The online petition calling for one seat for the European Parliament – oneseat.eu – has now passed 900000 signatures. It’s an excellent initiative to call for the ending of the wasteful monthly trips of the European Parliament to Strasbourg. Anyone in favour of an effective European Parliament and value for money for taxpayers should sign it. If you want to debate the pros and cons of Strasbourg, that ground has been gone over at this post.
Emmanuel,
A petition is just a petition, and the points you make are true for any petition. Still, petitions are regularly used to show that many people have a concern about a given subject, and this is clearly the case here.
One million signatures, even if a percentage of these are “false” as you call them, should mean something to the EU Member State representatives. This is probably the petition with the higher number of signature that ever existed !
PS : I don’t see why the fact that many signatories are Dutch shows that the petition is unrepresentative. Has a Dutch citizen less value than any other European citizen ?
Unfortunately, it’s all very well claiming the signature target is close – my definition of ‘close’ would be any hint that the member states are actually paying attention to it, especially France. I don’t see any concrete sign of that.
Jon, I don’t want to debate the pros and cons of Strasbourg, but just to point out how unrepresentative this petition is: in June, half of the signatories were Dutch, and I managed to sign it as “Jacques Chirac”, which shows how easy it is to distort the figures and create false signatories!