the Proposal was placed on the parliament’s website on 20 February by a former teacher, Margaret Anne Georgiadou. It requires that the government revoke the activation of article 50, and to stop the EU-exit. The justification: ”a new referendum may not be of the at all – so vote now”.
For a start, it didn’t get any major attention, but on Wednesday evening, when an increasingly desperate Theresa May called on his colleagues in the british parliament to ”determine itself” in a speech to the nation – got Georgiadous proposal to speed on social media.
well-Known personalities such as actor Hugh Grant and the physicist and presenter Brian Cox gave the puffs, and soon was the number of signatures in the midst of several hundred thousand.
https://twitter.com/HackedOffHugh/status/1108511401130237952
Between the hours of 8 and 9 on Thursday morning spread the link to the proposal on Twitter with between 567 tweets and retweets per minute, according to the platform of Pulsar. Also on Facebook, this draft has become viral.
As of this writing has more than a million signatures have been received. The rate of increase is a record high, according to the technical responsible for the uk parliament’s website. The site was overloaded during parts of the on Thursday afternoons
https://twitter.com/HoCpetitions/status/1108711303865139202
It is difficult to determine if all the new signatures are genuine – no control is not made by the site. However, according to the british media that tried to go through the names there are only a few examples of the most likely fake identities (as someone who states north Korea as the address).
The Open Data Institute (ODI) in Leeds have dug into the data, and according to Wired, most of the signatures come from parts of the country where many voted to stay in the EU, such as London, Bristol, Cambridge and Manchester.
another medborgarförslag, which demanded that the Uk leave the EU without any agreement at all, received last autumn, more than 373.000 signatures. Mainly from areas in the north of England, where many voted to leave.
the Government response after the petition was: ”The agreement that has been reached with the EU is good for Britain. To leave without an agreement would be likely to lead to uncertainty for the economy, industry and citizens.”
But with just eight days left to Brexitdagen on 29 march, the agreement has not yet been approved by parliament – and the uncertainty is evident.
Despite the fact that a medborgarförslag that gets more than 100,000 signatures, formally, should be considered to be taken up for debate in parliament, it does not indicate very much that the governing party the Tories are interested in discussing an outright suppression of Brexit.
Prime minister Theresa May has repeatedly ruled out this. The minister with responsibility for the government’s relationship with the house of commons, Andrea Leadsom, were also rejected on Thursday the new petition, arguing that the number so far is significantly lower than the number that voted to leave the EU.
“If it would reach more than 17.4 million signatures, then there may be reason to come back and take up the matter,” says Leadsom to the BBC.