New Committees and the Standards Trial
William tells me that the Commission in the Assembly is looking at the structure of committees here and very soon these will all be in place. There seems to be quite a lot of them and so with nine Assembly Members on each committee there is going to be quite a workload.
There will still be a Standards Committee and it looks like one of its first tasks will be to consider the 180 or so complaints made against me by the BNP. I asked Richard Penn, The Commissioner for Standards, when he came to tell me that he was looking into the matter whether this was a record number of complaints against an Assembly Member, and he said yes but that they were all related to the same blog that I put out slamming the BNP and all they stood for. I think there are some Assembly Members, possibly in my Group who have had more references but not so many individual complaints! I have been referred to Standards once before by Kirsty Williams, but was exonerated on that occasion.
Richard Penn did ask me if I wanted to retract or apologise for what I said about the BNP, and I said nothing doing so it looks like this will be one of the first references to the committee.
I didn’t want any of this to come out during the election campaign because I thought it might give the BNP the oxygen of publicity when they were doing far better than anybody in mainstream politics wanted during the election campaign anyway.
Peter Black said on June 11th, 2007 at 6:03 pm:
Surely your blog about the BNP was on the 18th May? Was there an earlier one as if so I would be grateful for a link as I would be interested in what you have to say.