I am a fuckwit and you might be too

Here's a graph of how the Go Gordon petition on the Number10 website has been accumulating signatures since last Friday when Kalvis Jansons started it and it was covered in The Register.


It'll be over 40,000 by the time you read this.

And here's Chris Qwghhlm calling everyone who signed a fuckwit.

For starters, we already have a mechanism for kicking Prime Ministers out of power. They’re called elections. True, they only come along every 4-5 years, but then democracies can only function with some continuity in administration. If you don’t want to wait till next year to cast your vote, then fucking tough, and count your blessings you live in a country where the citizenry can vote leaders out of power.

Second, you’re missing the wood for the trees. Gordon Brown’s premiership has been nothing short of a disaster, but it’s been very much a team effort. It isn’t just the man at the top, it’s the whole bloody team around him. Darling, Mandelson, Smith, Blears, Geoff fucking Hoon. Not to mention the old guard of Blair, Clarke, Blunkett, etc. setting it all up. The whole lot of them are responsible for the miserable idea-starved philosophy of New Labour, with its craving for power, its thrall for made-up wealth and its authoritarian managerialism in every department.

Third, what comes next? If Brown resigns, then Harman or Miliband or possibly Straw or some other New Labour apparatchik takes his place. A PM resigning does not mean a change in the ruling party, or even an election, and you don’t have to go that far back in history (Wilson, Thatcher, Blair) for examples. If you’re not happy with the current government then you really should be making a case for what the next one should be bringing (and fuck knows, the current Opposition need every bit of help in that department).

Finally, you’re a fuckwit because you’re a petition-signing fuckwit. Petitions have some very good uses - raising awareness of a previously unknown issue, or for co-ordinating action for the disadvantaged and disparate, or to help lobby for changing unjust laws. But these don’t account for many of petitions on the Number 10 site. Many of them are just ways for the inarticulate and incoherent to vent frustration at something they dislike, and petitioning the Prime Minister to resign is the stellar example. It has no hope of changing anything. It advocates nothing positive whatsoever. All it is is another way of childishly wailing “I don’t like you” to someone who doesn’t give a fuck, just so you can congratulate yourself with the delusion that you are sticking it to The Man. Well done, you must be so proud. Fuckwit.

Maybe he has a point. Maybe he's just very bitter about something.

A bit harsh calling so many people fuckwits though.

If you gave the people of the UK a general election we'd vote out Gordon Brown, but an election is a long way away, so the people are expressing their views in any way possible and right now, there's a petition on the Number10 website.

Back in the hours after the April 1st protests and some lefty moaning that right-wing bloggers were strangely quiet about it, Mr Eugenides posted a thoughtful piece about how lefties go on protest marches and right-wingers just want to be left alone. And so I reckon its the same sort of thing with signing petitions.

Some people go on protest marches to express themselves, some people sign petitions, and some people try to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and I'm not going to be all judgemental on anyone's ass and call them fuckwits if I don't subscribe to the same means of expression as them.