David Miliband's Latest Waste Of Government Money Hijacked - Good

Ever since the report by Andrew Gilligan that Iraqi intelligence has been "sexed up," the BBC have spectacularly failed to report on their politics page any possible source of embarassment to the Labour Government. Such happened yesterday.

David Miliband, the rather silly Secretary of State for the Environment, (if you remember, he's the one with the £40,000 blog), had set up a wiki on his DEFRA website. So far so good. He set this up so that the public can offer proposals about the "environmental contract." Miliband is keen on e-government, but is understood to be less keen after this farce.

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Under a list of things citizens should do, a reader had added: "Pay a higher proportion of their income to the government, and see little tangible improvement in their standard of living."

A heading of "Who are the parties to the environmental contract?" became, "Where is the party for the environmental contract? Can I come? Will there be cake? Hooray!"

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See. Utterly hilarious, but Miliband hasn't taken it in this light. He called the 170 people who messed about with it "juvenile."

Some thoughts now on why the people were right to deface the wiki.
1) Miliband, after the revelation that it cost £40,000 to set up his blog which amounts to little more than government propaganda, is a legitimate target, especially when he comes up with more ideas like this which are bound to waste money.
2) Having trawled through the eyesore that is the Labour 2005 manifesto, I fail to find any mention of this environmental charter. So it's been rammed down our throats in an undemocratic way. Shame Miliband can't recognise this.
3) When you do something like this, your political opponents will almost certainly get wind of it. Especially if it contravenes the basic idea of government. This contract lists what the citizens should do, and then what the government will do in return. Now I thought that the role of the government was to make the sacrifice first, not the ordinary people. If government required the electorate to do things before the government even considers them, what a pickle we would be in.

You know, I hope that this spectacular cock-up makes Labour think twice about Miliband as a potential successor to Blair.