Every now and again, a newspaper will run – and portentously headline – a survey on the future of the monarchy. There was a fashion, a few years back, for consulting the public on the question of whether the crown should skip a generation, so that Prince William could take over from his grandmother. The correct response to all such consultations was a heavingly contemptuous Alan Partridge shrug. The whole point of having a hereditary monarchy is that it’s hereditary and that the general public don’t get a say in the matter. If we want rid, it’ll take a bit more than a poll commissioned by the Sunday Times to do the trick.
There’s never a shortage of fools to jump on an internet bandwagon
Exactly the same response seems to me appropriate to the petition demanding an immediate general election that has appeared on the government’s petitions website. Just a few days after it launched, it has garnered more than 1.5 million signatures. It is being enthusiastically promoted by (among others) the former MEP Martin Daubney, the sportswoman Sharron Davies, Elon Musk (him again) and even a couple of sitting MPs of the Conservative or Reform parties such as Nigel Farage.
It has, as its enthusiasts like to point out, already far surpassed the threshold of 100,000 signatures above which (when this petitions gimmick was launched) the subject of a petition is eligible to be ‘considered for debate’ in parliament. Vox populi, vox dei! Wouldn’t it be hilarious, signatories seem to think, if they had to debate this in parliament? That’ll show Keir Starmer!
Counter-point: it won’t be considered for debate because to debate it would be a grotesque waste of parliamentary time that could be spent on any number of important issues; and the only thing it would show Keir Starmer is how hard it’s possible to roll your eyes before you faint. The petition is a juvenile stunt which misunderstands entirely how any of this works.
The idea of the petitions system was, at least, a decent one in theory: it was a way for people to draw parliament’s attention to issues of policy on which there was strong public feeling. It wasn’t ever intended as a mechanism to circumvent parliamentary democracy or change the terms on which it is conducted. It’s a shame that this modest but well-meant mechanism has turned into a sort of graffiti-wall for trolls and ignoramuses to scribble on.
What about the petition against Brexit, some will wonder. Didn’t that get six million signatures? There was a slightly stronger case, I think, to take that one seriously – not because it got more signatures, but because it came closer to being about a not-quite-settled matter of policy than about the settled result of a general election – but it really wasn’t very much stronger at all. It was ignored, and rightly so. We don’t live in a direct democracy.
To state what should be obvious, the UK electorate is more than 46 million strong. The existence of a million idiots somewhere in the world with internet connections doesn’t constitute a mandate for constitutional change in the UK. If you don’t like the way Keir Starmer is running the country – and I’m in qualified sympathy with people who take that view – there’s a long-established remedy for that, which is to vote him out when his government’s term is over. Those encouraging others to sign the petition because ‘it only takes ten seconds’ are weakening, rather than strengthening, such case as there ever was to take it seriously.
But it does seem to say something about the times we live in in two respects. One is the weird idea that if you get enough retweets, or you shout loudly enough, that in and of itself entitles you to get what you decided ten seconds ago you want. This sort of frictionless clicktivism is a parody of political engagement. The progressive left has been rightly mocked for the identitarian dead-end into which it has been led by the idea that the world must be reshaped to conform to individuals’ feelings. Now we see the same thing from the right: a sense that the structures and norms of governance that protect us all, and which add up to our constitution, should be blown like thistledown before the whimsical breeze of this or that viral jape. We should take a million signatures for ‘general election now’, or two million, or however many millions it adds up to, exactly as seriously as we should take a million signatures for sending ‘Boaty McBoatface’ to the moon, or changing the name of Snickers bars back to ‘Marathon’, or any other cause which we can pretty easily imagine catching on. Let us not forget that several hundred thousand people claimed to be practising Jedi in the 2001 census.
The second respect in which it speaks to our times – and it’s a more serious one, because there’s never a shortage of fools to jump on an internet bandwagon – is that, as previously mentioned, it’s being promoted not just by frivolous internet randoms but by elected members of parliament. Members elected, we should say, under a system that you would hope they had at least understood, even if they aren’t capable of taking it seriously.
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