Ken Livingston, elected Mayor of London.
This, the man who publicly accused the American administration of racism before war began in Iraq, now deems it entirely reasonable to refuse to apologise for repeatedly likening a Jewish Evening Standard reporter to a guard at a Nazi concentration camp, only months after playing host to the lunatic Islamo-fascist Al-Qaradawi
Why is this buffoon allowed to continue, ignoring the toothless Assembly every time he's asked to apologise for errors that, in the past, would have rightly brought down a politician?
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4 comments:
http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=568
Worth a read.
Not a bad defense of KL, if you ignore the following;
1) Listening to the audio recording of the conversation, Oliver Finegold made it patently clear that the concentration camp analogy was inappropriate, and offensive, but Livingston insisted on carrying on with it, knowing that the person he was dealing with was Jewish. It doesn't take much to connect this kind of verbal arrogance with Livingston's flirtations with the likes of Al Qaradawi (a man who speaks violently against the Jews on Al-Jazeera in the terminology of bloodshed). If I were Jewish, I'd find this beyond insensitivity.
Whether or not he is an anti-Semitist I can't say, but the whole matter strikes me as a highly inappropriate action on the part of someone who's all too ready to cast accusations of racism at others - see his appalling exchange with Darren Johnson in the assembly meeting not so long ago. People in glass houses and all that.
2) The matter has been compounded by his refusal to apologise. You can paint this as a matter of principle or you can paint it as a the actions of someone who thinks he's above reproach. I see it as the latter.
Turning to the arguments expressed in the Johann Hari article:
3) If Livingston's some kind of champion against the right wing history of the Evening Standard, I'm a monkey's uncle. His ethics certainly didn't get in the way of the ES being his paymaster back in the day.
4) "Never mind that last year, anti-Semitic attacks in Britain rose by 40 per cent, or that the most grotesque defamations about Jews are creeping back into our public debate. Nope; the real problem with anti-Semitism comes from the Mayor of London". Yes, anti-Semitic attacks are on the increase. If the Mayor of London speaks in a way that is felt to border on anti-Semitism by holocaust survivors, then refuse to apologise for his actions when confronted by those elderly men and women, what message does that send the public?
5) "Ken, by contrast, understood that we were not in the middle of a crime spree but a war, and it could only be brought to an end by a negotiated peace. At the time, this argument - never mind negotiating with Gerry Adams - was depicted as an act of raw evil". Let's not be anachronistic here.
6) "And there's more. Ken saw the importance of well-funded public transport...". Get rid of the Routemaster buses, get rid of conductors. We'll have bendy-buses instead where nobody pays for a ticket, because that will help plough funding back into TFL, for sure. But anyway, since we don't have to pay those conductors, what the hell. Never mind if the conductors actually helped to police the buses and make them safer for people using them, it's got to be better without conductors on the buses because that way we don't have to worry about prosecuting people who attack our staff. We'll remove the staff and avoid the problem.
And everybody know how great the new buses are. So what if they have a structural flaw that causes them to spray hydraulic fluid all over their engines, burning the whole vehicle out in about 3 minutes?
7) "Ken's willingness to veer wildly off the political script in strange directions can also be an asset: he is, for example, the only senior British politician today calling for "a United States of Europe"". Hmm. We'll leave that one for another day, shall we.
8) "Perhaps that is his greatest strength of all: Ken is resolutely, violently un- boring" Okay, okay, you've won me over now. As long as he's not boring, he can do whatever he likes. Screw public opinion. Is Hari confusing politics with entertaiment perhaps?
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