THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE
Which government petitions have recieved the most signatures from the public?
MORE people care about holding a second EU referendum than protecting the NHS from privatisation, providing amnesty for the Windrush generation, or abolishing the House of Lords.
That’s according to exclusive analysis of the government’s dedicated petitions website.
Petition periods run parallel to parliamentary terms.
The latest began when the Conservatives formed a minority government after last June’s general election.
Since then, some 8,961 petitions have been submitted and received at least one signature.
The most popular was a call to increase pressure on Libya and stop the enslavement of black Africans, which gathered 269,159 supporters.
A petition to stop the privatisation of NHS services received 238,767 signatures, while 237,069 signed up to a call for a bank holiday if England won the world cup.
Between them, the 10 most popular petitions of this parliament have some 2.0m signatures between them.
But that’s not even half the 4.2 million signatures received for the most popular petition in the previous parliament, which called for a second referendum on Britain’s EU membership. The petition - which was set up before the actual referendum took place - said that if the turnout was less than 75 per cent, either side should have to win 60 per cent of the vote for the result to be binding. Otherwise, it said, there should be a second referendum. As it turned out, the actual referendum saw a 72.2 per cent turnout, with 51.9 per cent of people voting to leave the EU. It is likely that result encouraged more people to sign the petition retrospectively.
Brexit is an issue that continues to stir people into picking up their virtual pens.
Nearly 600,000 people have signed a petition on Change. org demanding that people are given a referendum say on Theresa May’s final Brexit deal.
Unlike the official government petition website, parliament does not have to respond to Change.org.
If a petition on the official site gets 10,000 signatures then it receives a parliamentary response, and at 100,000 signatures it gets considered for a parliamentary debate. The second most popular petition from the previous parliament was to prevent Donald Trump from making a state visit, which secured 1.9m signatures. Other popular petitions started in this parliament include calling for a public inquiry into the Jamie Bulger murder case (213,625), amnesty for the Windrush generation (180,108), and rejecting calls to add Staffordshire Bull Terriers to the Dangerous Dogs Act (170,983).