How effective are online UK parliamentary petitions as a mode of action for political change?

Pre-steemit days meant floods of UK government petitions on my Facebook feed. Every one promised radical change in a seemingly simplistic way. Sign your name, enough names and the petition gets discussed at parliament. But I wondered. What good are they? So I had a look.

It was clear that the purpose of these online petitions was to provide public awareness and stimulate parliamentary debate. This seems at first sight to be a decent platform for hearing the public’s voice. However the top 10 most shared petitions of 2016 didn’t end up changing anything [1].

At the time of writing there were 46 petitions debated at parliament (10,891,804 individual signatures total) [2]. Out of these there were 19 rejections, 20 parliamentary responses that negated the initial argument or request (I’ll talk about these later), and 2 commitments to look into issues further, those being: more protection for police dogs and horses, increased funding for expressive arts. The remaining had 1 unclear response, 2 had no comment, 2 had an error on the government web-page (i.e. no description was available for me)

The internet provides huge capacity for governments to connect and engage more people into political debate and the UK government online petitioning platform has been around since 2011. This was rather embarrassing when looking at websites like Change.org's relative success with changing the tampon tax rulings, although it’s still not set [3]. Websites like Change.org are however, independent, self-funded and have groups focussed on a single movement which makes change more likely. Signing your name on a online petition helps you to believe you are making the world a better place, but also has the effect to satiate public dissent so less people attend street protests. This is what is missing in these online petitions, and that is a connected, social change. Being disconnected from the context of the stories that these petitions hope to solve, makes you forget about them as easily and you signed them.

Another side of this coin is the troubling phenomena of humans in groups. Notably, Socrates was particularly dispassionate about democracy, as people in groups tend to act under emotion and follow trends in great numbers[4]. Often voting for personalities over policies (cough Trump). As a result, many petitions that have been started and gained huge numbers of votes had to be cancelled before debate as they contradicted themselves or simply didn’t state any particular measurable end point to their wishes. This is group is often when the public are seemingly voting out of ignorance to the governments work, for example increasing funding towards cancer research. The basic response is “we already do this and will continue” i.e. the petition doesn’t change anything. In many of these cases the parliament is merely stating the already good work they are doing towards these issues. But this therefore shows an ignorance and lack of objectivity within the intentions behind these petitions founders. Another example being “Ban all non-recyclable/non-compostable packaging in the UK” was a flawed request as most plastics are already recyclable and ultimately it is up to the business to decide whether or not they use them.

I’m aware politics cannot be as simple as a single person having an idea, and a new law is implemented because of the support of 10,000 or more people. The UK government knows this too and has a petitions committee to regulate and discuss petitions, although it has been down since May 8th . Especially in light of Brexit, the UK’s voice is needed to be heard now most of all. I thus criticize both ends. The governments seeming benevolence towards these petitions and the people for their other implausible requests.

Countries such as Germany, Ukraine and the US also have similar systems set-up. I would love to hear about other peoples experiences and opinions of these and the UK’s

I am not a political scientist, sociologist, policy maker or lawyer. So I am not qualified to claim that this review is truly critical, it merely serves to point at an issue. Namely that 10 billion heard voices resulted in relatively minimal action and that almost half of the petitions debated at parliament were incorrectly worded by who started them.

On a light end note: One petition that was rejected to be published on the website asked for a ban on government petitions. The government replied with confusion at their contradictory request.

Finally, tips on improving my writing style or updates on references and facts are very welcome :)

[1]http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2017/01/do-online-petitions-actually-work-numbers-reveal-truth
[2] https://petition.parliament.uk/#petitions-with-debated-outcome
[3] https://www.change.org/p/george-osborne-stop-taxing-periods-period
[4]

[5] https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/petitions-committee/news-parliament-2015/petitions-2017-election--faqs/