Calls for new EU vote
A campaign for a second European Union referendum, following the Leave campaign’s victory in Friday’s vote, caused Britain’s House of Commons petitions website to crash yesterday.
The petition passed the 500,000 mark yesterday, with a map of the voting indicating that most of the activity was in London – where most boroughs backed Remain in the referendum.
A House of Commons spokeswoman said earlier that the site ‘‘was temporarily down due to exceptionally high volumes of simultaneous users on a single petition, significantly higher than on any previous occasion’’.
The page, set up by William Oliver Healey, reads: ‘‘We the undersigned call upon HM Government to implement a rule that if the Remain or Leave vote is less than 60 per cent based on a turnout less than 75 per cent, there should be another referendum.’’
If the petition receives more than 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in Parliament.
The United Kingdom itself could now break apart, with the leader of Scotland, where nearly two-thirds of voters wanted to stay in the EU, saying a new referendum on independence was ‘‘highly likely’’.
Lawmakers from the opposition Labour Party launched a GETTY IMAGES no-confidence motion to topple their leader, leftist Jeremy Corbyn, accused by opponents in the party of campaigning tepidly for its Remain stance.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet French, German and Italian leaders in Berlin on Tuesday to discuss future steps. The foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg met yesterday.
Merkel called the ‘‘Brexit’’ vote a watershed for Europe.
The result has emboldened eurosceptics in other EU member states, with French National Front leader Marine Le Pen and Dutch far-Right leader Geert Wilders demanding that their countries also hold referendums.
The political and economic shock hits a European bloc already reeling from a eurozone debt crisis, unprecedented mass GETTY IMAGES migration, and confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. Support for anti-immigrant and anti-EU parties has surged.
A crowd of Remain campaigners gathered outside the News Building in London yesterday to protest against the stance taken by some of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers in the referendum. The Sun – the UK’s biggest-selling daily – came out in support of Brexit a week before the referendum. Although News Corp’s other flagship paper The Times endorsed the Remain campaign, The Sunday Times also supported quitting the EU. PA, Reuters