Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Over one million people sign petition to revoke Article 50

Margaret Anne Georgiadou's petition on the government website has reached over a million signatures and is still climbing.

Well...

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Permalink Reply by Vanessa Salambassi on March 22, 2019 at 18:33

Hi Neil, I'm not keen to get into an online argument, but would like to understand why it is a disgrace? Should people stop having views and expressing them because 52% of the electorate (that voted), voted to leave in a referendum that was advisory?

Also when you talk about the will of the people, could you explain how the will of the 48% who voted to remain is taken into account. Or the young people who weren't able to vote? Or the foreign nationals who work and pay tax in our country? Should the views of the country as a whole not be taken into consideration? Are these people not allowed to have views or air them because at one point we had a referendum? Are they not people, what about their will?

I genuinely would like to understand if you feel that such a large proportion of the country is not entitled to views or opinions? Or you think that their needs and hopes for the future of the country are irrelevant?

Brexit aside - It is a petition, which means MP's need to debate the issue it raises if it gets enough signatures. Large swathes of the population getting MP's to debate something that is important to them seems highly democratic to me. Please explain to me the disgrace in that?

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Permalink Reply by John D on March 22, 2019 at 19:06

MPs debate all the time - that's their job.

But it doesn't seem to result in anything that the populace want.

The Government goes on their merry way regardless.

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Permalink Reply by Hugh on March 21, 2019 at 21:33

My sense is that these petitions act more as an outlet for frustration than as levers for achieving change. There's an accounting of the ten most signed petitions and what they achieved on the ITV website. It doesn't make good reading from any point of view.

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Permalink Reply by Hugh on March 22, 2019 at 9:06

Whatever you think of him, I fear that the view of much of the political establishment about these petitions is accurately indicated by Michael Portillo's reaction to Andrew Neill's mention of the petition on the This Week programme last night.

Who knows, maybe this time it'll be different.

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Permalink Reply by andy h on March 22, 2019 at 9:17

Unlikely.

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Permalink Reply by Liz on March 22, 2019 at 11:20

The largest ever petition registered 4 million votes and asked that we didn’t invoke Article 50 if the leave vote was less than 60% - well we saw how that turned out. Both main parties as excited as school kids to get started with Corbyn demanding that we send it *the next day* and clearly not at all interested in the views of 4 million people. Nevertheless, this is a form of protest, it does make the politicians uncomfortable and it gets the press talking about it so it is absolutely worth signing and sharing if you don’t want to leave the EU.

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Permalink Reply by Hugh on March 22, 2019 at 11:37

Agreed. As you know, I signed early yesterday. Nonetheless, I'm pointing out that we should be under no delusion that the petition will translate directly into action. May is clearly deaf to most people. Right now it's difficult to believe that any of the likely successors would be much better.