So, the Coalition have announced the return of the e-Petitions system previously in effect under Blair and Brown, with one clear change: petitions will be more readily be debated by Parliament. This is touted as a welcome change, where very few, if any, petitions under Labour actually changed government policy. The most notable one that did was a 2-million strong petition against the proposed system of road pricing in 2007, where Blair changed from “we support this” to “we still support it but we admit we’re not going to enforce it”. But with any sort of public consultation like this, it often falls by the wayside because of people being just uninformed on issues, such as a 250,000-strong petition to oppose a supposed “mega-mosque” in the London Borough of Newham that hadn’t even been proposed. And then there are the silly ones, like a 50,000-strong petition to make Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson the Prime Minister. Under the proposed rules, Parliament would probably have been forced to debate the latter two with a hard and fast rule of 100,000-supporters-means-debate-in-Parliament, wasting time that should’ve been spent passing actual laws.
Politics
Labour and Tuition Fees: An Addendum
Today’s the day that MPs will vote on whether to raise the cap on tuition fees. And, as they have been doing since Browne was published, Labour are currently digging into the Lib Dems for not caving into them breaking the NUS pledge. Including Tom Harris, MP for Glasgow South, who as you may recall, voted for the HEA2004, to which I challenged him on Twitter:
Labour and Tuition Fees
I’ve been tempted to blog for some time about things but haven’t quite got around to it. But Harriet Harman’s comments at PMQs last night really ired me for some reason. I’m a paid-up member of the Liberal Democrats, and a student, but I’m not going to leave the party on the issue of tuition fees. There has been a lot of misinformation about the tuition fee debate, most of it from Labourites (still) trying to besmirch Clegg for caving in to the wrong party (but that’s for another post), or from people who believe the first set of people while not verifying for themselves.