39 comments on UK Government Response to Peak Oil Petition
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firstly, this one passed me by (Oops!) Probably because I tend to look at the main TOD site more than the UK/Europe one.
Once again, though the official response to an e-petition is one of:
a) didn't RTFQ*
b) an answer worthy of Sir Humphrey**.
This one is more of the second. Maybe there would have been more of a wake up call if the petition had focussed on UK production. But then again, perhaps not. :-(
AKH
* example: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/midwives/
From the petition:
From the response:
** as a UK Civil Servant, I find this obfuscation depressing.Being parodied in "Yes, Minister" should have been the wake up call, but it seems that Whitehall still can't make simple, easy to understand sentences, 20 years on from that show. Grrr.
Yes Minister was a badge of honour and a training video. Young civil servants aspire to that level of command of their job - although the tools and techniques may have changed.
The petitions are setup to funnel 'customer action' into manageable mechanisms. After all, if someone really setup a petition outside this system they might further organise to use more effective tools as well. Horror of horrors, they might talk to the press. Keeping them at the stage of filling in a form and "that's all" is well worth the time it takes for a flunky to provide a rote answer well after the heat has cooled down.
Its a basic fact of politics, if they can see you coming and can manage your approach, you've already lost.
Yeah, I've had a few experiences with the e-petitions site, and with writing directly to various MPs and MSPs. The whole thrust of their approach seems to be that if they can fob you off with several pages of waffle that essentially ignores the point you were trying to make or the question you were asking, eventually you'll give up and go away.
I have to admit that it seems to work.