Comment by mytailorisrich
1 day ago
It's quite right that petitions are (mostly) ignored in Parliamentary matters, IMHO.
MPs are elected to Parliament, they get input from their constituents. Bills are debated, revised, voted on multiple times. There are consultations and input from a board range of view points.
A petition is in effect trying to shout over all that process from the street outside.
It's a good deal more complicated than that.
MPs belong to political parties - consider what happens if an MP's constituents and an MP's party disagree?
They might be allowed to vote against the government, if their vote will have no effect on the bill's passage - but if they actually stop the bill's passage? They're kicked out of the party, which will make the next election extremely difficult for them.
MPs are elected for reasonably long terms - and that means they regularly do things that weren't in their party manifesto. Nobody running for election in 2024 had a manifesto policy about 2025's strikes on Iran, after all!
That flexibility means they can simply omit the unpopular policies during the election campaign. A party could run an election campaign saying they're going to introduce a national ID card, give everyone who drinks alcohol a hard time, cut benefits, raise taxes, raise university tuition, fail to deliver on any major infrastructure projects, have doctors go on strike, and so on.
Or they can simply not put those things in their manifesto, then do them anyway. It's 100% legal, the system doing what it does.
Don't be ridiculous. MPs get their input from their party superiors, and their party superiors get their input from the people who buy them.
It's been decades since the UK had any genuine bottom-up policy representation for ordinary people.
Petitions are the only mechanism which produces some shadow of a memory of a that.
Is it quite right that the public gets ignored all the time?
How do you force your representatives to actually represent their constituents?
I have just described how the public drives the democratic process to ensure everyone gets a voice, not just whoever shouts the loudest. That's the opposite of ignoring the public.
That's the nice-sounding theory, but I don't see any metrics on how well it works in practice. MPs aren't required to share the input from the public or publish lists of how they voted on every issue prior to elections. Representative democracy really includes very little accountability for the legislators.
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If the public truly drove the democratic process we'd have proportional representation or something other than the current system.
Yeah who do these peasants think they are?
You vote for someone who says "I will create more jobs"
They instead propose a bill that will cut jobs
There's deliberation, but a lot of other people want to cut jobs
Is you shouting "hey, that is not what I voted for!" yelling and disrupting process, or calling out the fact that you were lied to and your representative is in fact not representing you?