The government is trying to limit the PR damage to its proprosed road pricing schemes from the enormous number of names added to the petition against them on 10 Downing Street’s own website.
10 Downing Street is the official residence of the British Prime Minister and last year they started a programme on their website letting people create E-Petitions on single issues that others could add their names to, all to show how much they were in touch with the views of the public. There have been close to 3,000 petitions started so far, most are straight forward and serious issues, a few less so such as the one to ‘Boycott the 2010 World Cup in South Africa’ which five people signed up to and one that asks Tony Blair to ‘Request George W Bush to allow all British Citizens currently in the USA to receive permenant residency’, which sounds like a great idea to me but only got endorsed by one person.
The one petition that has galvanised people to sign it is the one that says ‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy‘. So far over 1,325,000 people have added their names to this request and thousands more are signing it by the hour.
Naturally the government are trying to play down the value of this petition and the Transport Secretary says people are being misled by myths on road pricing, but what they seem to refuse to accept is the public are sick of paying through the nose to drive in Britain and as every opinion poll shows are dead against paying by the mile for the privilege of driving and don’t want tracking devices in their cars.
This road pricing and vehicle tracking E-Petition closes on 20 February 2007, to sign it you must be a British citizen (living anywhere in the world) or British resident, and have a valid email so they can send a confirmation. No doubt Labour will try and blow off this petition as irrelevant, but if upwards of 2million sign on before it closes next week it’ll show exactly why people have given up on politics in this country and why less and less people bother to vote, because they don’t bloody listen.
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