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?

Sign the Downing Street petition to stop the "Vetting and Barring scheme" #StopVetting

I submitted a petition on Sunday to the Downing Street website calling on the Prime Minister to halt the implementation of the "Vetting and Barring scheme". As I have blogged about before I think the scheme is a complete overreaction and will cause bigger problems in society than it seeks to solve. However as of this morning I had still not heard anything from the Downing Street website and was starting to get concerned that they might be ignoring me.

However a quick glance at the new petitions soon explained it. A Mr Oliver Hodson has beaten me to it and they understandably don't allow more than one on the same subject.

The petition reads:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to abandon the proposed Vetting & Barring scheme, which will result in approximately 11m volunteers and professionals needing to be registered before they can help kids."

So, now it is up there, if you disagree with the implementation of this scheme for whatever reason, please sign the petition:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/AntiVetting/

Please also tell other people about it, blog about it, tweet about it etc.

For ease, if you are on Twitter you could tweet this:

RT @MarkReckons: Sign the Downing Street petition to get the govt to abandon the Vetting + Barring Scheme #StopVetting http://twi.cc/tZz0

UPDATE: Caron has a good blogpost about this here.