The general election petition exposes Farage’s hypocrisy

What a difference a change of government makes. Nigel Farage, Reform, former Conservative cabinet ministers and a sizeable chunk of the UK’s right wing media are falling over themselves to talk about the apparently monumental significance of a petition on the UK parliament website calling for “another General Election”.

“Petition demanding general election hits 100,000– humiliated Keir Starmer must now respond,” wrote the Daily Express, before upgrading this to “General election petition hits one million names in humiliating new milestone for Labour”. The Mail opted for “More than 1.8 MILLION people sign petition demanding a new general election amid mounting fury at Labour’s Budget tax raid”.

Inevitably, Elon Musk – owner of the social media site formerly known as Twitter – weighed in, boosting a claim that the petition was the fastest-growing ever, not just in the UK but worldwide, overtaking a record previously set by a petition over the murder of George Floyd.

Needless to say, the claim was not just baseless but outright false: petitions calling for the revocation of Article 50 or for a second referendum both accumulated more signatures at their peak than the latest call for a general election.

And sadly for the Express, Keir Starmer won’t have to be “humiliated” by responding – a committee of backbenchers will look at the petition, before probably denying it debate time in Westminster Hall.

The petition is at least serving as excellent publicity for the man who set it up, Michael Westwood, landlord of a pub that is supposedly Britain’s “cheapest”, who told the Express that “people have seen what’s happened over in America” – where elections happen on a timetable fixed by the Constitution – and that’s had a “knock-on effect”, motivating them to sign.

The petition has sparked a newfound love of direct democracy in Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Dan Hannan and other key Brexit backers, though, who after almost a decade of saying that votes should never be revisited all lent their support to a campaign for a second general election just six months after the last one was a decisive landslide.

This kind of shameless populist grift might just be par for the course for Farage and Tice, but some expressed disappointment in Hannan, who still likes to style himself as an intellectual. “I have signed,” he wrote of the petition, before listing “so many things for which Labour has no mandate”.

He may wish to take that up with the Dan Hannan of 2020, who solemnly noted: “A willingness to accept the result even when we don’t like it is what distinguishes us from Libya or Zimbabwe”. If you say so, Dan.