In 2006 the inhabitants of the United Kingdom were given their first chance to ‘e-petition’ the Prime Minister. The website announcing this new facility declares that ‘petitions have long been sent to the Prime Minister by post or delivered to the Number 10 door in person. You can now both create and sign petitions on this website too, giving you the opportunity to reach a potentially wider audience and to deliver your petition directly to Downing Street.’ Among the e-petitions open in the summer of 2007 were one ‘to prevent changes to the current regulations on scuba cylinder valves’, another ‘immediately and retrospectively [to] give all Gurkha servicemen and their families past and present british [sic] citizenship’, and a third ‘[to] abolish all faith schools and prohibit the teaching of creationism and other religious mythology in all UK schools’. Around the same time members of the historical profession in the UK were being ‘e-lobbied’ by the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society to add their ‘e-signatures’ to another e-petition on the same site calling the Prime Minister to ‘make the study of history compulsory for all pupils to the age of 16’. Over three million people had registered their names against at least one e-petition, 68,000 of them for a request to ‘stop proposed restrictions regarding photography in public places’ and a remarkable 5,000 calling on the then prime minister, Tony Blair, to ‘stand on his head and juggle ice cream’.

In its desire to demonstate responsiveness to the vox populi, the government of early twenty-first-century Britain has at once reinforced petitioning as an inalienable democratic right and transformed it into a kind of on-line entertainment. The modern technologies that provide facilities for the effortless collection of millions of signatures would no doubt have been the envy of political campaigners who, from the end of the eighteenth century, sought to activiate mass petitioning as a means of lobbying Parliament for the great causes of the day: the promotion of the Christian religion in India in the 1810s; the removal of impediments against religious dissenters and the abolition of the slave trade in the 1820s; and the adoption of the People's Charter of 1838. The modern idea of the petition as a vehicle of popular politics that derives its moral authority from the number of signatories is, in fact, very largely a product of the 1780s.