03 October, 2007

David Miliband, Blogger

David Miliband, Britain’s foreign minister, has started blogging. His reasons:

Diplomacy is traditionally seen as something that happens between governments and behind closed doors, but as the distinction between domestic and foreign becomes blurred, increasingly foreign policy is becoming the domain of all people. Whether it is climate change, the threat from extremism or the fight against poverty and degradation, these are challenges that have an impact on all of us and we can all play a part in tackling them.

Through this blog I want to explain my priorities, how I approach my job as Foreign Secretary and my ideas about the issues we face. But I also want to use it to hear the views of the readers across the world who have their own perspectives and ideas.

That’s quite excellent, but the last time Miliband started a blog, it was alleged to be costing the British taxpayer “somewhere approaching £40,000 a year,” in a classic example of government inefficiency—a blog costs next to nothing to set up and maintain. If he wishes to portray himself as transparent and accountable, he should first indicate on his new blog how much taxpayers’ money is going into it. After that we can look past the clunky prose and figure out if this is just an exercise in public relations, or Miliband really wishes to engage with the world. If it is the latter, hats off to him.

(Link to Milband’s blog via FP Passport, which Gautam John pointed me to via email.)

Update: Ravikiran Rao writes in:

You’ve mentioned that a blog “costs next to nothing to set up and maintain”. But that is true only if you ignore the opportunity cost of the blogger’s time. For comparison, if a CEO of a major corporation blogs, he will almost surely have an assistant to do the research for him, and that will cost him something. Given that, 40,000 pounds a year does not seem hugely inefficient to me. It is inefficient only if you think that blogging is just hot air, which seems to be the premise of the criticism.

Good point. But the premise of my criticism is not that blogging is hot air, which would be rather ironic given the medium of my message, but that money coercively gathered from citizens should, at the very least, be responsibly spent. So the big question here would be whether Miliband’s blog is worth the taxpayers’ money spent on it, a matter that can be left to individual taxpayers to decide for themselves. To do this, they should first know what Miliband really is spending.

Also, if Miliband’s blog really has value, there should be better ways of monetizing it than using funds coercively gathered from hapless citizens. And that principle applies to more than just the blog.