The Mayor of London's Office and Press Office appear to have been infiltrated by Personality Cultists, who are bringing the system into disrepute, with their abuse of public resources to conduct personal attacks and to make threats against their political opponents.
The Evening Standard report last Friday, contains an extraordinary threat:
Whistle-blower to sue Mayor over 'bullying' claims
Andrew Gilligan, Evening Standard
25.01.08The whistleblower who exposed a key part of the City Hall scandal is to sue Ken Livingstone for libel, the Evening Standard can reveal.
The move comes after the Mayor claimed on BBC radio that Brenda Stern was sacked for bullying her staff.
Ms Stern, a former London Development Agency manager, was forced from her £70,000-a-year job after she complained about serious irregularities in a project run by a friend of the Mayor's equality adviser Lee Jasper.
A complaint of bullying was made against her but in a letter seen by the Standard, LDA chief executive Manny Lewis says the allegation was investigated and was "not founded"
[...]
Hopefully Brenda Stern will be awarded a large amount of money and, a public apology from Ken Livingstone personally.
However, more importantly, the article goes on to say:
The Mayor's office hit back, threatening that if Ms Stern sued, the GLA would investigate "other matters" apart from her stint at the LDA, including her past life and previous employment.
Firstly , if there was anything dubious in her previous employment (she is a lawyer who was seconded to the the London Development Agency), it shows GLA incompetence for not checking before employing her in the first place, which seems highly unlikely.
Therefore any such "investigation" must be an attempt to dig up information for a political smear campaign against a whistleblower, thereby abusing the staff and resources paid for by the London taxpayer.
These are the tactics of extremist cults, like the Scientologists or the Moonies etc. and is not how the public employees at City Hall should act, or appear to be acting.
This threat violates even the GLA's own Code of Ethics for Staff (.pdf)
2.3. Proper advice and support(b) To uphold the political impartiality of the Authority's staff, not to use public
resources for political purposes and not to act in any way which would conflict
with this Code;
The individual(s) who uttered this threat should be named and shamed, and investigated by the Standards Board for England, for bringing the Office of the Mayor of London into disrepute.
If the GLA is somehow manipulated by Livingstone and his cronies into trying to fund, or allow GLA human or technical resources to be abused in such an ""investigation", this would be a violation by a public authority of the European Convention on Human Rights Article 8, the right to privacy, and therefore against the UK Human Rights Act, and therefore against the GLA's own internal Codes of Conduct and Ethics.
If the individual members of Livingstone's inner circle carry out their threat, they should be investigated by the Police and charged with a criminal offence under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and / or with Malfeasance in Office.
Even if you are a Labour voter, it must be clear that the current Mayor of London and his clique of cronies must not be allowed back into power this coming May.