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David Miliband’s promotional blog

David Miliband, Minister of Communities and Local Government, is happy for (undisclosed) government employees to post comments full of praise for him on the taxpayer-owned blog he uses to promote himself and his department. When a taxpayer – in this case, journalist David Tebbutt – asks if the fawning comment is indeed from a government employee, Miliband will not even publish the query, let alone answer it.

This, in a blog discussion about how MPs and ministers can prove to us through blogging that they do listen to taxpayers and are not as out of touch as we silly people imagine.

The state is not your friend and politicians certainly do not work for you, no matter whose propaganda (theirs or the taxpayers’ rights’ groups) you have bought into. Taking your money under threat of violence and actually working for you are not the same thing. David Miliband is one of many who take your money and work on their own agendas, on which self-promotion is paramount. This is an obvious fact, and David Miliband’s abuse of his taxpayer-owned blog is just one more piece of evidence which proves it.

I submitted the following comment to the David Miliband promotional blog:

Dennis Howlett – who I know personally and like – misses the point about the difference between other blogs and this one: This blog is not the private property of David Miliband. It is being financed by the taxpayer and is using government (taxpayer-funded) resources.

Which makes it all the more disgraceful that David Miliband refuses to publish comments that might make readers realise his ‘integrity’ is not quite what it seems. (I do not expect this comment to be published, either, but only hope it imbues David Miliband with some degree of shame when he reads it, if he is capable of feeling such a thing.)

Quite apart from this abuse of a taxpayer-funded blog, this is a sterling example of abhorrent customer service. Then again, when the customers don’t actually choose your ’service,’ and are forced under threat of violence to pay for it, you have the freedom to be endlessly selective about which ones you pay any mind. Right, Minister Miliband?

12 comments to David Miliband’s promotional blog

  • Johnathan Pearce

    “Dr Mr Milliband, you’re a supercilious wanker. Yours sincerely, Joe Public.”

  • Derek Buxton

    Proposed and seconded, vote now.

    Derek

  • Nick M

    Let’s DNS the fucker.

  • HJHJ

    Surely Miliband’s blog is an attempt at comedy?

    I love the parody of NuLabour speak where he goes on about the “Housing Respect Standard” which apparently is shorthand for the “Respect Standard for Housing Management Consultation”.

    Even better in the comments field where someone with a wicked sense of humour asks a gobbledegook question about whether “the Respect Agenda could simply be integrated into the estate management Key Lines of Enquiry (KLoE)” and Miliband gives a serious (if incomprehensible) response.

  • Verity

    It reads as though he had leaned forward and drizzled his brains out all over the keyboard. It means absolutely nothing, except that the man’s an opportunistic moron. Surely he doesn’t really think anyone’s going to read this plodding, self-serving, non-meaning Nulabour speak?

  • I won’t hear a word said about him,my David has always been a good boy,I blame that dreadful Blair for this,that’s what you get when you let public school types run the Labour Party.

  • Howard R Gray

    The trouble is that blogging on the public dime is just another form of hogging taxed heisted funds. So what’s new? Slavery is alive and well, it never went away, it just became taxation; we work until late June or July for the gubernacular class, we just have to love it, or do the porridge. A blog on the public dime is small spuds but our spuds are dug up nevertheless, without our consent of course.

    A self aggrandising blog is more of same from those who don’t earn the money- i.e. our hard earned wasted cash. God forbid that you want to criticise them that’s not cricket is it?

    Many of those 60’s twerps in the Maoist, Marxist, International Marxist and Marxist International idiot clubs back in college are in charge now. Guess what? You now have less freedom, more useless government, an increasingly policed state, etc. etc. add a complaint of your choice here……Weren’t those mugs in favour of freedom back then? So what was the bending of the LSE gates all about? Not much truth be told.

    “What is to be done”? You might of heard some aging Leninist say, the answer is to consign him and the rest of them to the metaphorical dustbin of history. How so? Well, take a leaf out of the life of the late Dr. Chris Tame and keep on trucking by spreading ideas and arguing the cause of rational politics. Dealing with evidence, not wishful thinking and egalitarian phantasies, is the way to go using libertarian analysis. Don’t expect much from the fairy Tories either they, like many of the GOP, just don’t get it.

    The government is a set of connected corporations with special privileges, exemptions and powers. Blogging for them is another propaganda gambit in a forlorn attempt to convince hoi poloi about how concerned “they” are. We just aren’t convinced. Counter blogging and sending in questions is, inter alia, is a good move. It is imperative that “they” never forget that their opinions just don’t cut the mustard. We will outlast them. Quite frankly, “they” on the left, have lost the war on evidence, it is just a stamina contest for now. Socialism is simply a train wreck waiting to hit the buffers. Our job is to provide the buffers. Poking jibes at silly web-logs works. Jackie D, you go girl! Trust me, they notice criticism more than anything, that is why it is usually suppressed, but you putting it out on Samizdat results in thousands reading it. Muggins here pens this screed for the Geheime Stat Police files, sorry Knacker of the yard in support of the whole jolly process.

    The state is not your friend is perhaps true. Sometimes they can be helpful, though rarely. The trouble is, as I indicated above, it (Her Nibs and her gubernaculars) is a set of loose corporations with special privileges and neat exemptions from liability, responsibility and financial discipline. Most of government is unelected and those that are, are beholden to special interests, cult and occult. Thank heaven for the internet to compete with the left and their police statist chums ind dealing with all of this junk government.

    Libertarian sentiment is vital to the future of all of us, Dr Chris Tame lived to promote the ideas and intellectual ammunition to win this war of ideas. We just have to go to it. Spreading the ashes of my libertarian wife Marilyn at the Statue of Liberty here in New York, was not just scattering memories, but the recollection of a life for which Liberty was essential. She firmly believed in liberty, in the past she would have added to this screed but she is remembered here instead, her hand writes in spirit only. She accepted that the price of liberty was eternal vigilance. I’m sure that she would have approved of some blog-knocking as a bloodless sport of liberty minded folk.

    Busting self-serving web-logs should be relished for the opportunity to poke an idea in where it will be censored. The censors will remember it of course! Spreading ideas is what we are about isn’t it? While so much seems to be same old same old, though a well chosen idea can lurk in the mind, even in a critical mind, so long as it gets put there. In politics singularities emerge, from time to time, when this or that lurking thought can come of age and change happens or the horses get scared and just stampede. Wishful thinking perhaps, but here’s to wishful thinking, at least it is thinking rather than tired old Marxist nostrums.

    Keep on with the bloodless web-knocking!

  • Andrew Duffin

    What make anyone think that Milliband writes “his” blog?

    I would imagine there’s a good chance he doesn’t even read it.

    The whole thing is no doubt a set-up run by a very junior team somewhere in his department – one assumes with his approval.

  • I never thought I would say this, but it seems that even the EU is more open than this.

    This time last year, I successfully outed an employee of Margot’s own department who was posting without declaring his interest. The moderator published my comment and the guy fessed up.

    Staggering.

    What is, of course, even more interesting is that Milliband has not sussed that he cannot hide this kind of behaviour – he will get caught, as indeed he has in this instance.

    PG

  • Verity

    The Pedant-General – of course Millibrand is stupid. Grade A. They all are in this “government”. Raised by leftie parents, angry Students’ Union adherents … in other words, boring, trite, predictable, self-absorbed, self-glamourising people who couldn’t get a job in the private sector.

    So, no surprises.

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