Do you ever get a feeling of deja vu?
Do you ever get a feeling of deja vu?
Yesterday the Westminster parliament website started allowing e-petitions again. The website is a bit jazzier and it’s in a nice Westminster green colour. E-petitions still need to get 10,000 signatures to receive a government response (none of which I saw were worth having in the period before the general election) and 100,000 to be considered for a debate in parliament, just like last time, when my (our) e-petition reached 22,399 signatures in 10 months (being curtailed by the general election). But this time, e-petitions only have a six-month life. That’s fine by me – I can only check on how the sign-ups are going so many times in my life. So we have until 21 January (when I see I am talking to my local RSPB group) to get as many signatures as possible to highlight the plight of the Hen Harrier, and blanket bogs, and aquatic biodiversity, and water users, and the climate at the hands of intensive grouse moor management and wildlife crime.
This time around, we had fewer words to play with, and I had to get five people to sign up before the e-petition would be vetted by civil servants and potentially published. I asked 10 friends (you see! I do have friends) including the nice people at Birders Against Wildlife Crime, some local Peak District residents, author Mark Cocker, Natalie Bennett of the Green Party, the guys at Raptor Persecution Scotland and then waited nervously for the e-petition to appear. And it did.
You see, there were some changes, but the deja vu came in seeing the signatures come in at an impressive rate. It took almost exactly 24 hours last year to reach 1000 signatures and yet this time around we got there (me and 999 others) in about eight hours. Yesterday evening our e-petition was the fifth most popular of the new batch of 55 e-petitions. By lunch time today, I wonder how many signatures will have been added in the 24-hour period.
Just like last time, the figure of 10,000 signatures seems a long, long way away – although not so far away as yesterday! – and 100,000 seems almost impossible. But we’ll see. Together we can walk down the same road as last year but this time I am confident we will be a bigger crowd. We are a movement not a rabble, and we are on the move!
So, not for the first time, and not for the last time on this blog, I’m asking you to please sign my (our) e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting.
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