There’s currently a fake “petition” on the Labour website.

Ostensibly it’s gathering signatures representing opposition to the bedroom tax, but in fact its only purpose is to harvest email addresses so that Labour can then bombard unwitting recipients with dodgy, untruthful solicitations for cash. (What would actually be the point of a petition about the bedroom tax at this stage?)

That’s not the terrible thing about it, though.

The page displays the name of a supposed person who’s “just signed” the petition every second or so, but if you refresh the page, whether you do it after a minute or an hour, the exact same names will come up again in the same order – interspersed with the odd real one – but the number of signatories won’t have changed correspondingly.

It’s a tacky scam aimed at separating the gullible from their money, and indeed if you click the button to add your name you’ll be asked for a donation no fewer than three times before it’ll let you go, as well as begged to spam your friends on social media and go and knock on people’s doors.

That’s not the terrible thing either. Because if you look at the page’s HTML source code, you’ll see that sure enough, the entire list* of names is predetermined.

But the truly, blood-chillingly terrible thing is this. In constructing this shambolic piece of panhandling fakery, the party that wants to govern the entire UK was tasked with a seemingly simple, achievable job: think up 35 different British first names.

And Labour couldn’t even manage that.

Jean, Jane, Jean, Laura, Brian, Laura. That’s the best they could do. They couldn’t even space them out a bit so they didn’t appear right next to each other.

Vote Labour, everyone. Have your country run by morons.

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*EDIT 12.55pm: Since we started messing around with it by signing up under comedy names, Labour have hastily recoded the page so it does sometimes add actual ones to the list, and filters out names against a whitelist.

It still loops the stored list of 35 on refresh for 15-20 minutes at a time, it seems to only insert new real ones occasionally, and the number displayed as the total bears absolutely no relation to anything else. But they’re clearly keen readers of Wings, and so about 5% less inept than we initially thought.