Thursday, March 29, 2007

Blair gives misleading answer to Parliament about ePetitions?

It looks like the the person responsibile for the e-petitions on the Downing Street website who was called a "prat" by an unnamed minister after allowing the road pricing petitions up is off the hook.

When questioned about the cost of administrative support of the ePetition system, Blair answered saying that "it is potentially part of the work of all those involved in e-petitions and handling correspondence in my office" so it would be impossible to quantify the cost.

I have but a one word response to that, which is, characteristically, "bollocks". If everyone is potentially responsible then why is it, when you submit a petition as I did for a joke, you receive confirmation from team@petitions.pm.gov.uk and the email is signed "-- the ePetitions team"?

Call me old fashioned, but Blair's answer seems to me to be somewhat misleading. If he has an "ePetitions team" then he cannot equally claim that the ePetitions are managed by everyone in his office. Unless of course he's just made-up the "ePetitions team" to make it look like he has staff dedicated to it, but he wouldn't do that would he? That would be dishonest!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I understand it's being done by MySociety.org, so maybe that's them.

dizzy said...

In which case the answer remains bollocks. My understanding was MySocity just did the website creation and code and don't manage it. Either way, he's still talking bollocks.

Chris Paul said...

And your point is?