The United Kingdom is more like the Divided Kingdom today – RIMSHOT! – as the reality of the Brexit poll result sinks in, with the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ camps still firmly at one-another’s throats.
The latter are refusing to go down without a fight, with reports today that a petition for a fresh referendum has been set up, and is so popular it is causing the UK Parliamentary Petitions site to crash.
All submissions to the site must, by law, be considered for debate for the parliament if they reach over 100,000 signatures – this was the case with a recent cannabis legalisation petition, that topped 150,000.
UK media report that the site was “completely inaccessible” overnight due to the high volume of traffic, but it appears to be back up and running now. When we checked, the petition had more than 500,000 signatures.
The text reads:
“We the undersigned call upon HM Government to implement a rule that if the remain or leave vote is less than 60% based on a turnout less than 75% there should be another referendum.”
Essentially, the petition is asking the UK government to invalidate the result of a democratic poll, and introduce a piece of legislation that would apply retrospectively, something that they would be very, very, very reluctant to do.
Even leaving aside the worrying implications this would have for future democratic polls, the UK’s conservative government is still pretty unlikely to consider a fresh referendum, although the ‘remain’ campaign clearly feel this is worth a shot.
Yesterday, 17.41 million people voted for the UK to break away from the European Union, while 16.14 voted to remain. Interesting times, people.
Source: Independent.
Photo: Mary Turner / Getty.
