"As long as humans have been writing down important information, others have been pulling their leg. So it's no surprise that serious petitions to governments have always been interspersed with tongue-in-cheek campaigns designed to raise a laugh. Some of the greatest civil rights advances started with petitions to government, including the abolition of slavery. It's hard to say the same for the petition to rename raccoons Trash Pandas."
"A petition calling for broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson to be made prime minister was quickly backed by more than 50,000 people, although a jokey YouTube response from Downing Street led to Gordon Brown's government dourly being accused of wasting taxpayers' money. By 2011, the new Tory-Lib Dem coalition government decided to move e-petitions from a government website to a parliamentary site and tighten up the rules, but still the joke petitions sneaked through."
Petitioning has long mixed serious demands for rights with tongue-in-cheek campaigns. Major civil-rights advances began with petitions, yet frivolous petitions persist. The launch of Downing Street's e-petition site in 2006 widened public access and attracted spoof campaigns, including support for Jeremy Clarkson as prime minister. By 2011 e-petitions moved to a parliamentary site and rules were tightened, but joke petitions continued to appear, ranging from criminalising mislabelled pies to reviving Bacardi Breezers. Public appetite for petitions remains strong, with 57% of people reporting they signed a petition in the past year according to Office for National Statistics data.
Read at www.bbc.com
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