A petition online calling for Article 50 to be revoked and Brexit to be cancelled has reached a new milestone of five million signatures. Started in late February, it is now the most popular petition ever to be submitted to the Parliament website after it hit 4.16 million signatures on Saturday.
An estimate one million people marched through London where they demanded a second referendum on Brexit. Signatures on the website continued to increase and hit a record breaking number. The Parliament website crashed several times as popularity of the petition continued to increase following Theresa May’s appeal to the British folk to support her.
On Thursday, however, May rejected the message from the petition. A spokesperson said failing to deliver Brexit would cause “potentially irreparable damage to public trust.”
The petition has also seen the highest rate of sign-ups ever, according to the House of Commons petitions committee. At one point, there were nearly 2,000 people signing up the website every minute. Looking at the “heat map” of the petition, it shows areas where the greatest support lies, with petition responses mirroring Remain-voting areas in the 2016 referendum. According to the data, support is coming from London and cities and town with relatively high student population such as Warwick, Canterbury, Oxford and Cambridge.
