Fiona Melville

8th Aug 2011

The e-petitions site is back!

Well, once it had recovered from the first day’s surge of interest… When the police stats website first went live, it too crashed under the weight of demand. I spoke to someone who had been involved with that one, who said that there was no point paying for the capacity required for the first day because it wouldn’t be needed in the long-term – which I think is entirely the wrong way round. If you are expecting a huge surge of interest in something like this, it has to work from the word go; because if not, people become disengaged.

Given that the previous petitions site had had so many people on it (didn’t the one to have Gold as our national anthem have more than a million signatories?), you’d have thought that they might have been better prepared this time round. But no.

Anyway that’s not really my point – though it does feed into it. You see, if you make people feel like you’re ignoring them, unless they are REALLY committed then they won’t come back. And if the moderates don’t come back – either because they’re happy with the current situation, or because they don’t feel that strongly one way or another, all you get is the extremes – who are louder and more insistent; I think there’s a lesson here for everyone on the need to ponder whether you’re getting a balanced picture of a given topic…

The current top twenty e-petitions include three campaigns to bring back the death penalty, and three on withdrawing from the EU. I’d imagine there are more on both topics which have fewer signatures as well. This is the same problem as I’ve described with charities before – there are various organisations with great ideas and objectives, but because they are relatively small and replicate other ideas, they don’t carry as much weight as they could.

I like the idea of e-petitions. I like that we as citizens can make our MPs discuss things, and put their views on the record. But if you’re serious about the issue, as opposed to making a name for yourself, you have to work with other groups. You have to therefore be content with perhaps not achieving absolutely everything you want – but a focused weight of numbers is what will make the difference.

I don’t want to bring back the death penalty, as I’ve written before. But I don’t in any way have a problem with debating it and explaining why it’s a bad idea. While we may all grumble about governments not listening to us, at least these e-petitions will force them to tell us why not – and perhaps, if our politicians treat voters like adults, perhaps we will also be sufficiently grown-up to understand why they say what they do.