk losing their jobs over the matter? Of course not. This was a decade before the Soham murders, which revealed local authority and police negligence in recruitment of a pervert as a school care-taker. Soham was 20 miles from where I live, in the adjacent county.

Councillors only wanted the Youth Council as a tick in the "youth issues" box, but they hated youth activism. When I and members of the Youth Council raised these issues with a county councillor with responsibility for youth services, he responded by correcting our grammar while we spoke! He "looked into the matter" by speaking to the officials trying to cover up potential of abuse and unsurprisingly found no grounds for further action. The bureaucrats and politicians put their interests before the interests of the most vulnerable people in society. Ever since then, I have had a profound contempt for politicians and bureaucrats - a hatred that has only increased as a result of Blair's persistent lying.

Clive: Do you think that Tessa Jowell should be suspended from office after using bribes from Silvio Berlusconi to fund her mortgage? What is it with Labour cabinet ministers and their mortgages? Is it something to do with the lower middle-class obsession with climbing property ladders?

socialists

Dan,

Henry Kissinger once remarked that the reason student politics are so vicious is that the stakes are so small; much the same could probably be said of those of the parish pump!

Whether it be your local tories, Derek Hatton's Millies in Liverpool or any other clique that uses intimidation and bullying to undermine their opponents, the solution is not to go running to nanny standards board, but to ORGANISE and beat these dreadful people where it really counts - at the ballot box.

Your comments about council officials are going to take us seriously off topic. My only realy in depth knowledge of a similar scandal is the North Wales Child Abuse inquiry by Sir Ronald Waterhouse. In this instance great credit is due to the then chair of Clwyd county council social services, Malcolm King. Councillor King's efforts resulted, ultimately, in an internal inquiry, which has come to be called the Jillings report. John Jillings, at the request of county councillors, produced the report. That report was effectively suppressed by the insurance company. The council's insurers refused to allow it to be published. As I understand it, the council was not prevented by law from publishing, but had the report been published, the insurers were legally entitled to withdraw their insurance. That would have meant that the individual councillors who acquiesced in the publication of the report, in the best interests of their charges in care, would have been personally liable for any legal action resulting from publication. They would have lost their houses. That is an appalling situation and an understandable, if deplorable, incentive not to publish the report. If the Jillings report had been allowed to be published, a full investigation could have occured a lot earlier, and it is concievable that some of the victims who committed suicide after that would still be alive.

As Dan states, the law of libel in this country is pretty draconian. That said, it is right and proper that individuals should have some protection from having their lives and careers destroyed by false and/or malicious allegations. There are two sides to this coin. However in my view the libel laws are more than adequate to deter councillors from defaming people. There is no need for them to be supplemented by this ridiculous standards board.

On the subject of libel Dan, i'd watch what you are alleging re; the Member for Dulwich. You have just made an allegation that you would have a great deal of difficulty in proving was 'fair comment'.

Dave: Sorry, I should reword what I wrote to concur with English civil law -
"Do you think that Tessa Jowell should be suspended from office after allegedly using bribes allegedly from Silvio Berlusconi to fund her alleged mortgage?"
Of course, nothing is proven. I fully withdraw any statement that could infer that she is a corrupt, self-serving politician.

Hurrah ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4758246.stm

Hurrah:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1720265,00.html

I concur (and i'm a Labour Party member). Glorification is a problematic term and the legislation is political grandstanding that is likely to be of little practical use in combatting the jihadist nihilist crazies in our midst.

Going back on thread though Clive, I do suggest that you could do local democracy a real favour by raising some pointed questions about the whole purpose and rationale behind this code of conduct business. I have to confess that the more I investigate it, the more senseless and undemocratic it appears.

Dan,

"Do you think that Tessa Jowell should be suspended from office after allegedly using bribes allegedly from Silvio Berlusconi to fund her alleged mortgage?"

I'd say that under the law she is innocent until proven guilty. If TB sacked her (i don't think suspension is really possible) and she was cleared, could this not be claimed as unfair dismissal?

Dave: Innocent until proven guilty - unless you are a Muslim, in which case the government can lock you up without trial on suspicion of terrorism. One law for Tessa Jowell and another law for the rest of us.

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