Number 10 closes its website for rejecting petitions

A review of the Number 10 petitions website has apparently concluded, unofficially for now, that it won't be coming back.

The site was, of course, an embarrassment to the government. Not because a petition calling for Gordon Brown to "just go" secured more than 70,000 signatories; nor because the site was used by some to call for Tony Blair to face a war crimes tribunal over the conduct of the war in Iraq; not even because one of the very first uses of the feature was to call for the Prime Minister

to sing 'We're Going To Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line' through a megaphone while standing in a barrel of custard outside the Houses of Parliament

(which, gloriously, was rejected on grounds that "it was outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government" - small government indeed, that cannot meet even so modest a request).

No, the site was an embarrassment because it listed in plain view the government's rejection of 38,265 requests by its citizens, many of them perfectly reasonable and dozens of them supported by tens of thousands of people. 

If there was one example to which the government could point and say "actually, a lot of you told us you wanted us to do this so we changed our minds" then the site might have been a different matter. As it is, the site stands (or now stood) as witness to one of the more clueless and feeble attempts at pretending to engage with an audience ever attempted. There is nothing positive on either side about a mechanism for us to explain to our elected government what we want merely so that government can tell us that we cannot have it.