Highly controversial Conservative London Assembly Member Brian Coleman is in the news again, though this time it’s not for an outrageous expense claim or the like.
The Barnet Standards Board has ruled that he broke the rulesfor sending an email that called the blogger Roger Tichbourne “an obsessive, poisonous individual”.
I’m not exactly over-joyed at the outcome. Yes, Brian Coleman has once again behaved stupidly. Yes, he deserves criticism. But should such matters really be up for standards boards to rule on? I don’t think so. Let the actions of politicians be public and then let the voters or (if it’s a matter of the law) the police decide. There’s also libel law and a special legal provision against false statements about election candidates. This case does nothing to convince me that we need something beyond that to judge on whether politicians’s words are appropriate.
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5 Comments
Talking about expense claims has Lord Rennard repaid the taxpayer the £ 41,000 he claimed for a second home?
So what should Standards Committees (not Boards) rule on, Mark? It is all very well leaving everything to “the political process” You can see in the HoC where that has led.
Tim13: by (lower case) “boards” I meant the range of standards bodies, as issues over appropriate/inappropriate language have gone to national as well as local bodies in the past.
What Parliamentary events have shown us is that you need to have sensible financial rules (because some behaviour that was revealled and shouldn’t happen was actually within the rules) and those rules need to be properly enforced (asremember that all the evidence of MPs breaking the rules that has come to light could have been available to the authorities previously).
Neither of these areas touch on standards bodies ruling on choice of language, and neither are in fact particularly suited to standards bodies, their make up, their resources, their skills and their modes of operation.
Compare and contrast with the Ken Lvingstone events?
John Zim, according to the Sunday Times, it’s Labour and Tories who should be worried about their peer’s expences.
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[…] I hope the Lib Dem group decides not to take this to the Standards Board – Lib Dems have widely criticised having a quango stand in judgement on councillors: that’s the job of the voters. (For an example of LDV sticking up for a Tory in these circumstance click here). […]