Livingstone Suspension Frozen By Judge

Guardian

Ros Taylor

February 28, 2006

A high court judge has frozen the four-week suspension handed down to Ken Livingstone by the Adjudication Panel, which was due to begin tomorrow.
The ruling means the London mayor can continue fighting what he describes as the "McCarthyite" decision to suspend him without having to abandon his office for four weeks.

Mr Livingstone, who was suspended after the government body ruled that he had brought his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish Evening Standard reporter to a concentration camp guard, said earlier this morning that he would take the case to the appeal court and "most probably" the Lords, even if it cost him "hundreds of thousands of pounds". He added that he had no intention of apologising for his remarks.

"For far too long the accusation of anti-semitism has been used against anybody who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government," Mr Livingstone said in a statement delivered at City Hall today.

"The fundamental issue is not whether or not I was 'insensitive', it is the principle that those whom the people elect should only be removed by the people or because they have broken the law.

"It is because this fundamental principle is at stake that I pledge to do everything in my power to have this attack on the democratic rights of Londoners overturned."

The mayor said he had not broken the law and that he reserved the right to treat journalists with the same robustness as they treated him. "As far as I am aware there is no law against 'unnecessary insensitivity' or even 'offensiveness' to journalists harassing you as you try to go home," he said. Mr Livingstone was leaving an event at City Hall last February when Oliver Finegold tried to interview him.

He denied that his comments were influenced by alcohol: if he had been drinking, he said, it would have been much stronger.

"I treat journalists on the basis of the way I am treated by journalists," the mayor told a press conference. He said the incident had been "blown out of all proportion" and was part of a "25-year running battle I have had with Associated Newspapers", which publishes the Standard.

Mr Livingstone said the paper's editor, Veronica Wadley, "has had an irony bypass" after publishing a profile of him "in which I was described as a 'snappy, snarling brute', 'voracious', 'frightening', 'ugly', 'raging' and 'gripped by paranoia'".

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which pursued the complaint against Mr Livingstone after members of the London assembly had already censured him, represented only a "small section of the [Jewish] community," he said. A higher proportion of Jewish Londoners had given him their first preference vote in the 2004 mayoral election than had Londoners as a whole.

Asked whether, as mayor, he should be able to behave "as he liked" within the law, Mr Livingstone replied: "That is exactly what I'm saying." He added that, unlike him, journalists had resisted pressure for an independent body to be set up to rule on complaints against them.

The mayor's deputy, Nicky Gavron, will take charge if Mr Livingstone is forced to leave his post.

The mayor said this morning that if he were eventually suspended he would use the time to take a holiday or write "something useful about the history and context of the Middle East".

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