London's Calling

I haven't written anything about the London riots this week, largely because the subject is being covered in such intense and obsessive detail elsewhere and frankly I have nothing new or interesting to add, although I followed the coverage closely and will jabber about it a bit anyway. It was pretty surreal to hear about and see pictures of rioting in places I actually know - my family come from Lewisham and Catford in south-east London. On Tuesday night there was even a police helicopter over my house as some 'youths' in my town attempted a 'riot' (I believe they kicked over a couple of bins). It was all over in five minutes bar the cleaning-up, though, a very poor attempt at civil disobedience - it didn't even make it onto The Guardian's map of riot-stricken areas (interesting when compared to this map of child poverty in the UK, especially if you zoom in on London).

Given my recent fun with e-petitions, I was intrigued to note that the new top e-petition on the government website calls for people convicted of rioting to lose their benefits. I haven't been able to have a look at it, sadly, because the e-petitions website is continually crashing (they really need to sort that out, it hasn't been able to cope with the traffic at all).

There's also rumblings from David Cameron of a social media crackdown - he's said the government will be looking at whether it would be possible to ban people from social networking sites if they are thought to be plotting criminal activity. The government really does have a bee in its bonnet about social media - despite the fact that most of the riots seem to have been organised more through the heavily encrypted BBM (rioters are getting smarter! It warms the cockles of my heart).

It's true that they've played their role in the riots, but the same services also played a key part in organising the clean-up efforts afterwards, carried out by a demographic not so dissimilar to that of the rioters themselves. I'm pretty sure riots occurred before the invention of Twitter, and if many commentators insist that consumerism and greed (or even gangsta rap) was the sole motivation of the rioters, then it should be remembered that there are worse reasons to go on the rampage. Yes, these social media networks were used by the rioters to their advantage, but so were the good weather and the long summertime days, and no-one's suggesting that we create permanent artificial rain clouds over the houses of anyone who looks like a troublemaker. Anyone following Twitter on the nights of the riots would see that most of the relevant tweets consisted of shocked commentary, people reporting on events where they were, discussion of the media coverage, and later, talk of a clean-up. The vast majority of tweets on there were in no way a call to public disorder, at odds with their (mis)representation in a lot of the media. Hopefully Cameron's comments are just empty posturing to satisfy a public that wants to know What He's Going To Do About It.

e-Petitions: Let the Choir Sing On

The Government has just launched its new e-petitions site. This is where ordinary hard-working citizens, who are probably also law-abiding taxpayers, can create and sign petitions online, making suggestions for amendments to current laws and regulations. If a petition collects 100,000 signatures it is eligible for debate in the House of Commons.

Predictably enough, the site was initially inundated with demands to bring back hanging, although the petitions are already diversifying rapidly. A quick glance through the site suggests that the other most popular topics are leaving the EU and withdrawing from the Human Rights Act, as well as issues around sharia law and keeping Formula One racing on the BBC.

The possibility of a debate on the return of capital punishment has produced quite a lot of coverage in the media, and Andrew Percy MP, along with several back-benchers, has called for a referendum on the subject. Yet at present, the petition to retain the ban on capital punishment has twice as many signatures as the one to overturn it, and is by far the most popular petition on the entire site - a fact which most media coverage has thus far managed to overlook.

It will be interesting to see the final level of support for the two opposing petitions on capital punishment. But equally interesting is the sheer number of duplicate petitions on the topic; at the time of writing there are 75, 30 of which have already been rejected; other popular issues show a similar multiplicity of essentially identical submissions. One has to question people's dedication to their particular cause if they would rather start their "own" petition with two supporters, than sign up to an existing petition created by someone else and actually increase the likelihood of the topic's actually making it to the 100,000 marker. It's a phenomenon that's always been apparent with Facebook groups, as anyone who's ever searched for RIP Amy Winehouse knows, but one might have imagined that on a site dedicated to petitions - where the whole point is garnering the highest possible number of signatories - collectivism would have prevailed. If anything, though, it's probably an encouraging sign; as long as those individuals who believe that the Human Rights Act should be revoked persist in making separate petitions which fail to gain even 1000 signatures, the debate will never even make it to Parliament.

These petitions are wonderful for what they tell us about people; the current triumph of the petition to retain the ban on Capital Punishment is flying in the face of what certain newspapers would have us believe about "public opinion".

The sheer range of topics covered is impressive; their number is rapidly snowballing. Some give specific suggestions for improvements, such as this call to end public bodies using 0845 and 0870 numbers; others are more general, as with this demand for "bigger prisons with more convicts inside them". And there's a lighter side to the e-petitions as well. One particularly tongue-in-cheek example proposes public hanging for those who propose public hanging - the author states that "the proposed punishments for some crimes are so horrific that the proper punishment for proposing this punishment is the death penalty. After all, with all that DNA science we now have, we can always prove all the time who has proposed a punishment for a crime, and then propose punishing them appropriately".

One petition rather abstractly demands the building of prisons in "one or more West African nations", to house paedophiles, foreign prisoners and contract killers. Quite what these West African nations have done to offend the petitioner is unclear. Another suggests that our judicial process be replaced by the use of polygraph lie detectors in courts. The author notes that "Jeremy Kyle does it, why can't we?"

Allowing people to put their opinions forward in this way is a fantastic example of democracy in action. Some of the more popular petitions may prove genuinely worthwhile, and even the more outlandish suggestions deserve the chance to appear on the site - if only so that their failure to gain support is made clear.

It's often suggested that shifty politicians wilfully ignore "the voice of the people". On the evidence of this website, the voice of the people is like a huge, discordant choir, in which no two members have the same songbook (and half of them are making it up as they go along). Politicians must work hard to discern any one tune from the cacophany, and the most popular petitions on this site may make that task a little easier. Nonetheless, if the website proves one thing, it's that you can't please all of the people any of the time.

Perhaps most tellingly of all, there's also a large number of e-petitions demanding an end to e-petitions. As Joseph Blurton states in his submission: "We, the people, are idiots. Please, for pity's sake, ignore us more often."