Government Bloggers at £10K a pop
Members of Parliament have voted to give themselves £10,000 each a year to spend on things like websites to boost “public understanding” of Parliament.BBC News
Sorry? Did you just say ten thousand pounds? Each? Per Year? Per MP?
Look, I probably post more on my blog than most bloggers do. My site, including hosting, database connectivity, domain names and all, comes in at less than one hundred and fifty pounds per year. I could have set up an account on blogspot or wordpress for nothing.
Look — and this is a serious offer, open to any MP, irrespective of political allegiance — if it’s going to save in the region of £6,460,000 from the public coffers every year (more nurses anyone? police?), then I’m perfectly willing to spend ten or twenty minutes with as many MPs as I can sorting them out with a free blogspot or wordpress account — and I’m sure other bloggers would be willing to help too.
You want us to engage with the political process, don’t you? Well, I’m engaged. Are you willing to join in too?
…anyone?
Gareth Rushgrove says:
March 28th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Er. Yeah? Of course they are all going to spend it employing cheap web monkeys like John McCain rather than paying you an me.
JackP says:
March 28th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Oh no Gareth, I don’t want paying. The whole point is that they shouldn’t be spending public money on something they could have free.
Anthony says:
March 29th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Hmmm having encountered councillor.info when doing blogs for our councillors I’m not suprised.
By knocking up a Textpattern (I should have used Wordpres…) system and a front page I think we saved about 19,750 quid… a year… plus we didn’t have a table infested rats nest of a website. (though to be fair that was for 60 cllrs.)
Still can’t get them to actually blog about anything though. They make even me look prolific…
At least the MP’s will have lackies to do such lowly tasks as talking to the public.
Steve says:
March 29th, 2007 at 10:20 am
The whole subject winds me up.
I held a seminar at work for councillors recently about all things web related including the subject of websites for councillors. I’d heard wind that some of them were interested in setting up blogs and prepared some info for them, mostly that you could go and get one for free and set it up fairly easily etc etc.
Sadly only six (out of 47) turned up and their grasp of the internet was minimal. We even have a free community cms that they can use if they want but none of them were interested. I would like to say that my eight year old daughter has a better understanding of the web but that would be an insult to her.
So unfortunately MPs will vote themselves money to pay for websites because ultimately they can’t be arsed to do it themselves and would sooner waste money on paying someone else to do it.
Rob Mason says:
March 29th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Ah…so that’s why my council tax bill is going up!
paul canning says:
March 29th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
you’d think, as well, that the parties would be applying a little more stick, down to councillor level.
this is especially relevant when you’ve got a minister or pundit telling you to engage them when the local party tells them they can just say ‘am I bovverred?’ !!
disconnect??
JackP says:
March 29th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
@Rob – ah no, that would be local government you’re thinking of. MPs allowances would come from central funds.
mark fairlamb says:
March 30th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
tell them it’s coming out of their expenses allowance.
Ian Sparham says:
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:40 pm
You don’t want to know how much has already been spend setting up the Ministerial Blogs in government already. Once Milliband had one, everyone wanted one.
Look at DWP for example. Originally, it was set up using Wordpress. Until a certain contractor got wind of this, and then ’security issues’ were raised, and …..