Several people have asked if Forest is going to organise a petition against the Government’s plan to extend the smoking ban to pub gardens and other outdoor areas.
As I’ve said before, I'm not a huge fan of petitions because experience has taught me that they rarely make a difference, even if they go viral or attract hundreds of thousands of signatories.
I know because Forest has done it. Our petition against plain packaging raised over 250k signatories but we had to hire a company to organise street petitions throughout the country and that came at enormous cost.
Before that, and with little money to promote it, an online petition calling for an amendment to the indoor smoking ban attracted just 5,000 signatories.
It could be argued that the Hands Off Our Packs petition did help postpone legislation, and I would be delighted to achieve even that modest ambition today, but we simply don’t have the funds to conduct a street petition on that scale - or any scale.
A couple of days ago however I was alerted to a petition on Change.org.
It’s reasonably well argued so I've signed it, but (at the time of writing) it only has 279 signatories so I fear it will suffer the same fate as most petitions.
Nevertheless, if you wish to sign it too, here’s the link.