On Thursday – June 23 2016, a date which will go down in history – the people of Britain voted to leave the European Union.
In the immediate aftermath of this decision the pound has fallen sharply, the Prime Minister has resigned and Nigel Farage of UKIP has admitted on TV that the Vote Leave’s campaign pledge to spend £350 million a week on the NHS in the event of Brexit was ‘a mistake.’
A petition on the UK Government and Parliament petitions page is clocking up signatures at quite a pace. It currently stands at 3,748,971. It gained more than a million signatures in less than 24 hours which is unprecedented. It is the most popular government petition in the entire history of petitions. So popular that it has crashed the government’s website several times.
The petition was filed on Friday June 24th, the day the results of the referendum were announced, and calls for a second EU referendum. The logic of the petition’s author, William Oliver Healey, is that the Government should hold another referendum vote because the winning vote to leave the EU was less than 60 per cent based on a turnout of less than 75 per cent. The plot thickens as a man claiming to be Healy has identified himself on Facebook and said he is actually pro-Leave. The petition has been 'hijacked' by remainers, he says. On Facebook he wrote that he started the petition, 'when it was looking unlikely that 'leave' were going to win, with the intention of making it harder for 'remain' to further shackle us to the EU.'
Online petitions are a relatively new thing. They’ve been becoming more and more popular in recent years as people use them to express their political views. Membership of traditional political parties may be at an all time low but more issue-based politics is on the rise and, you could argue, petitions are testament to that.
Could this petition have any impact? Is a second referendum likely to happen?
In short, the answer is no. Parliament’s petitions system is watched over by a petitions committee. They consider petitions which receive more than 100,000 signatures and decided whether or not they should be debated in the House of Commons. They are due to get together again on Tuesday and undoubtedly this will be top of their agenda. It’s important to note that the only guarantee on a parliamentary petition like this is that it will be considered for a debate.
However, even if the petition is discussed it’s very unlikely to change anything whatsoever. Referendums are not legally binding in their own right in the UK, parliament has ultimate power and authority. Think of the referendum as a giant opinion poll of the country in which we were all asked to vote.
In theory the Prime Minister could have ignored the referendum. However, he did not. He has resigned yesterday. Since then the UK’s EU commissioner, Lord Hill, has also resigned. David Cameron has specifically commented on the petition calling for a second referendum and said it is not 'remotely on the cards' that there will not be another vote. 'The result is clear', he said.
While it’s true that nothing is official until we a) have a new Prime Minister and b) decide how we are going to go about the process of leaving the European Union. Yet, the majority of people voted to leave. ‘Out means out’ as Chris Terry, a researcher from the Electoral Reform Society has tweeted,
We will have to wait to see how this petition is addressed. While the number of people who have signed it is unprecedented, it’s very unlikely that it will win it’s aim of triggering a second vote on Britain’s future.
The Debrief spoke to Chris and asked him whether this petition will change anything.
‘The thing is’ he told me ‘we laid out a process for how the referendum would work with clear rules on how it would take place. The problem is that you now have a petition which is essentially trying to change the rules and move the goal posts. By doing so it looks like you are trying to annul the results of a process that was set out and agreed to by everyone on both sides. By doing this you deepen a sense of resentment and division.’
‘I completely understand why people feel this way about the result because there are articles about people changing their minds and so on and so forth. But the process was what it was.’
In theory, I ask him, isn’t this unprecedented? Unchartered waters both for the UK and the EU? No petition has ever managed to get so many signatures in such a short time so, surely, there’s a possibility it could make a change?
‘In theory this will now have to activate a debate in parliament because of the way the petition system works. From then you could move on to having legislation and so on but the political mood is against that so I cant see how it would happen’ Chris says. ‘The only thing that could possibly do it is if the petition somehow got more than 17 million signatures because that’s more voters than leave won with. That would be seen as contrary to result of the referendum. Its worth remembering that the e-petition system does allow for people who aren’t allowed to vote and wouldn’t be allowed to vote to sign up – such as EU migrants and 16/17 year olds who weren’t allowed to vote in the referendum itself. Therefore, it doesn’t have the same legitimacy as the referendum. I’m not quite sure what would happen if it reached 17 million because I’m not sure how it would be interpreted.’
So there you have it – with so many unanswered questions being asked right now it’s unlikely but not completely impossible that this petition will have any effect. Indeed, the petition was invesitgated for fraud over the weekend and 77,000 signatures were removed.
What’s probable is that is that there will, at some point in coming weeks or months, be a general election. As John Rentoul, Chief Political Commentator at The Independent points out Professor Vernon Bogdanor, an expert in constitutional history and David Cameron’s former tutor at Oxford said when speaking to the BBC on Friday that it would be ‘logical’ for there to be an election so that Parliament has a leader with the weight of the country behind them to see Brexit through.
According to the Electoral Commission on Thursday 17.4 million people (51.9%) voted for Britain to leave the EU. 16.1 million people (81.15) voted to remain. 72.2% of registered voters turned up to have their say. Just as it’s your right to vote it’s your right not to turn up to vote so the answer from politicians, if there is a debate on the petition, could well be along the lines of: ‘if people didn’t turn up and vote remain or if people vote to leave and have now changed their minds then that’s their problem’.
This article was updated on June 27 to reflect developments in the story
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.