So it’s nearly July and…

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/

Have the government just given up completely on this rather inconvenient slice of democracy?

They have become a bit of a waste of time IMO. I expect they’ll be back in the autumn when Parliament returns.

Meanwhile, on change.org:

Stop the 11% pay rise for MPs’ salaries
387,896 signatures.

Keep the Ban on Fox Hunting
362,939 signatures.

We call on the Government and the Prime Minister to provide a national referendum on the planned abolition of the Human Rights Act.
238,498 signatures.

Signing an e-petition is as likely to have an effect on the democratic machintions of this country as standing in the street, drunkenly shouting your opinion at passing buses.

Not that that stops me doing that on a daily basis, but at least I’m under no illusions….

Binners is correct. Utterly pointless exercise.

Signing an e-petition is as likely to have an effect on the democraticmachintions of this country as standing in the street, drunkenly shouting your opinion at passing buses.

The whole point of the official government e-petition site was that once they get above a certain threshold (100,000 signatures I believe) then they get an official government response and are debated in the Commons (or at least considered for debate by the cross-party Backbench Business Committee):

[video]http://youtu.be/VHyynfAAY-E[/video]

But of course, that doesn’t work for unofficial third-party sites like change.org

In Scotland fewer signatures are required hence a Petition demanding effective thyroid testing, diagnosis and treatment has been successful so the Scottish Government are having to act, although very slowly.

The whole point of the official government e-petition site was that once they get above a certain threshold (100,000 signatures I believe) then they get an official government response and are debated in the Commons (or at least considered for debate by the cross-party Backbench Business Committee):

The problem with that is the 100,000 threshold is too low – the idea has been adopted from other countries with smaller populations but we’ve kept the same 100,000 threshold

All kinds of petitions are pretty much meaningless though, the number of signatures you collect has no context. If a petition has a 100,000 signatures does that mean everyone invited to sign it has done so? – the motion represented by the petition has 100% support of all those approached? Or does it mean 10 million people were canvassed and were almost universally opposed to the proposal and only 1% were prepared to sign it?

You should start a petition calling for them to be reinstated…

Very true, petitions are very flawed. But then so is voting 🙂

What we can say is that a certain number of people feel strongly enough about an issue that they are willing to put their name to a petition, so perhaps it needs to be discussed and debated.

100,000 may well be too low, but the change.org petitions I highlighted all have more than double that.

The petition site is now back.

https://petition.parliament.uk

Finally.

And straight to the top:
To debate a vote of no confidence in Health Secretary the Right Hon Jeremy Hunt (174,393 signatures)

😆

They seem to have removed it now but yesterday if you cicked on the portcullis icon 8 times then a geeky webdev message appeared!