More than two and a quarter million people have signed a petition calling for a general election. This doesn’t mean anything in real terms for Keir Starmer, but it is worthwhile to look at where these signatures are coming from: not population centres, nor cities but rural, shire England.
Look at North Yorkshire on the map above – deep red. Look at Lincolnshire – the reddest it’ll ever be. Ditto Essex. There has been plenty of consternation at the verification process for the petition. The website asks you to provide a postcode to sign, but it doesn’t require any proof of address. So who is to say that the entire list of signatories isn’t just overrun with Americans inspired by Elon Musk? (The owner of X shared the petition and wrote: “The people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state.”) There will be some element of that happening here. But the fact that the numbers are concentrated across rural, disconnected seats suggests that the presence of foreign signatures is not distorting the picture too much.
Listen to the New Statesman podcast
Content from our partners
