The research team set out to answer three questions that are relevant to democracy in the UK today, using archival, oral, visual and print evidence from the past century.

• Petitioning shifted towards informal political participation

• Petitions were used for a diversity of causes, actions, and audiences

• To facilitate further action or bring visibility to otherwise ignored concerns

• To form links between campaigning activities and between their campaigns and decision-makers

• To organise, recruit and fundraise in local and national campaigns

• By being accessible to different groups, citizens, and campaigns

• By offering a convenient way for campaigners to attract publicity

Key message: Our research reveals the breadth of petitioning as a practice across all manner of causes and groups, addressing local, national, and international concerns. Studying who petitioned whom across a century enabled us to connect everyday political experiences of citizenship with changing understandings of where power lay and who claimed rights and obligations.

In the nineteenth century, Parliament was the main recipient of public petitions and the only one to count them. Petitions to Parliament declined throughout the twentieth century (Figure 1) so that in 1974 the House of Commons abolished its Select Committee on Public Petitions due to lack of business.

At the same time, citizens increasingly contacted their members of Parliament (MPs) to redress issues and a reinvigoration of the petitioning system might have enhanced this. Instead, those in power decided that petitioning had lost its value, thus devaluing the petitioning of Parliament further.

Despite this decline, surveys of political participation repeatedly found that, apart from voting, petitioning was the only form of political activity that engaged a majority of British citizens in the later twentieth century (Figure 2).

Our research reveals why people kept petitioning despite openly expressed doubts from decision-makers, commentators, and – often – campaigners themselves about petitions’ likelihood of success.

• Petitioning evolved alongside the early-twentieth-century democratisation of representative institutions. As such, petitions often mediated between citizens and institutions. Petitioners often pre-empted official efforts to encourage participatory democratic practices towards the end of the century (and continuing in digital forms in the twenty-first century).

• Citizens increasingly participated outside of formal political processes, such as those associated with elections and political parties. Rather than waiting for invitations to express views in a vote, consultation, or opinion poll, petitions offered a way for citizens to press claims without prior permission.

• The apparent expansion of petitioning in the twentieth century reflected a shift away from being a practice directed to particular political institutions to it becoming a mechanism for wider campaigns existing outside formalised processes or systems.

• Petitions enabled a dynamic process of different groups advancing their own representative claims. Petitions formed an important part of a pluralist, contested democracy, where no particular institution or medium could claim exclusive authority to speak for all of the people, all of the time.

Our research finds that petitioning diversified rather than diminished.

• Petitioners addressed a broader range of local, national, and international authorities, almost all of which did not formally record or count petitions.

• Some petitions now headed to 10 Downing Street, continued to address the monarch, or lobbied local government.

• Petitioning remained a common tactic for diverse causes, social movements, political parties, civil society and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) throughout the twentieth century.

• In other cases, people created freestanding petitions to represent their claims or opinions. We call these petitions ‘in the wild’. They were organised with no intention to be sent to a formal ‘petitions system’ associated with a particular authority or institution. This new informality offered greater scope for the creativity of citizens and activists, reflecting a rich clash of different claims to represent ‘people power’.

Recognising petitioning as a widespread, important, and popular practice explains why so many famous protest movements made petitions central to their activity.

• 1910 Women suffragists and suffragettes

• 1936 The Jarrow marchers

• 1957 The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

• 1971 Anti-European opponents of Britain’s entry to the Common Market

• 1999 The Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt relief

Petitions provided a tool for participation and representation in local, national, or international scales of collective action.

Petitioning persisted despite the extension of the vote to all:

• Adult men in 1918

• Adult women in 1928

In 1950, at the peak of a two-party electoral system when almost 90% of British electors voted for either Labour or the Conservatives, petitioning flourished alongside representative democracy:

• Over 2 million Scottish citizens signed a Covenant in favour of a devolved parliament

• 1.3 million Britons subscribed to the Stockholm Appeal, an international (allegedly Communist-inspired) campaign for nuclear disarmament

Countless petitions were used by citizens within their neighbourhoods:

• Stourport residents successfully opposed an attempt to convert an orchard into a car park.

• A Sunderland teenager organised a petition demanding better bus services.

• Parents on one of the Orkney Islands petitioned the local director of education regarding ‘the attitude and methods’ of their children’s teacher.

Key message: Many organisations and individuals kept petitioning, sometimes to the bafflement of politicians and insiders. Many people circulating or signing petitions did not hold a simple, instrumental expectation of ‘success’, but rather embraced sophisticated, strategic understandings of pressure, agency, and duty.

Individuals and organisations using petitions have often had a broader or more sophisticated concept of ‘success’ than politicians, officials, or authorities. Many petitioners did not expect the person receiving a petition to agree to their demands immediately, but rather saw petitioning as enabling, honouring, or developing goals. Asking people to sign a petition could be a way to encourage them to change their future behaviour or to change their mind:

• Mansfield Friends of the Earth’s 1995 petition opposed mahogany products and pledged not to buy them.

• Anti-German League’s 1915 petition demanding “all women who have signed it to register a resolve not to purchase German articles in the future”.

• The Equal Pay Campaign’s 1952 Committee petition: [Petitions afford an] “opportunity for publicity for the campaign and for educating public opinion” by “bringing the question before large numbers of individual citizens” asked to sign.

For people signing petitions, they might do so because it offered a chance to express their view or honour a sense of duty, rather than because they expected theirs to be the one signature that tipped the balance for achieving change. Signing petitions could have a unifying effect, or be divisive within communities:

• 1993: A petition for ‘Justice for Joy Gardner’, killed in a police raid, publicised the Black experience of the deportation system and London policing.

• 1968: Residents’ decisions to sign or not to sign a petition against a new housing development resulted in permanent splits in men’s Sunday drinking groups and women’s coffee morning invitations.

• 1986: One woman recalled how there had been an anti-abortion “petition at my Church and I turned away from the Church over constant badgering over this issue” as “I dislike men telling me what I should do”.

Petitioning formed part of a repertoire of campaigning tactics, and was often linked to demonstrations, protests, letter-writing, face-to-face lobbying, and other interactions with power.

At the time and since, petitioning has been dismissed as a low-risk, conventional form of participation compared to more direct and ‘radical’ forms of protest associated with the new social movements of the 1960s and afterwards.

Yet, the widespread use of petitioning within protest movements, including nuclear disarmament, women’s liberation, gay rights, and animal rights, reveals a more complicated relationship between protest and petitioning, which were not mutually exclusive activities. Indeed, petitioning was often valued by activists as a prompt for demonstrations or as a way to connect directly with authority through the presentation of petitions.

Increasingly from the 1970s, elected politicians organised their own petitions on local issues to show their leadership on constituency concerns or to boost turnout from their voters at elections.

Campaigners, whether local or national, found petitioning a valuable mechanism for organisation, recruitment, and fundraising. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament illustrates this.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (1950s-90s) advised branches to fill the donation column of the first line of signatures on each petition, to encourage others to chip in too.

• “Knocking on doors was very rewarding because it was surprising how many people were actually interested enough to listen and were sympathetic.” – Interviewee who collected 1000 signatures in Surrey for the World Disarmament Petition, 1980s

• “Cynics assert that no petition ever influences the body to which it is addressed” but this “does not prevent the petition being valuable as a means of propaganda.” – Anti-nuclear activist of the 1960s

• “In itself the petition is largely irrelevant, rather we use it as an enabling tool.” – CND newspaper, 1983

Key message: The growing ‘mediatisation’ of petitioning meant it was increasingly tailored and sometimes commissioned with an eye to newspaper or TV reporting, rather than the immediate authority to which a petition was addressed. In the 1990s, online pioneers experimented with e-mail and website petitions, adapting petitions to the early internet.

In many local contexts, petitions enabled residents, tenants, or service-users to offer their own democratic challenge to remote bureaucracies, arbitrary authority, or corporate power on any conceivable issue. Petitions focusing on local issues constituted a popular and ubiquitous form of everyday politics, which could extend beyond Westminster’s priorities or party lines. Whether or not such petitions connected a particular, local issue to general, national, or international questions, they captured everyday political concerns about the power to shape communities.

• 1957: The ‘fishwives’ of Cullercoats, in North Tyneside, stood at their doors to gather signatures from passers-by in protest at council plans to demolish their cottages.

• 1975: Students and gay rights campaigners in Durham organised a petition threatening to boycott the Three Tuns pub if it remained unwelcoming to gay customers.

Our research reveals a persistent genre of ‘ostracisation’ petitions such as:

• petitions against Gypsy, Romany, and Traveller people

• objections to perceived ‘problem’ tenants or neighbours

• demands to ‘keep the street white’

In 1985 The Commission for Racial Equality won an injunction against 53 tenants of the Exmouth estate in Tower Hamlets for signing a petition opposing an Asian family moving into their block.

While expectations of women’s political, economic, and social roles changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, petitioning continued to be a popular way to claim gendered authority on particular issues.

• 1906: Women temperance activists petitioned magistrates over the licensing of an inn in Trefeglwys.

• 1960s onwards: Campaigners opposed to the permissive society, such as Mar y Whitehouse or Victoria Gillick, reinforced their message through a medium, the petition, that evoked ‘ordinary’ voices, such as those of provincial housewives, in defiance of establishment elites.

• 1996: ‘Two Scottish mothers in a coffee shop’ started the Snowdrop campaign for restrictions on handguns following the Dunblane massacre.

The growth of photographic reproduction, broadcast media, and mass readership newspapers gave petitioners an incentive to fashion increasingly striking or spectacular visual petition-presentations.

• 1931: The Lord’s Day Observance Society delivered to Downing Street a petition of nearly 1.5m signatures against cinemas opening on Sundays.

• 1954: Women on the Equal Pay Campaign Committee and trades unions leaders presented petitions with 680,000 signatures for pay equality in public services.

• 1967: Disabled people went on foot or in wheelchairs to Downing Street to raise the concerns of the Disablement Income Group campaigning for disability support.

• 1982: 500,000 Sikhs marched to deliver a petition protesting their exclusion from race relations laws.

In the decades between the waning of mass petitions to Parliament in the Edwardian era and the early twenty-first century emergence of institutional e-petitions systems, petitioning was a widespread, but largely unrecorded, political activity directed to a range of authorities – or perhaps carried out without one specifically in mind.

In terms of our three research questions, we found that:

• during the development of mass democracy in the twentieth century, petitioning was used across all manner of causes, groups, and scales, from local to international;

• many people circulating or signing petitions did not hold a simple, instrumental expectation of ‘success’, but rather embraced sophisticated, strategic understandings of pressure, agency, and duty, and used petitioning as a key means of fundraising and recruitment;

• the ‘mediatisation’ of petitioning meant that it was increasingly tailored and sometimes commissioned with an eye to newspaper or TV reporting, rather than the immediate reception by the authority to which a petition had been addressed.

Despite the growth of government power during the twentieth century, Parliamentarians missed an opportunity to reinvent the petitioning process as a form of public engagement with legislators.

However, in 1999, the new Scottish Parliament was founded with a committee to consider and investigate citizens’ petitions; from 2000, it invited online petitions too. The National Assembly for Wales (now Senedd Cymru), Northern Ireland Assembly, and UK Parliament subsequently followed this lead to reinvent petition systems, as have many local councils.

Brief experiments with Downing Street e-petitions ended with a parliamentary committee overseeing a system that incorporates government responses to petitioners. Petitioning to legislatures revived thanks not just to technology but also to an explicit strategy to engage voters and citizens in the work of their representative institutions during the period in between elections.

Since e-petitions rely on some sort of online platform for signature, they have changed the relationship between the organisation and the reception of petitions. Legislatures may now vet the content of e-petitions listed for signature, since their servers and reputation are at stake in inviting people to sign.

At the same time, a variety of proprietary or individual websites for petition-signing continue the tradition of petitioning ‘in the wild’, where the mechanism for transmitting a petition to the relevant authority is less important than amassing a show of support for the cause. Many campaigns and organisations remain keen to host their own petitions, for members and potential supporters, to sign online or on paper.

Ownership of petitions – whether paper or digital ones – has become increasingly important. While organisations always valued the recruitment and fundraising role of petitions, twenty-first-century data protection laws make the signatories’ consent to further communications more valuable than ever. If the decline of local journalism provides fewer outlets soliciting or photographing petitions presented to a local council, then petitioning – whether online or not – remains a common means to represent a form of ‘people power’ to a wide range of authorities and audiences.

Understanding how political participation changed in the past can help us better understand and determine how we imagine its future.

The project team are grateful to our project partners at the History of Parliament Trust and the British Library (Oral History section) for supporting our research for the project, as well as their oral history interviewees. The project team are delighted to publish the report on their research in association with the Hansard Society. Report edited and designed by Research Retold. Photographs licensed © Mary Evans Picture Library.

This report summarises findings from the AHRC-ESRC ‘Petitioning and People Power in Twentieth-Century Britain’ research project (AH/T003847/1). A forthcoming academic book will provide a fuller account of findings, sources, and evidence.

Bocking-Welch, A., Huzzey, R., Leston-Bandeira, C. & Miller, H. (25 October 2024), What’s the point of petitions? What the last century reveals about petitioning and people power in modern Britain (Hansard Society)