If you ever wanted more evidence that Brexit is fuelled by delusional thinking, take a look at the ludicrous wording of the "Leave the EU without a deal in March 2019" petition and consider the fact that over quarter of a million people have actively approved this ludicrous display of Brextremist idiocy by signing it.
Just in case you can't see for yourself how idiotic every single sentence of this absurd petition is, I'll break it down, and just like the petition I'm leaving the most extraordinarily idiotic bits until last.
"We are wasting Billions of pounds of taxpayers money trying to negotiate in a short space of time" - Nope, we're actually wasting £billions in public funds trying to make preparations to mitigate the worst aspects of the "no deal" economic meltdown should we crash out without a deal in place. The government just announced they're wasting £4.2 billion more on this "no deal" nonsense.
"Leaving the EU in March 2019 will allow the UK good time to negotiate more efficiently" - Leaving the EU in March 2019 with "no deal" will destroy the single biggest piece of leverage the UK has in this farcical mess. As it stands now the UK can revoke Article 50 at any time before March 29th and the ECJ ruling also states that the EU are not allowed to punish Britain in any way by tinkering with our terms of membership if we do so.
If Article 50 lapses not only will it trigger an economic meltdown, but it'll permanently destroy the option of remaining under the current terms until someone comes up with something better than Theresa May's absolute farce of a deal.
Revoking Article 50 is clearly the sensible action that would stop the clock ticking and allow the UK "good time" to actually come up with a coherent exit plan (without deliberately exploding a bomb under the UK economy and wilfully destroying the single biggest piece of leverage we've got in the process like a "no deal" flounce would).
"The EU will be more eager to accept a deal on our terms having lost a major partner" - The EU will offer us better terms if we implode our own economy in the hope of inflicting a bit of collateral damage on them? How is anyone stupid enough to imagine that the EU would be the ones left begging the economy that just voluntarily self-immolated for help?
"We will save billions of pounds from our EU divorce payment" - Walking away from our debts and liabilities would be a disaster for Britain. What other country would ever consider signing trade deals with the UK if we'd just demonstrated to the world that we're prepared to leave our closest economic allies in the lurch like that?
If you just watched someone very publicly defraud a neighbour would you be stupid enough to sign up to a deal with them?
"as well as a similar amount from Civil Service and Govt costs" - This is just a flat out lie. The UK government is currently diverting thousands of civil servants from important jobs into emergency "no deal" planning at a cost of £billions. Aside from the costs in Whitehall, just think of the cost of all of the extra customs facilities, bureaucracy, and staff when the free trade in goods is brought to a crashing halt.
This is such a brazen effort to misrepresent one of the biggest costs of a "no deal" scenario as a benefit it's extraordinary that anyone could fall for it.
"This money will be used to support our own country whilst we await the EU to talk to us to make deals more in our favour." - We're going to use the money we're not going to save as we wait for the unicorns that are not going to be delivered!
Even the pro-Brexit Tory government admits that a chaotic "no deal" Brexit would trigger a bigger economic meltdown than the bankers' insolvency crisis in 2008. There will be no Brexit dividend, and the EU will not come riding to our rescue if we deliberately vandalise our own economy in the hope of causing them a bit of collateral damage.
"The EU border in Ireland to be managed simply by having a dual Euro / pound currency as legal tender in both the North and South" - Such a "simple solution"! Let's all sign a petition to make the UK government force the Republic of Ireland to accept Sterling as legal tender!
What kind of delusional imperialist dream world are these people living in? Ireland is an independent state. The days of English toffs in London telling the Irish what to do are long gone.
Aside from the sheer stupidity of thinking the Tories in Westminster could do anything whatever to force the Republic of Ireland to adopt Sterling as an official currency, consider the Northern Irish unionist perspective. They're bitterly opposed to Theresa May's agreement because the "backstop" creates divergence between the Northern Irish economy and the economy of Great Britain. Yet this "simple solution" is to create a much bigger economic divergence by saying Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland should adopt a dual currency scenario, while mainland Britain sticks with Stirling only!
How do these idiots think that their ridiculous proposition to economically reunify Ireland would go down with the unionists in Northern Ireland?
"Exports to the South would be dealt with in Euro and vice versa when importing to the North. Rates fixed at time of the deal." - What they've proposed here is a de facto currency union between the UK and the Eurozone!
If rates are "fixed at the time of the deal", then the value of Stirling would have to permanently track the value of the Euro wouldn't it?
This lot voted for Brexit because of "sovereignty" but they've all just signed a petition calling for the UK to abandon its own monetary sovereignty and join the Euro by default!
Conclusion
The wording of the petition is unmitigated gibberish from beginning to end. There's not a single redeeming sentence in the entirety of it, yet over quarter of a million Brexit dupes have signed it anyway.
The fact that this unrelenting display of idiocy is the single most popular petition on the UK government's petition website is nothing short of a national embarrassment. Just think what the Irish must make of this mass demonstration of sheer unthinking idiocy and consider the fact that Brits routinely make jokes about the Irish being thick!
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In November 2017 the widely respected British medical Journal published a study suggesting that Tory austerity dogma is linked to 120,000 excess deaths since 2010.
The BBC quashed any coverage of this shocking study on the advice of a shadowy advisory group that is part-funded by organisations like the Daily Mail and the UK government themselves. Apparently the British medical Journal and the academics who worked on the study were not reliable enough to warrant any coverage whatever.
Fast forward one week and the BBC joined various other outlets in championing an absolute sham of an article from the Guido Fawkes blog accusing other websites of being "downmarket trash clickbait" in an attempt to create a furore over fake news.
It is absolutely indisputable that Tory MPs voted to defeat an amendment to the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill designed to ensure that the UK government recognises animal sentience after Brexit. Here's a link to the vote on Hansard. We can all see from the public record that the Tories voted against the amendment to recognise animal sentience, making sure it lost by 313 votes to 295.
Tory MPs such as the current Environment Minister Michael Gove (the 3rd Tory Environment Minister in the space of two years!) gave assurances that the Tories would one day legislate to recognise animal sentience, but surely such promises from Brexiteers like Michael Gove are only as believable as their outright lies about using Brexit to give £350 million a week to the NHS?
Claiming that they have no intention of scrapping the thing whilst simultaneously voting against amendments to prevent them from scrapping the thing is exactly the same Tory trick used to justify voting against amendment 58 to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill which sought to stop them from using Brexit as an excuse to revoke workers' rights, equality legislation, environmental protections, workplace safety rules, and consumer protections.
Anyone with a grain of sense should be able to see that any government with an honest commitment to recognising animal sentience, or protecting our EU derived rights could have no real objection to supporting amendments designed to ensure that they can't just scrap these things further down the line.
The crux of the Guido Fawkes article was that the horrified public reaction to the Tory scuppering of the animal sentience amendment was "fake news" because we're simply expected to believe Michael Gove's subsequent statement that "this government will ensure that any necessary changes required to UK law are made in a rigorous and comprehensive way to ensure animal sentience is recognised after we leave the EU"
How naive would you have to be to believe that this statement would have been made without all the negative publicity and petitions?
And how naive would you have to judge Michael "350 million for the NHS" Gove on his words, whilst completely ignoring his actual actions in colluding with his Tory colleagues to vote down an amendment which would have prevented him (or any future Tory Environment Secretary) from backtracking on that commitment.
So the Guido Fawkes article is accusing everyone who shared articles and petitions criticising the Tory vote against the animal sentience amendment of spreading "fake news" because ... well ... we're supposed to just believe politicians like Michael Gove are not lying to us!
This Guido article clearly uses the term "fake news" in the same way Donald Trump uses it. Not to describe news that is demonstrably fake, but as a pejorative term aimed at discrediting news that they don't like.
In a way the Guido Fawkes article is an example of fake "fake news" news.
But that didn't stop the BBC from jumping on the bandwagon and promoting the narrative that the uproar about animal sentience is "fake news" because everyone is suddenly supposed to take Michael Gove at his word now, instead of judging him by his actual actions.
Incredibly the BBC gave Michael Gove (the man who told us that Britain "has had enough of experts") a platform to whine that "there is an unhappy tendency now for people to believe that the raw and authentic voice of what's shared on social media is more reliable than what is said in Hansard or on the BBC".
One minute he wants the public to disregard experts, analysis and evidence when it suits his Brexiteering agenda, then the next he's crying that people don't believe his claims that his words have more weight than his actions!
The way that the central argument from this Guido Fawkes fake "fake news" news narrative was hastily turned into BBC headlines, while an academic study from the British Medical Journal was deemed unfit for coverage just goes to show how standards of journalism and impartiality at the BBC have degenerated:
A study conducted by reputable academics from some of Britain's top universities and published in the British Medical Journal was deliberately buried in order to keep it out of the public consciousness as much as possible because it would reflect very badly on the government, and none of the academics involved were invited onto the BBC to discuss the implications of their study.
Yet some cobbled-together nonsense labelling all social media criticism of the government as "fake news" because we're all suddenly supposed to take lying Brexiteers like Michael Gove at their word now is deemed worthy of BBC news coverage because it fits with the mainstream media groupthink that independent media and social networks are significant threats to their ability to control public perceptions in the way that they did so brazenly when they decided to not bother reporting on the 120,000 excess deaths scandal.
Is it any wonder that more and more people are turning to independent media for their news when the BBC treat the likes of Michael Gove and the Guido Fawkes blog as more reputable sources than the British Medical Journal, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and University College London?
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Within two days of the Brexit result being announced over two million people signed a petition on the government website calling for a 2nd EU referendum.
I'm no Brexiter
Before I get to explaining what is wrong with the petition, I'd first like to explain my own stance so that nobody is under the false impression that I'm some kind of furious Brexiter shouting down the idea because I got what I wanted and don't want to see it undone.
Before the referendum argued that Britain quitting the EU would be a massive act of self-harm. I admitted that the EU is not flawless (I can't think of a single major political or economic institution that is), but repeatedly stated the position that bailing out it now and giving the hard-right fringe of the Tory party the green light to go on a savage ideological rampage through the national economy, legal system, trade relations and constitution would be far worse than anything the EU could do to us. To me Brexit looked like a classic example of an "out of the frying pan, into the fire" scenario.
Before the referendum I also picked apart a lot of the misrepresentations, false promises and outright lies presented by the hard-right Vote Leave campaign. They were clearly a bunch of right-wing snake oil merchants selling Brexit as their cure all elixir to all of society's ills, despite knowing full well that it has been the imposition of their fanatically hard-right economic ideology since 1979 that caused most of those problems in the first place.
Redefining the terms after the event
Trying to undo the result of the Brexit vote now by quibbling over the terms of the referendum is no good after the event. It was absolutely clear when David Cameron set up the EU referendum as a simple majority decision, he was taking an extraordinary gamble with the entire future of the UK, but nobody complained about it then (well I did, but hardly anyone was listening to me because I'm just some independent blogger, with a relatively small audience).
The fact that people are only quibbling about turnout thresholds and the like now, after the event, makes the whole Remain camp look like a bunch of sore losers.
An unworkable proposition
People who have followed my work for a while might remember me trying to kick up a stink about the Tory attempts to render trade union democracy completely unworkable by imposing arbitrary turnout thresholds. The result of this forthcoming Tory attack on the trade unions will be to render an abstention a more powerful vote against the motion for strike action than an actual vote against the motion! This warped situation comes about because voting against the motion would have the effect of pushing the turnout up closer to the 50% threshold, while abstaining makes it less likely that the motion will ever pass.
The proposal this petition outlines would have precisely the same effect. The setting of an arbitrary 75% turnout threshold means that the whole thing could just be derailed if Remainers engaged in mass abstention. In fact, every Remainer who actually voted for Remain under such a system would actually be making Brexit more likely by doing so!
A better proposition
Specifying 60% of the vote on a 75% turnout equates to demanding the backing of 45% of the registered electorate. It's clear that saying 45% of the public should back the motion to have it pass is a much fairer way of specifying the same thing, because setting it up that way wouldn't enable mass abstention spoiler tactics from people who favour the status quo.
There's nothing undemocratic about specifying a threshold like this, if fact people have argued that it's actually far more democratic because it prevents just 36% of eligible voters enforcing massive changes on the rest of society, as just happened in the Brexit referendum.
But it's still too late
The result is in now. Unless the petition ends up getting even more signatures than the number of people who actually voted for Brexit, it's highly unlikely to achieve anything, except looking like a massive bunch of sour grapes from sore losers.
The people who were willing to sup toxic snake oil from the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, Nigel Farage and the Tory bankrolled Labour Leave mob got their way.
It's not going to be pleasant for a lot of people because belief that the UK is due to become a bed of roses for everyone just because we quit the EU would be over-optimistic enough at the best of times, but when there's a fanatically right-wing government in power, and one that's highly likely to lurch even further to the right, then it's absolutely delusional.
It's even more delusional to continue believing in such fantasies when the hard-right Brexit politicians have already begun backtracking on all their lies about how Brexit would mean more funding for the NHS and cuts in immigration.
Things are going to get a lot worse for a lot of people, but signing sour grapes petitions isn't going to help. The only way to help now is by getting actively involved in opposition to the Tory government and trying to obstruct their inevitable right-wing ideological rampage at every turn.
Sign the petition if you feel like it, but it's prescription is clearly anti-democratic because it creates the opportunity for abstention spoiler tactics, so I won't be signing it.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
I have got a great deal of respect for the campaign website 38 Degrees, especially for their tireless work in support of the NHS and in opposition to the TTIP corporate power grab. However nobody is beyond criticism, and their decision to delete a petition with 35,000+ signatures on the most spurious of grounds is incredibly damaging.
The petition in question was one calling for the BBC Political editor Laura Kuenssberg to be sacked over her blatantly biased reporting in favour of the Tories. 38 Degrees decided to delete the petition on the grounds that it was supposedly full of misogynist comments left by "sexist bullies".
The problem for this justification is that Craig Murray found and published the 38 Degrees reserve cache of comments, which revealed that the overwhelming majority of comments on the petition were not sexist in any way. Only one out of the hundreds and hundreds of comments was explicitly sexist.
Instead of admitting their error and explaining the real reason they felt the need to remove the petition (perhaps the kind of establishment pressure that forced the Guardian to smash their hard drives?) someone at 38 Degrees thought it would be a smart idea to delete their reserve cache of comments in a desperate attempt to stop people from seeing the evidence that they had lied. Craig Murray simply switched the link on his blog to the Google cache of the comments, and even if that disappears it's now beyond doubt that many people will have made copies (when will people ever learn that you can't just simply delete things off the Internet? [1] [2] [3]).
One of the worst things from 38 Degrees perspective is that by deleting the petition they handed ammunition to the likes of David Cameron and Lucy Allan (the disgusting Tory liar who got caught out fabricating a death threat in order to harvest public sympathy) to attack Jeremy Corbyn with at Prime Minister's Questions.
By inventing the lie that the petition had to be deleted because of a non-existent tide of sexist abuse, 38 Degrees allowed the Tories to completely bypass the accusation of BBC editorial bias in their favour by painting Labour, Momentum, the left in general and the type of people who sign 38 Degrees petitions as nothing more than a disgusting misogynist rabble.
Perhaps the worst aspect of all is the appalling precedent set by this deletion of an entire 35,000 signature petition over a single sexist comment. The ludicrous decision to delete the petition rather than simply delete any offending comment(s) is clearly a red rag to foul-minded Internet warrior types. Disgusting people like that have now been given a clear indication that an effective way to derail any petition they don't like is to use sockpuppet accounts to post sexist/racist/bigoted/threatening comments in the hope of getting the entire petition deleted.
The decision to delete the entire petition rather than moderating any unacceptable comments is incredibly poor because it gives people reasons to not sign 38 Degrees petitions in future. "Why should I take the time to sign this if it's just going to get deleted if anyone says anything bigoted in the comments thread?" "Why should I sign this if 38 Degrees are going to tarnish my reputation by implying that I'm part of some misogynistic rabble for doing so?".
Handing free ammunition to the Tories to attack their political opponents with is bad enough, but the damage to their own reputation is much worse. By crudely implying that the 35,000 people who signed the petition are largely a bunch of sexist trolls, when the evidence clearly shows that the vast majority were nothing of the sort, 38 Degrees have damaged themselves terribly.
The 38 Degrees reaction after the lie was exposed was even worse. We all make mistakes, but the true marker of integrity is how we deal with those mistakes. Those who admit that they got things wrong and apologise for it have some integrity, those who desperately try to delete the evidence that they lied do not.
It really does pain me to criticise 38 Degrees because as I've said before, they've done sterling work on a number of incredibly important issues, but inventing lies to attack their own supporters, and fuelling a bonfire of synthetic Tory outrage in the process, is a massive cock up, and one they should be apologising for, not trying to hide.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In the aftermath of the November 13th atrocities in Paris, over 400,000 British people reacted by signing an absurd petition calling for the UK borders to be closed "until ISIS is defeated".
Firstly I'm going to look at what people actually mean when they say "close the borders", then explain why taking such a reactionary stance is such a shameful reaction to terrorism.
What do they want?
The idea that the UK borders can just be closed is fantastically naive. Hundreds of thousands of people per day transit in and out of the UK. Are the 400,000+ people who signed this petition calling for every UK airport to be shut down, our ferry ports to be closed and the Channel Tunnel to be bricked up until some distant date in the future when "ISIS is defeated"?
Just think about how long it took the US to kill Osama Bin Laden, and the fact that Al Qaida hasn't been defeated yet, 14 years after the September 11th attacks on the US. Anyone who thinks that ISIS could be defeated in the course of a few months or years is clearly pretty delusional.
Calling for the borders to be completely closed for an indefinite period of time is clearly a very ill-considered and impractical response to a terrorist attack. Just think about the hundreds of thousands of British tourists and business people who would be trapped abroad indefinitely. Surely few people are naive enough to actually endorse the staggeringly impractical appeal this petition makes, so what do they actually want?
Exemptions
The idea of completely shutting the British borders for an indefinite period of years, or even decades is an astonishingly impractical thing to ask for. The idea that nobody should enter and nobody should leave is so ill-conceived it's beyond words, so there must be exemptions.
Departures
I'm pretty sure that most of the 400,000+ people who signed the petition would agree that keeping people trapped inside the UK would be an irrational response to terrorism. Maybe they would allow an exemption to allow anyone who needs to be deported to go, and anyone who just wants to leave to get out?
British citizens
I'm pretty sure a lot of the people who signed this petition would become extremely angry if they were told that they could go on holiday abroad, but that they wouldn't be allowed back in "until ISIS is defeated". The majority of people who signed this petition would probably want an exemption to the "closed borders" for British citizens.
The problem with this of course is that the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the UK have been perpetrated by British citizens, and most of the attackers in the two major Paris atrocities in 2015 appear to have been French citizens too. Shutting the borders to all foreigners seems like a pretty impractical solution to the risk of homegrown terrorists.
EU Citizens
I'm pretty sure that a significant proportion of the people who signed such an incoherent petition must be of the Ukipper persuasion, so they'd be absolutely delighted if the terrorist attacks in Paris could be used as an opportunity to rescind European freedom of movement.
More fair minded people might argue that there will soon be a referendum on membership of the EU, so the democratic thing to do would be to wait for the result of that referendum rather than opportunistically using the tragedy in Paris to enforce the end of free movement between the UK and the rest of the EU.
Anyone who believes in democracy and isn't foul minded enough to use the deaths of so many innocent people to push their personal political agenda would say that unilaterally shutting the borders to EU migrants would be a very harsh move, especially considering the inevitable tit-for-tat recriminations against the 2 million British migrants now living in other EU countries.
People with the correct paperwork
The next question must be about people coming into the UK with the correct paperwork. Do the people who have signed this petition really want UK universities to collapse because foreign students are locked out of the UK? Do they really want to wreck the tourism industry by shutting out foreign tourists? Do they really want to rip apart any family that contains non-EU citizens? Do they really want to prevent foreign sports stars, artists, academics, musicians, actors from entering the UK "until ISIS is defeated"?
So who would the borders actually be closed to?
I'd guess that rather a lot of people who signed this petition would admit that when they say "close the borders" they actually mean "leave the borders open to pretty much anyone who wants to enter or leave the UK, but close them to a small minority of people". So which small minority of people are they wanting the borders closed to?
The answer is obvious: They want the border closed to Muslims, and specifically Muslims who are fleeing the appalling conflict in Syria.
Syrian refugees
The civil war in Syria and the rise of the barbaric ISIS fanatics has caused a vast refugee crisis. Some 12 million people have fled their homes. 8 Million of them are displaced in Syria and almost 4 million of them have fled to neighbouring countries. 1.773 million have fled to Turkey, 1.175 million to Lebanon, 629,000 to Jordan and even 250,000 to Iraq (imagine how bad things must be in Syria if they're running away to seek sanctuary in Iraq).
Of the millions of Syrians to have fled their homes only a few hundred thousand have ended up in Europe, far fewer still in the UK, which is pretty unfair given that it was the UK/US policy of eradicating the government in Iraq and creating the kind of stateless sectarianism infested society which created the perfect breeding ground for murderous Islamist fanatics like Al Qaida in Iraq and ISIS. It wasn't Lebanon or Jordan who pushed so relentlessly for the destabilisation of the region, it was the UK government.
Then there's the fact that the UK even tried to join in the Syrian civil war on the same side as the Islamist fanatics just a couple of years ago. Thankfully David Cameron was prevented from assisting the full ISIS takeover of Syria when he became the first Prime Minister to lose a war vote since 1782, but that doesn't detract from the fact that he wanted to make the situation a whole lot worse by removing Assad and creating a power vacuum that the Islamist fanatics would have absolutely thrived in.
Then there's the fact that Cameron is still cosying up to the Saudi Arabian regime when he himself admits that they're guilty of exporting militant Wahabist fanaticism all over the world. Anyone who can't see that Wahabist Islamist death cults like ISIS and Al Qaida are the children of Saudi Arabia is deeply ignorant. Cameron shouldn't be pathetically prostrating himself before the Saudis to win arms contracts, he should be doing everything in his power to stop them from supporting and funding ISIS.
Anyone who imagines that UK foreign policy has had no role to play in the rise of ISIS and the Syrian refugee crisis is under-informed at best and delusional at worst, and anyone who accepts that UK foreign policy has exacerbated the crisis in Syria, but believes that the refugee crisis should be handled exclusively by other countries as we "close the borders" is hardly fair-minded. Why should other countries be left to bear the burden of the UK's foreign policy disasters?
Fuck you everyone
The idea that the UK should just raise the drawbridge to keep out refugees from a horrifying conflict is cowardly and selfish.
Not only does it ignore the observable reality that the vast majority of terrorists in Europe are homegrown, it's also a big "fuck you" to the rest of the world.
Firstly it's a "fuck you" to people who are fleeing an unimaginably appalling conflict. Signing the "close the borders" petition is essentially saying that the horrors people in Syria have endured are nowhere near as important as our fear about what happened in Paris. It's saying that we don't give a damn about the very real horrors you've suffered, because there's a small chance that a few of the indescribably barbaric Islamist fanatics you're fleeing from might sneak in amongst you so fuck off.
It's also a very big "fuck you" to Syria's neighbouring countries, who have taken millions of refugees. By signing the "close the borders" petition we're saying that it should be left entirely up to countries like Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey to deal with the catastrophic human consequences, while we refuse to help anyone.
It's also a big "fuck you" to all of the countries in the Schenigen Area, including France. It's unquestionable that Syrian refugees are going to continue flowing into Europe as long as ISIS continue to run amok there, but what people who have signed this appalling petition are saying is it's a problem for the rest of Europe to deal with because were shutting our borders to it.
At a time when we should be standing in absolute solidarity with the French, instead hundreds of thousands of us are signing a cowardly petition saying "fuck France, fuck Europe, fuck Syrian refugees, fuck the rest of the world. The Syrian refugee crisis is your problem now because we're washing our hands of it".
It's a big "fuck you" to the victims of terrorism (the Syrian refugees and the shellshocked French) and a "fuck you" to the other countries that are carrying the lion's share of the humanitarian disaster (especially Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey).
Fear and cowardice
It's clear that the vast majority of people who signed this petition don't actually want the borders to be closed, the airports to be shut down, and the Channel Tunnel to be bricked up. They've just been motivated to sign such a selfish and incoherently written "fuck you" petition out of fear.
It's understandable that people are afraid. Anyone with the faintest shred of human empathy must be utterly horrified at the atrocities in Paris and frightened at the thought of similar atrocities being carried out against the British public. Nobody is saying it's wrong to be scared, but people tend to act irrationally out of fear, and (aside from the Ukipper opportunists who see the attacks in Paris as a glorious opportunity to promote their insular little Britain ideology) I'm pretty sure most of the people who signed this petition did so without realising that it was such a cowardly "fuck you" to the actual victims of Islamist terrorism.
If the terrorists get us so afraid that we end up saying "fuck you" to their victims, then they've won already haven't they? They've cowed us in fear to such an extent that we've given up our human decency, our empathy, our compassion.
If you've signed that petition you've admitted that the Islamist fanatics have already beaten you into submission and reduced you to such a cowardly and incoherent state of fear that you'll abandon your human decency and turn on their victims by signing a petition that doesn't even make any sense.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
One of the things that delights me about having an ever growing audience of politically engaged people is that I can help people get more involved in politics. Some people like to contest that the only way to make a difference is to get out on the streets and protest, but this is wrong headed. Street protests are obviously an important component to dissent but many (especially the elderly, the disabled and those with children to care for) find street protests difficult and/or intimidating, especially given the concerted efforts by the establishment to undermine the right to peaceful political protest and to militarise the police.
I often ask people (if they feel strongly about an issue I've highlighted) to get involved by doing things such as writing to their MP, writing to businesses to explain the reasons for boycotting their products, contributing to public consultations and signing petitions. In my view these activities are just as important as street protests and pickets.
I recently posted the Avaaz Internet Apocalypse petition on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page for anyone who is opposed to the plans to introduce a "two-speed" Internet, where corporations will be able buy special favours from Internet Service Providers at the expense of the wider Internet (non-profit organisations, campaign groups and independent blogs like my own). One of the regular cynics that trolls my page then popped up with an appalling appeal to apathy, saying that petitions are "pointless wastes of time that give people a false belief they are making a difference" and challenged me to "list me 5 petitions of the last 10 years that have made a difference".
I'll do better than that, I'll list 10 petitions of the last 5 years that have made a difference. To be honest, even this challenge (which is 4x as difficult as the one I was actually set) is a bit easy to someone that does like to sign and share petitions.
1. Hugh's Fish Fight: I used to have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his posh-boy cookery show, but he has earned an enormous amount of respect from me after leading the campaign for the abandonment of the extraordinarily wasteful practice of EU fish discards (throwing millions of tons of dead but perfectly edible fish back into the sea). Over 870,000 people signed the Hugh's Fish Fight petition and in December 2013 the EU finally legislated to reform their fisheries policy and abandon the ludicrously wasteful discards policy.
2. Universal Basic Income: A 2013 petition in Switzerland has triggered a referendum on the introduction of Universal Basic Income. The referendum has yet to be held, but the fact that the public in Switzerland will have a say on the issue is entirely down to the people that signed the petition in the first place.
3. Barbarity in the Maldives: One of the most emotive petitions in recent years was one concerning a 15 year old rape victim who had been sentenced to public flogging for the "crime" of sex outside marriage. After more than 2 million people signed the 2013 Avaaz petition, the conviction was overturned.
4. Bank charges: In 2012 A Change.org petition with over 300,000 signatures led to Bank of America abandoning plans to introduce a $5 monthly banking fee within a month of announcing it.
5. The Food Poverty Debate: In 2013 A petition on the UK government epetition website resulted in a parliamentary debate on food poverty. Unfortunately the Tories stonewalled the debate, but they earned themselves an awful lot of bad publicity as they laughed and shouted their way through the debate. The absurdly evasive and misleading speech made by Esther McVey was derided as the "one of the nastiest frontbench speeches I’ve heard in more than 43 years" by parliamentary veteran Gerald Kaufman. Although the petition didn't result in changing the Tory policy of forcing the most vulnerable people in society into destitution (which, after all, is one of their core political strategies), it certainly opened a lot more people's eyes to their sheer callousness.
6. ACTA: An American led drive to censor the Internet was abandoned due to an extremely strong public reaction against it. The EU cited a 2012 Avaaz petition with well over 2 million signatures as a key factor in their decision to abandon their participation in ACTA.
7. The Olympic Tax Dodge: One of the most stunningly successful petitions in recent years was the 38 Degrees campaign against a tax-dodging deal arranged by the IOC for sponsors of the 2012 London Olympics. Within just a few weeks every single Olympic sponsor pulled out of the tax dodge under a tide of negative publicity.
8. Save the Forests: 38 Degrees led the campaign to stop the Tories selling
off nationally owned woodland. Over half a million people signed
the 2010 petition and the Tories were forced to cancel the sell-off.
9. Neoncotinoid pesticides: A 2013 Avaaz petition with 2.6 million signatures drove the EU decision to impose a temporary ban on neoncotinoid pesticides which have been linked to colony collapse disorder in bees.
10. Ryan Ferguson: Ryan was freed after a 2012 change.org petition with 250,000 signatures helped to secure him a retrial in which his absurdly dubious murder conviction was overturned.
These ten are some of the most high profile petitions of the last five years and they are obviously not the only ones (feel free to mention other "petitions that have made a difference" in the comments section).
Of course petitions are not the only way of protesting against injustice (direct action, street protests, spreading awareness, boycotts, strikes, pickets and attempts to engage with the political system are some of many other avenues) but I hope I've made it clear that it is possible to make a difference by signing a petition.
The fact that I've so easily surpassed his request for evidence is a clear demonstration that people like my "petitions are a pointless waste of time"
troll are either hopelessly ignorant about the subject they are
pontificating about, or they are cynically lying through their teeth in some pathetic attempt to dissuade other people from even trying to make a difference.
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