Thank you to everyone who responded to my requests on twitter and facebook for signatures yesterday. You can see the letter and sigs at the bottom of this post

I hope that it is just one of many letters that The Telegraph receive. I know that firefighters and health workers are busy collecting sigs for theirs.

So what have I learned from this experience?

1. Blogger is RUBBISH for allowing people to leave comments. I ended up spending lots of time responding to people who were unable to leave comment. I need to find a better blog platform. Apologies if you wasted time trying

2. The Daily Telegraph starts off every single letter “SIR – …” Really?! In this day and age?!!

3. There is a real appetite from the Great British Public to have their say. People who resent media dominated by voices of ‘rich & powerful’, ‘great and the good’ and the professional commentariat. Political parties and some trade unions could make much more use of this. Instead, most of them just see us as a stage army to come out and act when they want! I don’t think we should be so passive – we can speak out without needing permission!

4. Even without getting this letter promoted by a political party or by trade union official accounts it was easy to make a big noise on twitter. RTs by Zoe Williams, Owen Jones, Jack Monroe and Sunny Hundal meant this letter travelled widely quickly. My facebook friends by and large ignored my requests for sigs. My new haircut got more likes that this initiative!

5. It is always better to do something rather than nothing. The business leaders may have vast media platforms but we have numbers on our side, “We are the many, they are the few”. So many people in this world live under regimes where speaking out leads to doors being kicked in and midnight visits from secret police that it makes us look a little feeble if we don’t use our democratic rights. Moaning on twitter is NOT taking political action!

Finally,

Huge apologies if I left you off the letter. I got a bit stressed about missing deadlines and lost lots of tweeted replies once I starting to get 100’s of mentions. Sorry 😦 There was no one my end to help me proof read so have done my best to ensure that names are not repeated. There will be no prizes for highlighting my errors!

Thanks to everyone who helped spread this. Let’s see if we can help and support other groups of workers spread their letters.