More on Ken Livingstone

There is an article by Jennie Bristow on the Spiked website which takes a similar line to the New Statesman editorial I discussed earlier. She makes another point that is worth quoting:

Ken 'Ban It' Livingstone has spent so much of his seasoned life campaigning to censure people whose remarks could be construed as racist and offensive, this seems like a just punishment: he has fallen foul of the intolerant climate that he helped to create.

Unfortunately, this is not simply a story about a po-faced politician getting his come-uppance. It reveals the petulant and censorious spirit of our times, in which references to the Holocaust are bandied about like common swear words and the response to anybody feeling offended is to call for official censure.