Scottish Parliament Forced to Consider Legalizing Incest

MRCTV ^ | 1-26-16 | Dan Joseph

[naturalman1975]

Is there not a minimum number of signatures necessary for a petition to go to Parliament? Otherwise it seems they would be flooded with all sorts of idiotic ones.

No - the United Kingdom Parliament has a minimum number of signature requirement for a petition to be considered, but Scotland doesn't.

There are rules that concern what form a petition must take and what issues they can and cannot cover, and there are Clerks who review and will not admit petitions that are outside those rules (they will also help rewrite a petition that is wrong in form, if it's addressing a proper issue.)

There's a lot about the system that is good - it does allow for people to be heard on a wide range of issues and have them considered, but, yes, it is open to potential abuse. For the most part, petitions are about reasonable subjects though - beside the one that this article is about, the last ten petitions have been about protecting salmon (a major industry in Scotland), autism, survivors of child abuse, public planning, behaviour of elected officials, football hooliganism, health testing, healthcare centres, and licencing acupuncturists - wherever people stand on these issues, it doesn't seem unreasonable to want them discussed. So the system doesn't seem to actually be being abused too much, even though the risk of that seem high.

[Rockpile]

Thanks. Except maybe at the local level we have small chance of getting a hearing in the US.

[SWAMPSNIPER]