Gov justifies e-petitions as MPs mull upping debate threshold The Coalition government's e-petitions website has been defended by the team working on the Cabinet Office's digital-by-default agenda, after politicos considered upping the 100,000-votes-to-get-it-debated-in-the-Commons threshold. In a post on the government digital service blog, Peter Herlihy - delivery manager for the GovUK …
"He pointed out that media outlets have given such online petitions significant coverage when they came close to 100,000 signatures"
Make it a threshold of 75,000,000 and even with Ms May's open immigration policy it would take a few years to have that many people voting.
Will save parliament being forced to debate whether to schedule a motion to consider debating bringing back capital punishment for serious offences such as tax evasion, or in the borough of Westminster, for parking. Instead they can all go home (on expenses) and have a nice cup of tea.
Does anyone know why we have politicians? Just wondering, it bound to be my fault somehow.
The fact that a 3 line whip was used to crush free voting on a petitioned vote for a referendum on leaving the EU shows the utter contempt/idiocy of the (Socialist) Political Class, especially for the really big important stuff! The mere idea of increasing the signature threshold demonstrates just how arrogant they are.
This petition project has already been demonstrated to be yet another farce of the moribund (Socialist) Political Class, with its political parties and career politicians; the stasist Socialist parties still don't get it, without a free vote, the whole project is pointless, worse seen to be pointless too!
The existence of the Tea Party in the USA and the occupy movement around the world shows that people are waking up, abet groggy and confused from the Neo-Roman Bread (easy credit, consumerism and state bribes) and Circuses (mass corporatist media and mass sports), and have begun looking for ways to break free of the prevalent and oppressive Stasism and Corporatism.
Note: Stasists is a word coined in the book "The Future and its Enemies" by Virginia Postel (1999), for Statists and Technocrats of both the Left and Right wing (Socialist ideologies) i.e. those who resist dynamism in favour of the status quo, ever greater regulation, thus stagnation and decline. The Left and Right wing are just polarities of the bankrupt Socialism ideology, thus irrelevant; the real battle is between stasis and dynamism, hopefully this will become more widely acknowledged.
"said that it has now been more than 100 days since the e-petitions site landed"
It might only be 100 days since this site landed, and admittedly at least this does have a threshold but there's been an e-petition site since at least 2007 : http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/.
Although the last government was as determined as this one to ignore the wishes of the plebs.
Backbenchers are evidently far too smitten with the magnificence of their own genius to allow debate they aren't seen to control. Typical middleman mentality; not so different from pimps, recruitment consultants, estate agents and other unsavoury sleaze brokers. I've met a fair few MPs who have really impressed me over the years, a great deal more who comfortably fit the 'local councillor who got lucky' mould. In other words, self serving, arrogant pricks.
Quite irritating to see some minor politician whining about having to spend time "debating" whether or not the public's wishes should actually be mentioned by the rest of the politicians or not - the obvious solution is to remove this Backbench Committee from the process and have the petition scheduled automatically, taking precedence over all other business since, unlike the stuff the politicians want to talk about, this is being imposed by their employers.
Better still, bypass Parliament too and have the petition question put directly to the electorate as a binding referendum. Somehow I doubt these turkeys would endorse that particular Christmas either, but it would remove this particular excuse for them whining about us taking up their precious over-remunerated time with mere democracy...
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