E-Petitions Hit Parliamentary Snag

David Cameron's high-profile pledge to allow people to e-petition Parliament hit a hitch last night. A plan to stage the first debate to be triggered by a subject attracting at least 100,000 signatures was abandoned because of "problems" with the new system.












Fail: The highly-anticipated e-petition website crashed within hours of going live.

The delay was revealed by the backbench business committee, which controls the relevant part of the House of Commons timetable. Natascha Engel, the committee's Labour chairwoman, declined to explain in details what the problems were. The MP did protest that the committee had not been fully consulted about the operation of the new system, which had raised "quite a few problems".

In the interim, subjects will be considered for debate only if they are raised with the committee by an MP - the standard process before the introduction of the e-petition system.

Engel told the committee's weekly meeting: "Everyone really supports the idea of e-petitions and public engagement, but I think there are quite a few problems that have risen their heads. All of us really want, in the long-term, to make sure e-petitions work, but that they work properly."

The government has pledged that any issue reaching the 100,000-signature threshold on the e-petitions website will be considered for discussion by MPs in Parliament.

The prime minister said the idea was part plans for "fixing broken politics", saying: "It will allow members of the public to table a bill that could end up being debated and voted on by MPs."

Two petitions have reached the 100,000 landmark so far, the first a call for people convicted of involvement in recent inner-city riots to be stripped of state benefits the second a demand for all official papers relating to the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool football fans were killed, to be released.

The hold-up means neither petition can be debated until October at the earliest, after the Commons resumes sittings following the party conferences.

Even then, only one slot will be available each month - triggering warnings that the government has raised expectations that cannot be met.

However, supporters of the Hillsborough petition pledged to press ahead with asking the backbench committee to back a debate, at its meeting next Tuesday. Andy Burnham, the Liverpool-born Labour former Cabinet minister, said: "We'll put strong case for debate at earliest opportunity."

Cameron Still Lacks A Foreign Policy Vision

What kind of a power do we want to be? How do we achieve that ambition? Cameron is unsure.












David Cameron greets troops after making a speech to British and American troops at Camp Leatherneck military base on July 4, 2011 in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Nato's mission in Libya looks like a foreign policy success for David Cameron, but that is not the same thing as having a successful foreign policy.

First, the obvious caveats: it is early days; the battle is not over, let alone the war. There are easily enough military and diplomatic traps ahead for the Libyan intervention to become a failure. The prime minister, the deputy prime minister, the foreign secretary and the defence secretary have all said as much. But for now, the politics of the situation are favouring Cameron. He took a big decision under considerable pressure and, after some nerve-wracking months, it appears to have paid off. "He definitely leapt before he looked," was how one senior Ministry of Defence official put it too me early on in the campaign. (The same source also said of the anti-Gaddafi rebels "the only good fighters among them are the al-Qaeda ones", a slightly wild allegation which should nonetheless be reason enough to put blind optimism for the future on hold.)

Libyans will decide whether they are better off in the long run for the UK's military partisanship in their insurrection-cum-civil war. The point is that, in the eyes of the British public, Cameron has effectively led a short war. There are usually political dividends to be drawn from that position.

But I suspect they will be limited in this case because, as with so much of Cameron's leadership, the good news story doesn't slot into a wider strategic narrative. It is worth remembering that the Conservatives came into power signalling reluctance to reshape the world - a la Blair - by military excursion. The new doctrine, as spelled out by William Hague in a series of speeches in July 2010, was a kind of bilateral mercantilism. The UK would continue to promote freedom and democracy around the globe, the foreign secretary said, but the main tool would be aggressive pursuit of trade interests. Overseas embassies would be reconfigured as pushy chambers of commerce.

Barely weeks before taking action in Libya, Cameron declared: "I am not a naive neocon who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000ft." The fact that Cameron then decided to use British military assets against Gaddafi doesn't signal some visionary conversion to fanatical interventionism. Libya might be a one-off; Gaddafi might just have been low-hanging despotic fruit.

To get the maximum political advantage from the intervention, Cameron has to frame the episode in terms of his vision of Britain's role in the world - and it isn't clear that he has one. The project of expanding our national influence by trade is looking trickier as the global economy falters. As an ambition it is of a pair with George Osborne's hope of rebalancing the economy and driving growth through exports - which relies on a level of overseas demand for UK goods that has not yet materialised.

A big gap in Cameron's world view (at least the publicly known portion of it) is his sense of how Britain's position in the European Union will evolve as the single currency lurches ever onward in financial and institutional crisis. As I mentioned in my column this week, this omission is stirring dissent in the party. A lot of Tories see the eurozone crisis as an opportunity to start a wholesale renegotiation of Britain's EU deal, but there isn't much appetite for that at the top of the party. (This is partly because the leadership's view of all matters EU is coloured by their "modernising" crusade in opposition, so there is an association between public expressions of fierce euroscepticism and unelectability. Then, of course, there is the problem of the stubbornly Europhile Lib Dems.)

The Arab Spring; global economic turbulence; structural crisis at the heart of the European Union - three giant themes that raise profound questions about Britain's position in the world. What kind of a power do we want to be? How do we achieve that ambition? I don't get the impression that Cameron is any closer to having persuasive answers to those questions than he was when he moved into Downing Street last year.