A petition calling on the government to drop plans to make wartime-style mandatory identity documents picked up a million signatures in 24 hours after the policy was soft-launched this week.
An early indication of public sentiment on the notion of mandatory identity documents, as no new polling has yet been published on the matter, has arrived as the “Do not introduce Digital ID cards” petition picks up steam.
The petition, that had originally been launched in the mid-summer but which slowly picked up signatures until the government soft-launched its identity crackdown on Thursday night, had around 100,000 signatures yesterday morning. Now, 24 hours after that soft-launch and amid the Prime Minister actually making the announcement on Friday morning, the petition has grown by over a million signatures.
At time of publication, it had picked up over 1.2 million backers. The drive is on the UK government’s official petition website, where any cause can be put to the public. Under the state’s own rules, if a petition gets 10,000 signatures, the government is obliged to issue a written response to the petitioners. If a petition reaches 100,000, the petition can be “considered” for a debate in Parliament.
In reality, petitions that don’t already align with the government’s intentions are generally ignored. Unlike in countries that practice direct democracy, like Switzerland, there is no mechanism for public petitions to actually force change. Nevertheless, the petition is a potentially useful barometer for public feeling on the ID document issue. As things stands, opposition has come from an astonishingly broad cross-section of British political life, from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and even rebels inside the governing Labour Party.
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