J’accuse the Standards Board for England of bringing local democracy into disrepute. The suspension of Ken Livingstone is a disgrace – the state-appointed ‘adjudication board’ has usurped the electorate, and treated the ballot box with contempt. Love him or loathe him (and I fall into the latter camp), Livingstone was elected by millions of Londoners and it is to they alone that he should be answerable. This should act as a cautionary tale about the quangoisation and over-regulation of public life. Firstly the Commission for Racial Equality complained the mayor’s behaviour ‘compromised the ability of the GLA to comply with Section 71 of the Race Relations Act’. In the end Ken was ‘prosecuted’ for breaching ‘a subsection of the Local Authorities (model code of conduct) (England) Order 2001’ after a complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to the Standards Board. Fulfilling the letter of these bureaucratic codes appears to be the endgame. Key players say the complaint would never have been pursued if Ken had apologised, but won’t encouraging politicians to parrot insincere apologies to appease the thought police mean the death of principled politics? The story reveals how cavalier we have become about free speech. Tim Morshead, the solicitor representing the ethical standards officer, claimed that attempts to turn the hearing ‘into a state trial about freedom of speech’ were ‘a smoke screen’. But as the hearing was premised on regulating what a politician said and censuring him for saying the wrong thing, it is precisely freedom of expression that is being curtailed.   Offensiveness is a dangerously subjective category to police politics. Even informally, the dreaded phrase ‘I find that offensive’ deems certain topics off limits. A public life denied the right to be offensive must lead to nervous politicians frightened to say anything that might rock the boat. Prohibiting a politician from insulting newspaper hacks – or vice versa – can only stifle the rough and tumble that a healthy public life demands. As Salman Rushdie said: ‘Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around and make polite conversation…they argue vehemently against each other’s positions’. Avoidance of offence when married to identity politics is particularly divisive. The mayor’s intemperate jibes about Nazi guards were deemed particularly offensive because directed at a Jewish journalist and because they showed ‘wilful disregard’ for the Jewish community. But consider the consequences if the feelings of any one community are treated as sacrosanct and given the moral force to silence. No wonder politicians stood by allowing sections of the Sikh community in Birmingham to close down the play Bezhti claiming it was offensive. The recent cartoon furore all centred on the degree of offence they contained for Muslims, and led to an unashamed degree of self-censorship in the British media. Ken is to fight his suspension and I wish him luck. But remember, he has been hoist by his own petard, and fallen foul of a censorious climate he helped to create. I, for one, spent endless hours arguing against Ken’s old GLC’s no-platform policies, and hate speech codes aimed at censuring people whose remarks could be construed as racist or offensive. Last year Ken put out a statement endorsing the draconian incitement to religious hatred bill. Ken may shout injustice now, but the GLA signed up to the Standards Board code without even a whimper of opposition. If local government wants to have its voice heard, it needs to argue consistently against curtailments of speech for everyone, not just elected representatives. It needs to tear down the undemocratic codes pinned up around town halls and replace them with Thomas Paine’s slogan: ‘He who does not offend cannot be honest.’ n   Claire Fox is director of the Institute of Ideas