Petition into triple figures online. What next?

This morning the 100th person signed our petition (thank you Leo Aspden, get in touch if you are reading this!),

The petition calls for Manchester City Council to

Establish a permanent “Climate and Environment Scrutiny Committee”, of equal standing to the existing 6 scrutiny committees Make strenuous efforts to secure additional funding for climate action, including the use of some of its strategic reserves.

This is because the existing scrutiny arrangements for climate change have revealed themselves (over the last ten years) to be woefully inadequate, and because there is evidence that since last July’s climate emergency declaration that the Council has been shaking the money tree (FoIAs to follow).

This morning the online petition passed its first significant milestone. There will be others and we will make a fuss about them – 250, 333, 500 and so on.

OUR target is to get 1000 signatures online.  It’s really straightforward, once you realise that the registration has NOTHING TO DO with the main Council website registration.  All you have to do is go to here, enter the details that give you the right to sign the petition (you live, work or study within Manchester City Council’s boundaries). You will be sent a link to your email account, and then can sign the petition. It is literally a two minute job (or should be) and most of that is waiting for the email to come through. And once you’ve signed, here is a list of other ideas

We will be doing a lot more over the coming weeks, beyond Facebook and Twitter, to encourage online signing (even Instagram!).  If you have ideas about where and with whom we should be engaging online, get in touch – petition@climateemergencymanchester.net

But our target for signatures is actually not 1000, but 4000.  So the other 3000 are going to come from collecting face-to-face. With clipboards, flyers and pens. Old school.  And we are going to do this across ALL the wards of Manchester, not just in the Hulme-Chorlton-Didsbury triangle.

Because the goal is not to get 4000, have a debate in Full Council and then lose the vote that follows because we have re-inforced the myth that only middle-class trendy lentil-eaters care about the fate of life on earth.  The goal is to make it impossible for Councillors who want as little action as possible to hide behind their current excuses.

So, what this means is

  • we in the core group will be collecting signatures a lot
  • we do not imagine ourselves as some heroic vanguard
  • we support other people in their collecting efforts (which have already begun) by offering face-to-face training (take about 10 mins) and equipment.

There is advice about collecting signatures here. PLEASE read it.

There is an updated petition sheet here you can download and print off.

If you have ideas about where and with whom we should be engaging “in real life”, get in touch – petition@climateemergencymanchester.net

 

Marc Hudson

(the CEM core group member tasked with leading on the petition campaign)

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