People power

Extending the e-petitions idea to local government I think is a good idea. Such things help to elucidate the relevant issues of the day, allowing voters to measure the performance of their elected representatives against some explicit checklist of concerns when it comes to election time. But I would be cautious about concluding that this will really "give power to the people".

There has been at least one petition success that I'm aware of, namely that of the Alan Turing apology. Whilst this might have been highly enthralling to nerds like myself, and possibly also to scholars of history and mathematical logic, Turing's apology can hardly be characterised as a major political issue of our time. Most petitions which gain a significant number of votes are, as far as can be meaningfully discerned, simply ignored - save for the eventual transmission of a perfunctory email of acknowledgement after some period of time has elapsed.

If there is no link between petitioning and the activities of politicians or local councilors then further extending the system could result in a kind of faux democracy, where people are erroneously lead to believe that they are participating in some civic process of import, when in reality they are doing nothing of the sort.

Some petitions are clearly silly and can be dismissed out of hand, like the one to make Jeremy Clarkson king/president/god, but is there a good way in which the rest could be used? One possibility might be to pass legislation which means that if a petition gets more than some threshold number of votes, and is not obviously silly, then the relevant politician has to ask a question in parliament related to it. This would at least provide some kind of link between petitioning and what goes on inside parliament - connecting voters to their representatives. Something similar could happen at the local government level too, but in each case the resulting debate would need to be broadcast online so that concerned petitioners can verify that the issue is raised in something more than a purely dismissive manner.

Although electronic voting has been pretty much a disaster, and thankfully has not yet been foisted upon the British public, I think that the prospects for useful convergences between politics and technology are good. Internet based systems - provided that they're sufficiently open - will allow individuals and interest groups to monitor their own streets and towns more effectively than before and identify trends and issues in a much more intelligent and quantifiable way. It will also become increasingly difficult for both politicians and campaigners to get away with quoting bogus statistics, as has frequently been the case in the past.