The decision to suspend the mayor was taken by a three-person Adjudication Panel for England that investigated offensive remarks that Livingstone made a year ago to a journalist for the London Evening Standard. The panel found him guilty of breaching the Greater London Authority code of conduct by making remarks that were “unnecessarily insensitive and offensive” and “did damage to the reputation of his office.” Livingstone was also ordered to pay £80,000 (US$140,300) in court costs for the case.

The exchange between Livingstone and Standard reporter Oliver Finegold took place at the end of a Feb. 8, 2005, reception held at City Hall to mark the 20th anniversary of Labour member of parliament (MP) Chris Smith coming out as a gay. Smith was the first MP to do so. The Evening Standard had campaigned against the use of public money for the reception.

In response to a question from Finegold, Livingstone asked the journalist if he’d ever been a “German war criminal.” On hearing that Finegold was Jewish, Livingstone likened him to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

Livingstone’s remarks were widely reported in the media. The London Assembly unanimously voted for the mayor to withdraw them. Government officials, including Prime Minister Anthony Blair, publicly called on the mayor to apologize. He also described Livingstone’s suspension as “bloody stupid.” Livingstone admitted that the remarks were offensive but refused to withdraw them or apologize. The Board of Deputies of British Jews called on the Standards Board of England to investigate the matter.

The Standards Board—known here as a quango, a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization—referred the matter to the Adjudication Panel, a subcommittee. “The unusual punishment comes at a time when Britain, and Europe in general, are wrestling with the definitions and limits of free speech,” wrote Washington Post correspondents Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan February 25. “Muslims worldwide have angrily protested a Danish newspaper’s publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.” Livingstone was prominent in the London protests against publication of the cartoons, calling them “an orgy of Islamophobia.”

Support for the mayor’s suspension has come from the Evening Standard, the London Jewish Forum, and the chair and deputy chairs of the London Assembly.

Condemning the ruling, Livingstone said, “This decision strikes at the heart of democracy.… Three members of a body that no one has ever elected should not be allowed to overturn the votes of millions of Londoners.”

The ruling was also attacked in a February 25 London Times editorial. Writing in the paper two days later, former editor William Rees-Mogg commented, “The panel was established by law—one of the many foolish laws passed by the Blair administration—but they were not enforcing the law, they were enforcing their own subjective discretion…. The issue is more than a matter of a show-off mayor or a silly subcommittee of an unelected quango abusing its inappropriate powers. It concerns the ancient issue of ‘due process of law’…. Without due process, there is no law. A merely subjective judgment, lacking judicial safeguards, by an unelected tribunal, does not constitute due process.”

“In theory traditional court processes and attitudes to civil liberties could work,” Blair wrote in the February 26 Observer. “But the modern world is different from the world for which these court processes were designed.”
 
 
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