[ssf] Fwd: Brown "resign" petition

[Jason]

All,

This petition is at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/.
Signatures now up to over 20000.

Downing Street website hosts petition calling for Gordon Brown to resign
Ten thousand people have signed a petition on the Downing Street
website, calling for Gordon Brown's resignation

 a.. Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent
 b.. guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 April 2009 03.01 BST

There have been many joyous postings on the Downing Street website in
recent weeks to show the world that No 10 is a happy place.

Scores of pictures of the Downing Street garden in bloom have shown
that staff are enjoying the wonders of spring. And of course there are
lots of pictures of Gordon Brown holding earnest meetings with world
leaders as he works hard to save the world economy.

But what is this? A suggestion has slipped on to the website that all
may not be well beyond the iron gates of Downing Street. In fact there
is a demand that the prime minister should be evicted.

By 7.00 last night nearly 10,000 people had signed a petition on the
Downing Street website calling for the prime minister to resign. The
petition, only posted five days ago, simply states: "We the
undersigned petition the prime minister to resign".

The petition was posted by Dr Kalvis Jansons, an academic
mathematician, who describes himself as a disillusioned "traditional
Labour supporter". The "final straw", which persuaded him to post the
petition, was the prime minister's initial reluctance to apologise for
the emails by his former special adviser Damian McBride smearing the
Tories.

Jansons, from Hitchin, Herts, who has taught at University College
London, deliberately worded the petition in simple and brief terms to
avoid it being blocked by No 10. In a message on the site, he wrote:
"There are many reasons why we might want Brown to resign, but rather
than having lots of narrow petitions on this topic (most of which have
been rejected), I wanted one for all of us."

Jansons told the Press Association: "I wanted a simple, clear,
generalised petition which would cover all the bases and comply with
their rules. I wanted it to be something that could unite the
country."

His aim was to make his petition the most popular on the site. A call
for the RNLI to be protected from maritime radio licence fees is the
most popular petition at the moment, with 28,000 signatures. Other
petitions on the site call for an end to plans to part-privatise Royal
Mail, preventing any increase in university tuition fees and opposing
restrictions on vitamin supplements.

The prime minister will probably be cursing the internet whizz
Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, Tony Blair's last director of strategy in No
10, who dreamt up the idea of hosting petitions as a way of connecting
Downing Street to voters. He was branded a "prat" by the former
transport secretary Douglas Alexander, a Brown ally, when a petition
criticising road pricing attracted 1.8m signatures in 2007. Blair
wrote an email to the petitioners explaining government policy.

Petitioners are promised a government response if they attract more
than 200 signatures on a "serious" subject.