Brian Paddick Picked By Liberal Democrats For London Mayoral Race

2012 race will be rematch between Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone and former Met deputy assistant commissioner.












Brian Paddick is once again the Liberal Democrat candidate for mayor of London, pitted against Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone.

London's mayoral election next year will be a rematch between Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick, after the former Scotland Yard deputy assistant commissioner was selected as the Liberal Democrats' candidate for the second time.

Paddick, who came third in the 2008 mayoral election when Johnson ousted Livingstone after two terms, was declared the winner after a four-horse race in which the former MP Lembit Opik was eliminated in the first round.

Opik lost the safe Lib Dem seat of Montgomeryshire in the 2010 general election. On Friday, in an election run on the single transferrable vote, he secured just 252 votes, coming fourth behind London councillor Brian Haley, with 316.

Paddick narrowly won on second preference votes (1,567), with Mike Tuffrey, a member of the London assembly, close behind on 1,476. About 6,000 London party members were eligible to vote.

Paddick, who had said he was undecided about standing when he put in his nomination papers in June, has pledged to fight for a "fair deal" for Londoners, to protect local community policing and to hold down bus fares.

He thanked Liberal Democrat members "who placed their trust and confidence in me to be their candidate for mayor of London – I won't let you down".

Opik, who had previously claimed that "forces within the party" were trying to prevent him standing, conceded defeat before the final result was announced. He told the Evening Standard: "I stood because I felt the Lib Dems desperately need to reach out beyond their traditional voters. Boris and Ken are celebrity politicians. I fear the party doesn't grasp the implication of this." He was not quitting. "I'll be back," he said.

Some in the party are resigned to next year's election being a Johnson-Livingstone rematch, and see the mayoral election as a way of boosting the party's profile for the London assembly elections taking place at the same time. Currently it holds just three seats out of 25.

Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister, said Paddick provided Londoners with a "real, credible alternative" to Johnson and Livingstone.

"Brian's experience is exactly what London needs right now. Whether dealing with the aftermath of the riots or phone hacking and corruption in the Metropolitan police, Brian has shown in recent weeks that he has the authority and leadership London needs."The phone hacking scandal that rocked News International, the Metropolitan police and the political establishment is likely to surface in the 2012 contest. Paddick, whose phone was hacked by the now defunct News of the World, is among a group of public figures who have sought permission for a judicial review of the Met's handling of the phone hacking scandal.

Johnson, the incumbent mayor who declared his intention to seek a second term a year ago, came under fire over the summer for having dismissed reports that News of the World's use of phone hacking was more widespread than first thought as "codswallop" – a claim that turned out to be wide of the mark.

Livingstone, who was the first to declare his intention to stand again, was mayor when the original police investigation was conducted in 2006.

Paddick, who retired from the police in 2007 after 30 years of service, told the Evening Standard on Friday that reformed gang members should go into school to warn children of the dangers of getting involved in violent crime, after the recent riots in the capital raised fears about violent young people.

David Starkey Claims 'The Whites Have Become Black'

Historian provokes storm of criticism after remarks during a televised discussion
about the riots on BBC2's Newsnight.

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The historian and broadcaster David Starkey has provoked a storm of criticism after claiming during a televised discussion about the riots that "the problem is that the whites have become black".

In an appearance on BBC2's Newsnight, Starkey spoke of "a profound cultural change" and said he had been re-reading Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech.

"His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham," he said.

"But it wasn't inter-community violence. This is where he was absolutely wrong." Gesturing towards one of the other guests, Owen Jones, who wrote Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes, Starkey said: "What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black."

An outcry on Twitter began with the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn asking the BBC: "Why was racist analysis of Starkey unchallenged? What exactly are you trying to prove?" A spokesman for Newsnight said: "I think that [presenter] Emily Maitlis very robustly challenged David Starkey.

"The two guests [Jones and the writer and education adviser Dreda Say Mitchell] that we had also quite clearly took issue with his comments."

Jones told the Guardian he believed Starkey's comments were "a career-ending moment". He said: "He tapped into racial prejudice at a time of national crisis. At other times, those comments would be inflammatory but they are downright dangerous in the current climate.

"I fear that some people will now say that David Starkey is right, and you could already see some of them on Twitter. I am worried about a backlash from the right and he will give legitimacy to those views in the minds of some." On the programme, Starkey said: "The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together.

"This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country."

The historian and broadcaster, whose historical documentaries on Channel 4 about the Tudors established him as a household name, went on to name-check Tottenham's Labour MP: "Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white."

He was challenged by Mitchell, who ridiculed his theories about the speech patterns of young people.

"You keep talking David about black culture. Black communities are not homogenous. So there are black cultures. Lots of different black cultures. What we need to be doing is ... thinking about ourselves not as individual communities ... as one community. We need to stop talking about them and us.