Government has me stitched up

Jokes at the Governments expense? Well it's not exactly new and has been going on in the UK for centuries. So a few months back I suddenly had a bright spark of an idea. The Government have been testing out an on-line polling idea from their 10 Downing Street web-site - I thought I give it a little go to see what would happen. I wrote my online petition and submitted it and a little while later had the following e-mail:

Hi,
I'm sorry to inform you that your petition has been rejected.

Your petition was classed as being in the following categories:

* Intended to be humorous, or has no point about government
policy

If you wish to edit and resubmit your petition, please follow
the following link:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/gulliballs/

You have four weeks in which to do this, after which your
petition will appear in the list of rejected petitions.

Your petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to: 'Remove the
word 'gullible' from the Oxford dictionary'

The word 'gullible' is out of date and now underused, so
pressure should be applied by the British Government to
persuade the Oxford dictionary to remove it. Our children our
learning this word at school and it will be no use to them in
the future so removing it will save time and resources spent on
education and misunderstandings in future years as the younger
children reach maturity.

-- the ePetitions team

Schoolboy humour maybe but it was worth a go!

You are able to amend your petition if they reject it - I did not do that with mine as it was obvious ridicule but I waited to see what their system would do and this week I got the following e-mail:

Hello,
This is an automatic email to let you know that the
petition you submitted 4 weeks ago has now been published on
the rejected petitions page,
. This is because you
chose not to edit and resubmit your petition in the time since
we asked you to change your original submission.

As a reminder, your petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to: 'Remove the
word 'gullible' from the Oxford dictionary'

The word 'gullible' is out of date and now underused, so
pressure should be applied by the British Government to
persuade the Oxford dictionary to remove it. Our children our
learning this word at school and it will be no use to them in
the future so removing it will save time and resources spent on
education and misunderstandings in future years as the younger
children reach maturity.

As we wrote before, your petition was classed as being in the
following categories:

* Intended to be humorous, or has no point about government
policy

For transparency, the parts of your petition that can be
published legally and in accordance with the civil service code
can be seen at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/gulliballs/

-- the ePetitions team