Every UK petition

On france, we currently have one with 2.1M signatures, gov still said nope (petition against reintroduction of dangerous pesticide, backed by sciencists community)

Don't you guys have a more effective way of convincing the government?
- Milk poured all over the streets of Paris worked well for the dairy farmers to the best of my knowledge. Imagine the fucking smell two days later.
  The French are first class protesters.
- Yellow vests, Citroëns on fire, Guillotines
There is no legal binding whatsoever?
- It compells the government to talk about it.
  That's it.
  "so what shall we do about that petition then?"
  "tell them to shove it?"
  "great ! Good work everyone, let's have lunch."

I signed the petition but I had zero belief it would actually result in anything.

We don't actually live in a democracy, that's just something they tell us while they do whatever the bloody hell they want.

Meanwhile Nigel Farage is just racking up these own goals while getting ready to sell the whole country in three years time.
- Crossing my fingers for the Corbyn party...
reminds me of my philosophy teacher arguing against someone because my teacher said that we don't live in a democracy, but a lot of people disagreed.
i still remember the look of disapointment in their face, since they had just told us the definition of democracy😭
- I love people who say "we don't live in a democracy because we live in a republic." Yeah, we don't live in a republic either, bitch.
It's a representative democracy, not direct democracy.
- It's Lizard Democracy.
- And why should it be that way? You can certainly have a mixed system. In many American states, for example, official petitions can result in referendums to enact laws without the legislature's intervention.
- It's a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
- Just a reminder that downvoting something doesn't stop it being true.

Scotland stopped voting Labour into power over a decade ago. If only England had the balls to do it too. Torys and Labour, two sides of the same corrupt coin. Come England, youre better than that. Starmer is a tory cunt. Vote greens, or Libdems, or anyone else buy those two corrupt scum parties.

~~Labour~~ Starmer is just warming shitface Nigel's seat at this point

I mean 122,000 out of 60 million isn’t a lot.

Could likely get 5 million to say banning people based on colour is a good idea, but I don’t agree.

Only need 500 (out of 40mil) + one MP sign off for the government to legally have to respond in Canada. They don't have to say yes but they have to officially acknowledge you at least. I was pretty surprised by how low that threshold is.
- It's only like 10k here too, but the response is always "we have no plans to change anything"
why are you including infants amd people without the right to vote in your figure?
there's less than 48mill who can vote btw
That's not the point. The point of this post is that the government didn't respond.
- I read that as the governments response was no. Not that they didn’t respond.
  The government in the UK will respond if 10,000 signatures and will debate in parliament if 100,000 signatures.
- They did, they said no.

The purpose of online petitions is to provide a means for people to psychologically discharge their righteous anger at something and need to be heard about it, by "doing something", with a "something" which the politicians can safelly ignore.

It's a lot harder to ignore large demonstrations and even harder to ignore people activelly campaigning at the grassroots level in their electoral circles to make specific asshole politicians loose their seats, so best have the ~~plebes~~ citizens discharge their anger on some automated online straight-to-trash People's Will recorder.

Wait until you hear about protests
- Just don't inconvenience anyone in any way.
  Being slightly irritating is a terrorist activity now.

Counterpoint: Brexit

Petition
Bad thing please
Government responded
Yes
The petition to reverse Brexit got something like 4 million signatures. Response: LOL No.
Brexit it's referendum because the Tories were scared of loosing power to Frog Face Faeage's party. So they did a bit of appeasement.
That just proves the point. The politicians will do what serves them best, regardless of what's good for the people or the country.
- Yeah, that's very true. But they'll do the bad thing it even if there's a referendum on it.

but why

Because there is nothing legally binding about petitions.
- If petitions (= begging) are the highest level of what people can do between two elections, something about the system is fundamentally broken.
- Well it does atleast force them to make a public opinion on it, it’s a foot in the door.
The intern responding doesn’t have the authority to do anything.
Because the government doesn't give a shit about us

Pretty much - we all put our names to them, but they do nothing.

The best option is to organise writing campaigns to your local MP and indicate that this is the decider on your vote.

More like "This is good thing, please vote."

This image is a great reflection of the entire history of the UK, incidentally.

Well they did say yes once in 1215
- To the Barons, not the plebes.
  The Magna Carta was just a reapropportioning of power amongst the elites, who had the riff-raff fight and kill each other to determine how much power the King would have and how much would the other nobles get.
  All but a handful of people were as powerless after it as they were before.

What if there was a law that said once something had enough signatures, it needs to be put to a vote?

The only issue I can think of is the threshold being too high and authenticity of the signatures.

At a 1mil signatures, it must be discussed in parliament. They don't do a great job of voting on it, but it's the law.
- That’s comforting to know

We don't deserve nice things.