The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, yesterday appealed to the British High Court against his four-week suspension for making anti-Semitic remarks to a reporter.

The suspension has triggered widespread dismay, even by the mayor's political opponents, including Tony Blair, because the largest personal democratic mandate in Europe has been overturned by unelected officials...

...But even he was stunned last week when an obscure committee, the Adjudication Panel of the Standards Board for England, suspended him for bringing his office into disrepute.

Because the office of elected mayor is less than a decade old, this is the first major test of the rules under which Mr. Livingstone has been penalized. The suspension is due to take effect tomorrow, but it is expected that the High Court will grant a stay of execution while the appeal is heard.

The controversy erupted more than a year ago, when Mr. Livingstone emerged late in the evening from a party to honor Britain's first openly homosexual member of Parliament, Chris Smith, to find Oliver Finegold, a Jewish reporter from the London Evening Standard, asking him polite but insistent questions.

Mr. Livingstone, who has a history of embarrassing incidents after drinking, responded with an extraordinary display of aggression, repeatedly accusing Mr. Finegold of being a "concentration camp guard" and a "Nazi war criminal," despite the journalist informing him that he was Jewish, adding: "Your paper is a load of scumbags." Mr. Finegold did not lose his cool, but recorded the outburst on tape.

The Mayor's comments were widely condemned, but he refused to apologize, justifying them by reference to the record of Associated Newspapers, the firm which owns the London Evening Standard, during the 1930's, when its owner, Lord Rothermere, expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler...

...The current defence of his insult as legitimate if offensive political expression indicates a general refusal to take seriously the deeply racist nature of his political strategy. He systematically provokes Jews in order to curry favour with a variety of political and religious constituencies. Interestingly, he incurs no serious political damage for this policy. While one can agree that it is unacceptable for an unelected administrative committee to suspend an elected official for a non-criminal act, this does not conclude the matter. Where is the general public opprobrium that one would expect as a corrective to such behaviour in a genuinely liberal society? Its absence suggests that for a large part of British public opinion this behaviour is entirely acceptable and offers no cause for alarm. It is a mistake to insist on an apology from a political figure who is sufficiently depraved as to regard ethnic politics as a legitimate instrument of self-advancement. And to come on bended knee with a request for an apology, as the official leadership of the Jewish Community has repeatedly done, is worse - as irrelevant in this context as it is self-debasing...