[thrkw123456789]

No the uk has no direct democracy. Parliament is sovereign not the electorate. Indeed before any referendum the uk parliament has to pass specific legislation binding itself to the result+. These petitions are a relatively new thing and have never (please someone jump in and correct me if I'm wrong) lead to anything meaningful. 100,000 signatures mean that it has to be considered for a discussion in parliament - it doesn't even mean the discussion has to go ahead and if it does a vote in parliament may not happen (filibustering happens on non-goverment initiated debates in parliament) and would not be binding anyway.

+ interestingly the EU referendum was technically only advisory - but parliament would be mad to ignore it.

[streety]

The apology made by Gordon Brown to Alan Turing was prompted by a petition

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-...

A complete list that were debated is at https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=debated

[petercooper]

These petitions are a relatively new thing and have never (please someone jump in and correct me if I'm wrong) lead to anything meaningful.

For a very small value of "meaningful", I signed a petition when the government made suggestions they would be moving businesses to submitting tax returns four times a year. The response was not actually a change in policy but a pretty good explanation of the miscommunication over what they were actually planning to do and why it wasn't worth getting worried about. So at least as a way to get the government to explain their intentions more clearly, it worked.