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Comment: Ken must tell us the truth
Evening Standard Comment15 Feb 2008
The Mayor's decision to suspend his equalities adviser, Lee Jasper, and invite the police to investigate the allegations against him marks a decisive shift in Mr Livingstone's approach.
Mr Jasper says that he asked the Mayor to call in police in order to clear his name: he denies any wrongdoing and the Mayor dismisses the charges as a "malignant political charade". The truth is that Mr Jasper still faces very serious allegations about his involvement in the misuse of up to £3.3 million of public money, and that neither he nor the Mayor have yet provided any reliable account of where the money went, despite having had more than two months to do so.
While the Mayor and Mr Jasper portray the Standard's allegations as politically or racially motivated smears, they are nothing of the kind. In fact they are something much simpler: good, oldfashioned investigative journalism, following the money trail and asking uncomfortable questions of those in power. Those questions - where the money went, why, and who knew - are the ones the Mayor must now answer. He previously promised that there was a "full audit trail" for the grants concerned; he has since had to concede that there is not. He has tried to minimise the importance of the unaccounted money, stressing that it was a small proportion of the London Development Agency's budget - as if that were any excuse. But we are still waiting for proper answers to our questions.
Specifically, the Standard's allegations centre on a series of grants made by the LDA to organisations run by Mr Jasper's close friends and associates. Some appear to have been largely paper organisations that did little or nothing despite being given tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds, often after Mr Jasper directly applied heavy pressure to those in the LDA making the decisions. Some money seems to have disappeared, and some organisations have been wound up; the benefit to the black community, which was their ostensible raison d'être, has been minimal.
These are serious charges, and there may yet be criminal cases to answer: the Mayor omits to mention that police have already been called in over allegations of fraud, violence and intimidation at the Green Bridge Taxi School, one of the beneficiaries in question, as well as regarding five other such organisations, at the request of the LDA. But at this stage, this is a matter for the District Auditor, the watchdog who oversees public authorities' use of money. For the Mayor to say that "the police have made no approach to me" is an irrelevance - nor has the Standard ever demanded a police investigation. All we have asked is that the Mayor, the LDA and independent auditors investigate the affair fully and provide a proper explanation for the disappearance of taxpayers' money. If the police decide to extend their investigations, the Standard will be happy to cooperate with them should they request it.
In other words, this latest move is yet another smokescreen for not investigating the matter. Mr Livingstone has always been a firm believer in the principle that the best form of defence is attack. So he presents today's developments as a pro-active move. But in reality the Mayor has finally been forced to action to limit the political damage that Mr Jasper's defiance was causing him. Mr Livingstone's hope must be that the move will take the heat out of the affair: the police will either decline to move or if they do, will take so long that the Mayoral election will be over long before their investigation is complete. This is an irresponsible piece of party politics.
What is at stake? Certainly not the strength of "black organisations across London", as Mr Jasper speciously claims today: the organisations involved are a tiny group of business ventures and political cheerleading fronts who represent almost no one in the black community. But this is more than some petty local squabble. What is at stake is the integrity of London's government and those who run it. Mr Jasper's deputy, Rosemary Emodi, has already resigned over separate irregularities; Mr Jasper should now do the same. Meanwhile, the onus remains on the Mayor to explain what happened to millions of pounds of Londoners' money, and he cannot any longer brush aside that question.
