End the badger cull instead of expanding to new areas – Simon King – 70,315 signatures (closes 25 February)
Introduce a moratorium on the hunting critically declining wading birds – Chris Packham – 23,784 signatures (closes 23 March)
Develop a GCSE in natural history – Mary Colwell – 2,545 signatures after 2 days (closes 9 July).
If Simon King and the Wildlife Trusts get their act together then they can certainly get to 100,000 signatures with the resources at their disposal. I wonder whether they will.
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All signed, two previously, the GCSE petition just now. A GCSE in natural history, I would happily go to evening school for that.
I’d like to pose a question re the Government website petitions if I may, please? As it is an official government site, and everyone has to put in their details, does it put quite a few people off signing, even though they may support the subject of the petition? Are there (lots of) people, genuinely interested in and supporting conservation issues in other ways, who don’t want to ‘put their heads above the parapet’ when it comes to officialdom? I think I know some, but they wouldn’t admit it if I asked them, so I haven’t!
I think there will always be those people. Those of us who do sign a petition ar unlikely to be the majority of those who feel in favour of the cause.
These Government petitions are a useful tool to highlight a cause. Even if we don’t trust the politicians we mostly have some level of trust in anything that has a .gov web address. This gives credibility to a cause publicised on social media. This is the starting point to discuss the issue. We may not achieve the parliamentary debate level required but the 6 months of trying to get there will have reached thousands of non signers who had not considered the issue or those that had but did not want to stand up and be noticed as an individual in favour of it. It may influence who they vote for, what products they buy or give the cause familiarity the next time it is presented.
As such even if a petition only gather 5000 votes then progress has been made and perhaps the next time round that scary parapet will not seem so scary to poke the head over.
Alan – well said. Thank you.