The Prime Minister's office at 10 Downing Street has resorted to extraordinary spin in an attempt to fragment and dissipate opposition to it's flawed road pricing policy.
1) The following wording appears on the petitions web site [1]: "We will use your email address to confirm your signature and, unless you ask us not to, we will also send you a maximum of two responses to the issues raised in the petition and a maximum of two emails from the creator of the petition." Peter Roberts has NOT been allowed to send emails to the petition signers.
2) Instead of allowing Peter Roberts to make a clear statement to petitioners on the Downing Street web site, they have attempted to bury Peter's response amongst others. [2]
3) Peter's response on the web site is three clicks down from the petition web page, while the 'official' response is just one click down. Web publishers will know that 'clicking down' results in attrition rates of at least 10:1, so this move makes it (at the very least) 100 times more likely that Mr Blair's views will be read instead of Mr Roberts' by casual visitors.
4) When you do view the page with Peter's response amongst others [2], Peter's is the only 'distant' photograph. We don't believe that this is an accident.
5) No significant Downing Street publicity has been given to Peter's new 'Traveltax' [3] web site.
6) They limited Peter Robert's response to 300 words, but Mr Blair's email was1,274 words.
Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign(www.safespeed.org.uk) said: "It is outrageous that the Downing Street web site should slant the playing field like this. It is indicative of a propaganda machine in full swing. They are behaving like bully boys, not professionals with sound policies."
"If this is what they call 'public debate' then we don't want it. It is bad enough that they press on regardless of the opinions of 1.8 million signatories, but it's worse that they resort to unbalanced presentation and bully-boy' tactics."
"I expect I speak for most of the signatories when I say: WE DEMAND the right to see Peter Robert's email response at the end of the petition."
