The leader listens?

The leader of Barnet Council Cllr Mike Freer (also Tory PPC for Finchley and Golders Green) has a chequered career when it comes to blogging. His first attempt was in a blog on the Hendon Times Group website. This was free and presumably reached a wide audience. However Cllr Freer withdrew from that blog when a shiny new blog started up with its own domain name ‘leaderlistens.com’. At the last council meeting I asked a number of questions about his new blog. Why? Because it is costing the council tax payers of Barnet £400. Not a huge sum of money but why pay when there are plenty of free places to set up a blog such as this one?

Then there is the issue of censorship. For a long time there were no comments on the blog. I knew at least one person (step forward RogT) who had posted comments. Now the council has a duty to be careful what is published in its name, although Barnet’s record on this is not very good. It allowed a video to be posted on one of its sites which contained anti-Semitic comments. RogT’s comments were straightforward and as far as I could see there was nothing in them that could cause offense. However his comments were not published. Magically just before the council meeting a number of comments were published and a few more have been published since.

It will be interesting to see the stats for the website to see just how many people are visiting the site. I’m all in favour of Cllr Freer having a blog but why are we paying for it?