Wow. Gosh. I mean…wow. Catherine Bennett is telling us not to bother visiting the Downing Street e-petition website. And she’s doing it in a really, really angry way. The person who invented it (Tom Steinberg) is a “prat”. The intention is to stifle and channel debate, not to promote it. And the people who engage with it are lumped in with the people who watch Big Brother:
In short - though it may be small consolation to the drudges currently sifting through this mountain of garbage - the prat’s site is a triumph. Petitioning will never be the same again. Who, attempting a serious protest, would want to lose it inside what is, effectively, a particularly insufferable blog, replete with studenty sallies about chocolate biscuits and a perpetual chorus of whining motorists? Or invite the obvious criticism that, being so effortlessly produced, the petition can be equally effortlessly dismissed? And yet, now that petitions, like everything from shopping and dating to bullying and thieving, can be done online, without leaving home, who would go back to the real, clumsy thing?
The shots in this piece are not just cheap, they’re facetiously low-rate and contemptuously overplayed. So when you ask people what they think, some of them have views which are a bit silly? I mean, who knew? Has La Bennett been in a pub recently? Has she spoken to anyone who isn’t university-educated, urban-dwelling and keen on fine cookery? Does she think real people should be seen and not heard?
So the e-petition website is a failure, in Bennett’s view - despite the fact that it has, very interestingly, revealed that a great many people are really steamed about road-pricing, and that fact should sort of be taken into account, shouldn’t it? And nowhere does she propose her own answer to the question which Steinberg tried to answer with e-petitions - how do we directly engage with a populace which, thanks to the bi-party state, only really has a binary response to matters of state, Labour or Conservative? How do we maintain people’s interest while the issues they face fragment ever further, at the same time as the bi-party state seems to entrench even further? How is the will of the people expressed and arranged in ways which government can act against?
So sneers all round chez Bennett. Put the sneer away, Catherine, and tell us: what would you do.
