Democracy in Action

If you are a citizen or a resident of the United Kingdom you may be unaware of the 10 Downing Street petition site. This is an official inititiative of the Prime Minister by which ordinary citizens (i.e. you and me) can petition him about any subject.

Downing Street is working in partnership with the non-partisan charitable project mySociety to provide a service to allow citizens, charities and campaign groups to set up petitions that are hosted on the Downing Street website, enabling anyone to address and deliver a petition directly to the Prime Minister.

The most three most popular open petitions at the moment are:

Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.   248,161 signatures (as at 1.57 pm today). This reached 200,000 votes at 4.30 pm yesterday.

Repeal the Hunting Act 2004. 18,490 signatures

Scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards. 10,217 signatures

If you support a petition you can sign it very quickly. If you are against a petition, you can start a counter petition.

Having started this site with a fanfare of trumpets, the Government will have a problem if it is seen simply to ignore very popular petitions. So sign up to your favourite petition today!

P.S. Apparently they gave some thought to allowing people to vote against a petition, but rejected the idea. However it does open up a vision of subjecting proposed Government legislation to a Digg or Reddit type vote.