The case has now finally worked its way through the system and he has been banned from holding public office:

A Glasgow Labour councillor has been banned from holding office over alleged comments he made about a case involving the alleged rape of a nine year old.

William O’Rourke, who represented the Greater Pollok ward, was suspended from the party last March after he allegedly suggested that the young victim may have been a willing participant and that the girl “wanted it to happen”.

O’Rourke is alleged to have made the comments at a personnel appeals committee hearing into the case after the care worker who was dismissed for allegedly having sex with the child, O’Rourke is said to have asked if the girl “wanted it to happen” because no force was used and that she was not a “typical innocent nine year old”.

He also made a comment about the child’s mother being a prostitute and went on what the Police Officer described as a ‘rant’ about promiscuous children and the need to lower the age of sexual consent.

Glasgow Labour were accused of closing ranks in order to protect O’Rourke after it emerged Baillies Jim Scanlan and Jim Todd were also present at the hearing, but had said nothing.

O’Rourke’s comments were only made public after a Strathclyde Police Officer who was a witness at the hearing reported concerns and an official complaint was lodged with the Standards Commission for Scotland, which regulates the behaviour of politicians.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

As The Observer reports:

Fresh revelations have raised a series of questions about the links between the former Conservative deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft and a company responsible for luxury projects across a string of islands…

Who controlled Johnston International, which won building contracts across the Caribbean worth tens of millions of pounds, has triggered awkward questions for the Tories, and above all for their major donor, Lord Ashcroft.

The Tory peer, who has given the party more than £10m, is spending a small fortune on lawyers and spin doctors to deal with inquiries about his relationship with Johnston, whose interests before it collapsed with debts of $30m stretched across Belize, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago.

The company, and its relationship with politicians in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British overseas territory, plays a central role in a libel action being brought by Ashcroft against the Independent newspaper.

A BBC Panorama investigation, broadcast last Monday, suggested that the Tories’ former deputy chairman had misled the stock market about his links to the firm.

And now an investigation by a court-appointed liquidator into the relationship between Johnston’s parent company, a plethora of interlinked companies and Ashcroft’s British Caribbean Bank (BCB), is raising as many questions as it answers.

You can read about those questions in the full article.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

So to round it off, here’s that photograph from the Labour leadership contest of Ed Miliband bravely standing up to Rupert Murdoch:

This time it’s the question of pensions, and whether they should be increased in line with the consumer prices index (CPI) or the retail price index (RPI).

The government is switching from RPI to CPI for public sector pensions, resulting in Early Day Motion 1629 signed by one Ed Miliband on 17 March 2011 which condemns the move.

So far, so not surprising.

But wait.

The Labour Party has a pension scheme for its own staff.

I think you can guess the rest… yes indeed, at the start of 2011 the Labour Party, leader one Ed Miliband, had switched from using RPI to CPI. But that hasn’t stopped him continue to criticise the switch.

In the case of the public sector pay freeze, at least it can be said Ed Miliband changed his mind. On this one he’s left being both for and against the same policy.

Hat-tip: Paul Wild on Facebook amongst others

2010: “Absolutely the wrong thing to do” (Channel 4 News, July)

2012: “I think it’s right” (BBC News, January)

Hearing him attack Boris Johnson is certainly not a surprise.

But hearing him attack Boris Johnson for saying what Ken Livingstone himself said previously? That’s a bit odd, shall we say.

Compare and contrast now and then.

The now:

Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone were engulfed in a war of words today over whether Londoners are too “lazy” to find work. The Mayor claimed some young people in the capital lacked the “energy” to go out and get jobs which were instead going to immigrants. His Labour challenger Ken Livingstone immediately accused him of branding Londoners “lazy and workshy”.

And the then:

The Mayor [Ken Livingstone] has attacked Londoners who are too lazy to hold down jobs. He said many of the long-term unemployed could not be bothered to get out of bed in time.

f there is one thing that unites Conservatives it is the desire to win the next general election outright.  Certain things follow from this.  The first is that we need more votes at the next election than we received at the last.  This means attracting people who voted for a different party last year.  This in turn imposes two requirements: to address the things they care about most, and to show that we are changing the things that put them off voting Conservative in the past.

You may think this is so obvious that is hardly needs stating.  Indeed, Conservative audiences always nod earnestly when you tell them.  Yet some Tories have an apparently limitless capacity to detach this objective from the way they actually behave.

What do we know about voters’ priorities?  We know they are anxious about the economy, in terms of growth and jobs, not just cutting the deficit.  We know they care more about the NHS than they think we do, that they believe it is subject to cuts and that they do not know how our reforms are supposed to benefit them.  We know they are not sure whether our promises on immigration are being delivered.  We know they do not think this government is dealing as effectively with crime as they hoped and expected.  And we know that for many people, the main barrier to voting Conservative is that they do not think we share the concerns of people like them.  But which issue has the last week shown still seems to exercise our party above all others?

You can read his full post over on ConHome.

The official in charge of the London Labour Party has been removed after saying that Ken Livingstone, Labour’s candidate for the mayoralty, “cannot win” next year’s election if he continues as now.

Hilary Perrin, Labour’s London regional director, has been moved back to her previous role overseeing all the regional directors after Ken and his chief of staff, Simon Fletcher, appealed to Ed Miliband’s office. Another London Labour official, Paul Harrington, has also left his job. An awayday to plan the campaign, supposed to take place last Friday, was cancelled. (Daily Telegraph)

You can read the full story on the Telegraph website.

I fear it is all going to end in tears when someone puts our own punctuation habits under the microscope, but before it does I have exciting, related news to report.

I have blogged before about the fall-out amongst Cotswold Conservatives following their big losses to the Liberal Democrats in May’s local elections, including their fear that they are seen as “toffs legislating for toffs”.

Now, however, I have got hold of a copy of their full election post-mortem, and therefore have seen not only the full list of reasons Cotswold Conservatives have come up with for their electoral hammering, but also the order in which they have placed them.

Number one is a familiar one from post-mortems in all parties – blaming another part of their party for not giving them enough support. Further down the list are other factors, including the toffs problem, raising parking charges and the controversy over the council spending £19,000 on a magician.

But wait, what sneaks in at the top of the list, above all those, and in fact coming second only to blaming other parts of their own party?

It is this: “Grammatically incorrect literature”.

I salute the electors of the Cotswolds for their exacting standards when it comes to deciding who to vote for.

Note: Of course, any spelling or grammatical errors in this post are deliberate irony, ok?

There is a council by-election campaign underway in Shortlands ward, Bromley where the excellent Anuja Prashar is the Liberal Democrat candidate. (So excellent, I’ll forgive her for organising a raffle once that broke all my Lib Dem raffle rules.) She has been campaigning against council plans to axe the lollipop ladies at two local schools and, as part of that, presented a petition signed by 283 residents to the council.

And then things started being done differently…

For the first time, Bromley Council decided to respond personally and directly to all the signatories on a petition, posting out a letter to all of them – using council stationery and council postage – from the relevant Conservative Cabinet member, Colin Smith.

A very generous soul might think that perhaps Bromley Council had been planning to start writing directly to every petition signer and it’s just chance this started during a council by-election campaign in response to a petition organised by a rival candidate. Oh and that the council wanted to spring a pleasant surprise on everyone which is why that decision had been kept secret.

But even such an extremely generous soul might struggle a bit when it comes to the text of the letters. For what is in them? Not simply a reply on the issue of the petition, but a defence of several other controversial council policies, none of which were mentioned in the petition and even promoting the council’s work in other areas.

The Chief Executive has been asked to explain what his council is up to and the District Auditor has been asked to investigate.