Lee Jasper: a case to answer

It’s easy enough – pleasurable, even – for the left to criticise cases of corruption, chicanery, bungs, backhanders and general no goodery that emanate from New Labour or the Tories; it’s rather harder to speak out when apparent impropriety is closer to home.

The natural tendency is to close ranks, to prevaricate, make excuses, advance more or less spurious justifications, plead attenuating circumstances, and shrug off inconvenient accusations as baseless allegations mischievously gotten up by political opponents.

Yet such desperate avoidance of candour leaves socialists open to accusations of double standards and logical inconsistency. Are we for the highest standards of probity in politics, or are we not?

When those ostensibly on the left are under fire from the right, even to suggest that they may have a case to answer is not a route to ready popularity; some even regard it as tantamount to scabbing. My criticisms of George Galloway after the ‘cash for oil’ charges five years ago brought me intensive opprobrium from those now making the very much the same points.

Today it is the turn of Livingstone race adviser Lee Jasper, who has been forced to step down after revelations that he sent intimate emails to a woman just days before advancing a £65,000 grant to one of her projects.

Now, that infinitesimally small proportion of the population at all interested in the nuances of leftwing politics will know that I am closer to the McDonnell/Corbyn wing of the Campaign Group than the Livingstone/Socialist Action side of things.

But in as far as 99% of the politically aware public lump all of the above together as ‘the Labour left’, the Labour left should take a clear stance on the Jasper affair. If the reported details are correct - and I haven't seen them being denied - then the allegations must be taken seriously.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the use of a work email account to send messages of an inappropriate nature to a colleague would merit disciplinary proceedings in many workplaces. Cheesy chat-up lines are not a crime, misuse of public money very clearly is.

Jasper properly benefits from the presumption of innocence and the right to due process, as anyone else does in these circumstances. Earlier claims against him have been investigated, and Scotland Yard has ruled that he has no criminal case to answer.

But it is not enough to cry ‘racist stitch up’, because the man does have a case to answer. Nor will it do to accuse Andrew Gilligan of being a Tory; I happen to know he isn’t.

Jasper has only his own actions to blame for finding himself in the unenviable position he now occupies. It would be a huge mistake for Livingstone to allow his project to be prejudiced by understandable loyalty to a political associate of long standing.

I hope – for the sake of the Labour left and for the good of the Labour Party as a whole ahead of the crucial London elections on May 1 - that Jasper is exonerated. If not, we should, to use his own choice of words, let him cook.


http://www.davidosler.com/2008/03/lee_jasper_a_case_to_answer.html