Steve Webb, Lib Dem MP, has recently said online that online campaiging such as e-petitions offers a great way to get people involved in campaigning. I completely agree, I think that the more avenues open to people to easily show their disgust, horror, disapproval or disenfranchisement with policy the better. However one area that I don't agree any of this works is E-Petitions.

The government E-Petition website that lets people submit petitions online to the PM is a farce that only creates the illusion that you are actually starting to make a change. Sure enough there are hundreds if not thousands of irrelevant petitions on there that never accrue more than 60 or so votes and thus never warrant the attention of the Prime Minister's office, but there are also plenty on there that manage to get over 1000.

given that around 1000 is all it takes to usually get parties hot under the collar when it comes to popularity polls it strikes me as very odd that the prime minister and his lackies can shrug off some of the requests of the British public with such ease. For example, a recent petition was lobbying...

to Keep Cambridge Free - Oppose congestion charging in Cambridge, provide no funding for it, and require a referendum before the council can introduce it.

The response can be found here and I'd suggest you don't hold your breath for anything startling given almost 9,000 people signed this petition. You see, as much as you may think a petition is there to actually change things it is most certainly not. No one should really go in to such a system with such a belief as petitions in any form are never intended to change policy instantaneously, only to inform of a general mood. Unfortunately, as it can be seen, the office of the PM doesn't even really care to take the opinions of the people on board for the future.

I have to say that despite feeling good about the online e-petition system when it first came out, I now regularly advise people not to bother. The system for getting a petition online is laborious and long winded, and assuming you even manage to get your petition seen amongst the volume of bollocks that is displayed by the general individually outraged peoples of the nation with little support from anyone else over their specifically local issue the petition is unlikely to be answered in the time frame you wished. Once it does get answered all you will get is a reiteration of the government line that kind of defeats the purpose of even sending the petition in the first place.

You see, Gordon, or whoever really reads E-Petitions, we KNOW what the government line is, that's why we write petitions. If we know what the government line is, and we write a petition because we disagree with such a line then how on earth do you think we will be appeased by a reiteration of that line? Gordon Brown wants to re-engage with the public, the first and easiest start he could make is to up the threshold on number of votes required to warrant a response to a petition and then to actually show how he is going to take the opinions of the public on this matter on board and progress them further, not shut them out with a dismissal that is far too wordy and ultimately just tells Joe Bloggs and his mates to "fuck off" and stop bothering the office in the first place.