Thoughts on politics and life from a liberal perspective

Monday 2 November 2009

Downing Street petition site rejects "Sack Alan Johnson" petition

Kalvis Jansons, the man who brought you the Gordon Brown "resign" petition has contacted me to inform he that he has tried to submit another petition calling on the PM to "sack the Home Secretary" in the wake of his deeply unpopular decision to himself sack Professor David Nutt from the ACMD.


The Downing Street petition site has rejected it. Its reasoning for this is that it is "similar to or overlaps with an existing petition" and cites this as the one it overlaps with. However all that one calls on the PM to do is to reinstate Professor Nutt. That is a completely different thing.

What's the point in even having a Downing Street petition site if legitimate petitions like this are going to be rejected for spurious reasons?

6 comments:

Kalvis Jansons said...

Indeed. There is no logical overlap between the two petitions mentioned.

This is a clear example of filtering out a petition that is more damaging to the government.

Petitions should be unfiltered, as they were in the days of paper ones, where the author of the petition could write exactly what they wanted.

I have resubmitted that petition with no changes and have asked for it to be reconsidered.

I am not a fan of the Number 10 petition site, which might surprise some, but rather want to expose it for what it is.

The best way to do that is to get on it, and get the top petition and see it totally ignored. So far the "resign" petition has not even be answered, and remains the top unanswered petition of all time.

Irfan Ahmed said...

Hi Mark,

If you have Kalvis' email address or if Kalvis is reading this can you please get in touch in with me.

Anonymous said...

"What's the point in even having a Downing Street petition site"

It looks hip to the kids. If I were to be less cynical I would suggest that it can be used to demonstrate "lack of support" for policy changes that don't rate many 'signatures'.

But I doubt it's even taken that seriously.

Kalvis Jansons said...

If you wish to contact me, use

petition@kalvis.com

toby johnson said...

Since when has the Labour party listened to anything, anyone says?

(Unless, of course, the people doing the shouting are some minority groups that the govt thinks it can win the vote from the whole of)

Anonymous said...

Comes as absolutely no surprise - considering there are 57 rejected Gary Mckinnon petitions available at the Downing Street search engine ?
Keep it up Kalvis - people are beginning to listen - the TRUTH is OUT THERE!
Long live Human Rights !
cliffsull