Over 4 million signatures and it’s still growing
The online petition calling on the government to revoke Article 50 and cancel Brexit has become the most popular petition in Parliamentary history with 4,244,520 signatures at the time of writing.
Created in late February, the petition has the highest rate of sign-ups on record according to the official Petitions Committee. A petition is only required to break the 100,000 signature threshold for it to be debated in Parliament.
The petition was set up by former college lecturer Margaret Anne Georgiadou who said its purpose was to “put stop to the claim that exiting the EU is the will of the people”.
On the website, it reads: “The government repeatedly claims exiting the EU is ‘the will of the people’. We need to put a stop to this claim by proving the strength of public support now, for remaining in the EU. A People’s Vote may not happen – so vote now.”
It comes as hundreds of thousands of people march on London in support of the People’s Vote.
The second most popular petition is one from 2016 calling for a second EU referendum if the Remain or Leave vote was less than 60 per cent. It gathered a similar amount – just over 4.15 million signatures.
In comparison, the most popular pro-Brexit petition had received almost 460,000 signatures by Saturday morning. It calls on the government to “leave the EU without a deal in March 2019“.
The petition to revoke Article 50 has caused the parliament website to crash several times after it surged in popularity on Wednesday following Theresa May’s desperate appeal to the British people to support her deal. At one point almost 2,000 signatures were being added every minute.
The House of Commons petitions committee has also confirmed that 96% of the signatures are from the UK, debunking conspiracy theorists who claimed the movement had been hijacked by bots.
A few people have been talking about fraud and overseas signatures. As of this afternoon, approximately 96% of signatures on the petition were from the UK. That’s broadly what we’d expect for a petition like this.
— Petitions Committee (@HoCpetitions) March 22, 2019
