Sunday 3 May 2009

Petitions and their Recipients

The petition calling on the Prime Minister to resign is on the Downing Street website and the signatories are approaching 50,000. Fine, but the purpose of the petition is not to obtain a new Leader for the Labour party, or at least I don't believe that is why so many have signed it. It's aim is to cause the resignation of the Executive and the calling of a general election.

Why then does the Head of State, who dissolves Parliament and thus precipitates a general election, not have a web site and the facility to petition there? Petitions to monarchs are a particularly well-established practice. It's all very well our Head of State acting in an even-handed fashion to all and every one of the governments that come and go but this one refuses to go despite collapsing the UK economy, putting millions out of work, causing record bankruptcies, destroying civil liberties and doing a fine job of work on the Constitution too. Not to speak of registering a level of loathing for its Executive that, frankly, I cannot remember ever being expressed before.

There should be a modern facility for petitioning the State, as well as the government of the day.

3 comments:

Kalvis Jansons said...

That is a very interesting thought, and I will put it on http://news.kalvis.com/

Anonymous said...

You can write to the Queen.

hatfield girl said...

Not good enough. Writing to the Queen is not the same as petitioning the Head of State.

Many have written to the Queen, we need to see the signatures on the petition mounting up.