Dear all
Whilst in no way trying to denigrate or belittle the very laudable aims of the people who set up petitions on the petitions.pm.gov.uk website, I do wonder how successful the petitions are
We know over a million people signed up to the anti road charging petition but I see that Manchester is still going ahead with their plans, recently announcing a consultation period on road charging, and London has increased their charging structure.
Over 15000 people have signed up to protest again the cuts in funding of the British Library but at the end of the day even if their funding is increased it will only be at the expense of another part of the information sector. I very much doubt if the government will magic more money into the budget just to restore the BL funding.
Presumably the AHRC had very valid reasons for ceasing the funding of AHDS and whilst we will all want to deplore such a decision it was presumably based on some rationale of funding priorities. So even if we were able to reverse this decision would it not be at the detriment of a possibly equally worthy cause.
Also and this may be personal to me, I have over the last couple of months been asked to sign a number of petitions including everything from protesting about the BL cuts to saving medieval markets in London and stopping the out sourcing of Medical Secretaries work to India. An eclectic bunch of causes I admit but all in their own way deserving of our support.
However on the presumption that everything is monitored nowadays will the people in power not be monitoring the petition site. If so will they not begin to recognise a pattern of the same core people protesting again and again and therefore feel safe in ignoring it. Even if on the spurious grounds they will protest at anything and therefore there is no pleasing them.
Finally we protesters might also suffer petition signing burn out and feel unable to carry on signing, especially if it has very little effect.
At the end of the day I would love to be proved wrong but whilst I will carry on signing, I am not at all sure that my signature even combined with thousands of others will really make a difference beyond registering a protest.
A few very personal views which in no way reflect the views of my employers.
Regards
Nigel
Nigel Hardman
Group Archives
DBRS Warehouse
Bootle
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