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London mayor suspended
25/02/2006 11:54 - (SA)
London - London Mayor Ken Livingstone has been suspended for a month after a disciplinary tribunal found he had brought his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard.
The Adjudication Panel for England - an independent tribunal which hears complaints against local authority members - on Friday ruled unanimously that Livingstone, 60, should be suspended for four weeks starting March 1.
It said his remarks to Oliver Finegold, a reporter for the London Evening Standard, on February 8 last year had been "unnecessarily insensitive and offensive".
The three-man panel's chairperson, David Laverick, said they did not think it appropriate to disqualify the mayor from office, but were concerned he had failed to appreciate his conduct was unacceptable and damaging to his office.
"His representative is quite right in saying... that matters should not have got as far as this but it is the mayor who must take responsibility for this," he added.
"It was his comments that started the matter and thereafter his position seems to have become ever more entrenched."
Livingstone, 60, immediately criticised the panel's ruling as one that "strikes at the heart of democracy.
"Elected politicians should only be able to be removed by the voters or for breaking the law," he added, finding support from his deputy and soon-to-be acting mayor Nicky Gavron, whose mother was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.
Some in the Greater London Authority described the ruling as a "hysterical overreaction" while others called for him to step down. Newspaper editorialists criticised the decision by an unelected body even while denouncing the mayor's remarks.
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