Oh, if only they’d sent Ken Livingstone on a racial sensitivities counselling course, instead of suspending him from office for four weeks. Can you imagine it? Ken, the most racially attuned man in Britain, a chap so implacably pro-Muslim, pro-Irish, right-on, anti the imperialist white hegemony, forced to sit on a blond wooden chair in some corporate hellhole while a lecturer, with the use of an overhead projector, attempted to address his inner core of racism.

“We’re all racist, Ken, even when we don’t think we are. Here’s a picture of some black people. Now, Ken, what do you think when you see them? Be honest.” If only the tribunal had a sense of irony. If only.

Ken has been suspended by the tribunal for something he said to a Jewish reporter from the London Evening Standard. The tribunal decided that his comments brought the London mayor’s office into disrepute, which perhaps suggests that they do indeed have a sense of irony.

The congestion charge, the speed humps, the bus lanes, the enormous surcharge Londoners pay to keep Ken in his hideous glass bowl by the river, his penchant for rabid, homophobic Muslim clerics, his platforms for Sinn Fein, his old Third World dictator beige safari suit and risible History Man moustache, his obsession with newts — hell, all that stuff is fine. But when he’s a bit rude to some local hack he gets slapped with a disrepute charge.

The problem arose when Ken was asked a reasonable but politically tricky question by a reporter. When he found out that the reporter worked for Associated Newspapers, Ken disparaged the journalist’s employer, likening him to a concentration camp guard who was “following orders” and in it “only for the money”. If there is one thing that Ken really hates it’s the Daily Mail — although his stand against a newspaper group that briefly supported Hitler and has (as Ken puts it) “waged war on ethnic minorities for 100 years” has not, in the past, stopped him from accepting lucrative commissions from it. But the reporter then announced that he was Jewish and was thus offended by Ken’s allusion, not understanding perhaps that denizens of the far left always liken to Nazi Germany things to which they are opposed.

Ken refused to apologise or withdraw his statement and so all hell broke loose. The Board of Deputies of British Jews howled with outrage and there were even calls for him to be prosecuted. Why? Because his comments were racist.

What utter rubbish. However intemperate, rude and fatuous Ken’s outburst might have been, it was not racist. I’m certain that Ken would be indiscriminate, on racial grounds, in whom he likened to a concentration camp guard; basically, anyone he didn’t like much, be they Aryan, Jewish or Puerto Rican.

It’s all gone a bit far, this persecution of people for saying things. Recently — perhaps while your house was being burgled, who knows — the police “investigated” Sir Iqbal Sacranie, from the Muslim Council of Britain, for having told listeners to the BBC’s PM programme that homosexuals were damaging society and, all in all, were a bit of a bad thing. Well of course he thinks that; he’s a Muslim. And so, in the same month that we propose legislation demanding that Islam be respected, our police consider prosecuting someone for articulating one of that religion’s fundamental tenets.

Nor are we alone. In Austria the historian David Irving is serving a three-year sentence for comments that he made 16 years ago denying that the Holocaust had been intended by Adolf Hitler. In the British List of Appalling Human Beings (2006), Irving comes many places nearer the top than Livingstone. Irving is a repulsive man, a true anti-semite, his mind seemingly eaten away by a consuming loathing for Jewish people (check his website). But three years in prison? I suppose you can argue that his opinion was motivated by hatred rather than the pursuit of objective truth. But a prison sentence? And banged up by the Austrians of all people, 650,000 of whom joined the Nazi party after the anschluss and one of whom — a short, dark-haired chap with a Chaplinesque moustache — has a pretty decent claim to having set the ball rolling, Holocaust wise.

Or there is Nick Griffin, chairman of the British National party and prosecuted for saying nasty things about Islam, and old Hookie himself, Abu Hamza, bunged away for seven years for having recited somewhat bloodthirsty bits of the Koran and taking them rather literally.

You cannot and should not enact laws to coerce people to have more amenable views, be it about gays, Muslims, suicide bombers or the Holocaust. Nor should you persecute them with tribunals and the like. The decadent West does not have many ideological weapons in its armoury but until recently, at least, freedom of speech was one of them. But we have become inordinately sensitive to other people’s opinions, too quick to clobber them for speaking their minds. Why have we become so insecure and intolerant? Meanwhile, I suppose London will have to struggle on without Ken. What shall they do, just how will they cope? I wonder if there will be a rebate on the quite exorbitant council tax bills by the end of the year.

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