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FORUM - Opinion in the CNJ
 

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.

• Murad Qureshi is a Labour member of the London Assembly
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