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The great reporter Keith Waterhouse once said his ideal news story would start: "Last night, the monster came down from the mountain and took another child." Sadly, London has few mountains. But I can report that last week the Standards Board for England came down from wherever it comes from and took another councillor.
This extraordinary six-year-old quango has the power to sack any locally-elected representative it likes, quite independent of what those tiresome people, the voters, might wish. Last week, it disbarred Eleanor Pinfold, former leader of the opposition on Sutton council, for "brash and offensive language." Goodness me - whatever can she have said?
Well, it turns out she upset the borough's police commander, Superintendent Warren Shadbolt, by referring to him simply by his surname. Unconscionable! Ms Pinfold also accused Shadbolt - er, sorry, Warren - of being a Liberal Democrat who didn't take complaints from Tories seriously. Worst of all, she accused Sutton of corruption, something the Board ruled "brought the council into disrepute".
There are three problems here. First, police chiefs need to be thicker skinned. Second, there was an incident of corruption in Sutton council at the time. Earlier this year, after a sting by The Sun, an official got nine months for pocketing money.
Third, it seems that nobody did take complaints seriously. Councillor Pinfold claimed she alerted the council to the corruption a year before The Sun forced them to act.
If that is true, the council deserves to be brought into disrepute. Even if it's untrue, it is surely miles within the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. Democracy dies if elected representatives cannot accuse any public official of failing.
That may be what the Standards Board wants. Pinfold is only the latest in a series of outrageous decisions whose effect has been to terrify councillors about making accusations of inadequate performance. Decisions mostly stemming from complaints by council officers - the very people supposed to serve councillors, not censor them to protect their official backsides.
In London's biggest scandal of the moment, the vanishing grants paid to friends of the Mayor's aide Lee Jasper, leaked emails have been key evidence for this newspaper's reporting. Last week I learned that some of those emails have been in the hands of two London Assembly members for months. Why didn't they alert the public? Perhaps they were worried they'd be "Standards Boarded".
The fact is, politicians sometimes have to be "brash," and, yes, even "offensive" - because, inconceivable as it is to the sensitive flowers on the Standards Board, offensive things sometimes happen in public life. Things that have to be exposed, not brushed away with everyone forced to be nice to each other.
Britain already had a Standards Board to punish misbehaviour. It was called the electorate. And that, not this pernicious quango, is where accountability should lie.
Reader views (3)
Orwellian in its implications. Watch out Andrew, Ken's behind you!
Can we have a bonfire of the Quangoes?
Can we have a list of the members of this Quango, their political affiliations and their pay? It would help us to understand where they are coming from. Then we can move on to "understand" all the other Quangoes who influence the lives of Londoners.
- John, Enfield Middlesex, 02/01/2008 07:57
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Such a pity that the Standards Board has decided that it is a Censor.
Why can it not simply do its job, rather than meddling in peripheral nonsense like this? How crass and irrelevant.
- Chuck Unsworth, London, 01/01/2008 21:45
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She probably wasn't a member of Common Purpose.
- Fnusnuank, Gen. Switz., 31/12/2007 19:43
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