Lawrence Bailey, the previous Labour leader of Swansea Council, has been banned from being a councillor for two and a half years. There were two reasons for this ban. The first: the finding of indecent images on his computers on more than one occassion. The second, and more unusual: the finding of 253 documents on his laptop computer, most of which were letters to the Swansea Evening Post but:
“Although the police examination showed Mr Bailey as being the author, the documents purported to have originated from various residents of Swansea,” stated the report [in to his behaviour].
“In some cases the addresses did not exist or the postcodes did not match them, or the true residents had no knowledge of the letters.”
The BBC report into Lawrence Bailey has further details.
Hat tip: Peter Black
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9 Comments
Porn is great, faking letters from constituents isn’t. How disappointing that LibDem voice should even mention the porn.
Shame on you.
Erm, Colin:
1) it’s been widely reported – for LDV not to mention it would seem, and be, odd, even prudish; and
2) the porn he looked at was on council computers, not his own, which is a clear misuse. Why should the Council treat a councillor different from how it would treat an employee?
No. Prudish is a definition of someone who gets upset over a bit of porn & is sad enough to introduce rules about it. Whilst of course loving it really, which is hypocrisy. Of which there is, sadly a great deal surrounding lovely porn & lovely deviant consensual sex.
oh, and ordinary common-or-garden sex too, come to think of it.
@1, 3 & 4
But did the residents of Swansea feel that was why they provided this gentleman with his equipment … er, so to speak
Oooerrrr, matron!
Council issued computers should be used for Council business.
Well, obviously councillors (and staff) are going to stray a bit. Personal emails, the occasional peek at LDV.
But spending one’s whole day downloading porn from the internet (as a Labour councillor in Ealing did) is crossing the line somewhat.
And don’t forget. Many Labour politicians have a history of posing as feminists – and under Blair, as guardians of public morality. It does no harm to show up their hypocrisy once in a while.
ColinW has a point here.
I’m sorry, but Colin W has no point at all.
If a councillor wishes to indulge in looking at pornogrpahy, even if it is legal porn, then he should do so on his own computer. If a member of staff had been caught doing this they would have been fired.
Nich’s hit it on the head – a staff member would have been disciplined and fired, and so should a councillor be. The difference is that the cllr – in theory – could be returned at a later date, whereas the staff member would have a real career crisis to cope with.
Labour’s always been notorious for a sort of ‘we’ll make the laws for the rest of you to follow’ approach when in power – just look at what’s unravelling on the funding front. It’s (almost) beyone belief that they’d go to so much effort to work around a law that they introduced!