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David Cameron has today unveiled a new Conservative policy whereby public online petitions which garner 100,000 votes (some reports give the figure as 50,000) will automatically be debated in parliament; any which succeed in getting more than a million will enable the organisers to propose legislation which MPs must vote on.
The privileged photoshopped prat must think he’s spanking fags back in the jolly old debating society at Eton or something, because this is the dumbest idea I’ve heard from any politician for a LONG time. For a start, any online petition is rife with multiple and frivolous signatories (I.P. Freely, Hugh Jarse etc). For seconds, it lays open the possibility of politicians being forced to waste valuable time debating frivolous subjects (Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister, Jedi to be adopted as the state religion etc etc). Finally, in a more sinister vein, it would be incredibly easy to push unsavoury right-wing populist topics up the agenda; bringing back hanging, deportation of immigrants, discrimination against Muslims / homosexuals, leaving the EU etc etc. 100,000 signatures is absolutely nothing; UKIP have already stated that they could get that many with ease, and there’s no reason not to believe them.
We’ve seen in the last few years how easy it is for snotrags like the Mail to use the internet to goad their credulous and unintelligent readership into frenzies of meaningless outrage - to the point where outrage seems to be the default response of the British public to pretty much any story going. Surely the WHOLE POINT of parliament is to provide an insulating layer between the legislature / executive of power and the easily-manipulated vigilante lusts of the seething, prejudiced, ill-informed masses below - why would you want to weaken that layer?
OK, that’s a slightly snobby and apocalyptic view of the situation. I’m not saying that greater public involvement in the agenda of politics is a bad thing per se - in fact, it’s vital if trust in the political system is to be restored - but in all seriousness, this would be a REALLY stupid way of going about it.
(* - Sorry about the title; best I could think of at short notice.)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Fatuous comments and ridiculous generalisations, Irritating Things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
I bet loads of people would vote for fags and booze to be available on the National Health.
It’s a difficult one really - in a perfect world this is a great idea. It’s harder to see how this can work well in reality. You very overtly expose one of the key ideological failings of democracy - that perhaps the majority, or even an (in)significant* minority is not always right / well equipped to judge an issue / worth listening to. Beyond this, like the contents of Pandora’s Jar, once you’ve started this scheme you can’t easily stop it. You can’t just scrap it without damaging your own credibility as a democratic government.
That said, I fundamentally like the idea – maybe if they implemented a “we’ll debate the top 10 petitions” style scheme on a trial basis they could test the water here. This would allow the government to assess how many idiotic petitions were going to be setup and the popularity of these without committing to debate them or turn them into legislation. I would like to see this kind of idea explored, but agree that all out implementation as described is absurd.
In terms of avoiding fake votes, maybe we could combine this bad idea with the shocker that is the ID card scheme – at least that way I’d feel there was some purpose to the GB£5 bn (or more) that’s been pissed away on this.
* (the threshold of 100,000 for debate and 1,000,000 for a vote on legislation is astonishingly low … I’d suggest 10x that in both cases would be more sensible)
First para from The Independent article that you cite, Taf:
… this is why I don’t read daily newspapers anymore - their choice of issues is an almost Daily Mail standard of one-sidedness.
Doesn’t anyone in the media feel bad about selling out on journalistic standards?
(Long live the BBC!)
Firstly - Moomin, a very hearty welcome. New contributors most welcome. Re. fags and booze - I’m sure people would vote for them (well, I would!), but another function of government seems to be to protect us from any excessive enjoyment of life, and prolong our lives in a state of impoverished boredom for as long as possible. Seriously; we have a MASSIVE problem with overpopulation and growing dependency on the state in old age; people should be SPONSORED to smoke and drink!
TM - coincidentally, Charlie Brooker (sorry that I’m bringing him up again, I do enjoy his programme but I’m no slavish devotee) in the most recent edition of “Newswipe” addressed the subject of how to stimulate public interest in politics, and the ominous noises which Simon Cowell has been making on the subject (watch from about 13 minutes in). I like the idea of canvassing the public in principle as well, but I fail to see how it could be implemented without being hijacked by the likes of Cowell / Murdoch / any other number of mass-media rabble-rousers. The problem is, as I mentioned in the main post, that large numbers of people live in a state of media-induced outrage - democracy doesn’t work when stupidity is in the majority, and is so easily manipulated by the press.
As for your quote from the Independent; it’s still a solidly liberal (if boring and badly-run) organ as far as I know; surely they’re pointing to hanging / the EU etc as issues which said rabble-rousers would inevitably focus on and therefore highlighting the main problem with Cameron’s proposal, rather than suggesting that politicians are WRONG to “overlook” them?
These sorts of “ideas” always seem to have the odour (there goes my spellchecker!) of “democracy,” but then why bother having elections? Unless we want to American Idol-ize the government. It hasn’t worked well in California.
That’s a good point, Kyklops / Rick, I hadn’t actually thought about the parallel with California’s ‘voter initiatives’, which I believe have contributed to near bankrupting of the state.
http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15453142
http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15127600
Interestingly, I didn’t realise these ‘voter initiatives’ also existed in 23 other states, nor that they were the subject of corruption at the hands of lobbyists and the like.
Even more interestingly, now that I think about it, perhaps the results of this kind of ‘direct democracy’ imply an important, undocumented role for democratic government - to ignore the stupid ideas of its idiot voters.