Post-Brexit, an online campaign for a second UK referendum gains huge support

The UK may not yet have introduced online voting -- nor is it likely to any time soon -- but it does have a website that can be used to raise petitions for debate. The House of Commons website is home to a huge number of such petitions, and any that gain 100,000 signatures will be raised in Parliament.

After the UK referendum on EU membership saw the country narrowly voting in favor of Brexit (even if they didn’t know what this meant), a petition calling for a second referendum has been signed more than 3 million times. Ironically, the petition was set up by a pro-Brexit, anti-EU politics student a month before the referendum actually took place. His plan was to call for a re-run in the event of a narrow vote to remain in the EU, but his wording is such that it could (although it's unlikely) backfire on him.

So popular has William Oliver Healey's petition proved that the day after the referendum result was announced, the sheer volume of traffic hitting it took down the House of Commons website. Healy created the petition back in May when it was looking as though the Remain campaign might (just) win. He wanted to secure the option of a second referendum in the event of a narrow win. The petition reads:

EU Referendum Rules triggering a 2nd EU Referendum

We the undersigned call upon HM Government to implement a rule that if the remain or leave vote is less than 60% based a turnout less than 75% there should be another referendum.

Sadly, amusingly, or meaninglessly -- depending on your point of view -- precisely the opposite of what Healy anticipated actually happened. The Leave campaign won... but only just. There was a turnout of 72 percent of the electorate -- below his specified 75 percent threshold. Just under 52 percent of voters backed Brexit -- again below his specified threshold of 60 percent.

In reality, the petition is little more than a slightly amusing aside to a political event which has had, and will continue to have, seismic repercussions. While it is extremely unlikely that Healy's petition will amount to anything -- despite the apparent level of interest, it is probably that it will be debated and subsequently dismissed -- the petition serves to demonstrate the power of the internet.

Healy, however, is not impressed with what's happening. As an anti-EUer, he's quite happy with the Brexit result. In a post on Facebook he said:

The UK People have placed a ticking time bomb under the floorboards of the EU.

I welcome this. I do not favour a second referendum the petition that has attracted so much attention from remainers was hardly noticed until yesterday, so the remainers weren't really interested in their view or they would (have) fought harder.

I am a strategist and one of those strategies has been wrongly hijacked by the remain campaign.

Photo credit: esfera / Shutterstock