Sir Richard Leese, the Labour leader of Manchester City Council and occasional self-appointed ruler of all Greater Manchester, has a blog. I don’t tend to read it very often because a) I’m not a Manchester City Councillor and b) as the blog is hosted on the MCC website (and therefore funded by the Manchester taxpayer) it tends to be devoid of political content and not very interesting.
However I’m grateful to David Ottewell for pointing out this post on the US elections and the TIF bid. We’ll step around the ludicrous inference that Barack Obama would support the TIF bid (I rather doubt he has a view either way) and instead ask ourselves why the Manchester taxpayer is funding Sir Richard’s politically partisan comments.
We all know that taxpayer-funded blogs are ludicrously poor value for money. David Miliband’s blog cost over £8000 of taxpayers’ money. Salford City Council blew over £30000 on Councillor.Info. One would hope that Sir Richard’s blog isn’t quite that high maintenance but there will nonetheless be officer time involved – and that’s before the principle of hosting rants on political hot potatoes on an official Council website.
Both WordPress and Blogger offer free blog hosting which is good enough for most political bloggers. For a small fee out of his own (or his local Labour Party’s) pocket he could even buy his own webspace and domain name. Of course, Sir Richard does have access to the Crumpsall Labour blog but he hasn’t bothered to update that since May (funny how there were a stack of posts just before the election and then it all came to an abrupt halt afterwards!) - so why does he insist on blogging at the taxpayer’s expense?
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