Revealed: Thousands of people outside Britain signed pro-LEAVE petitions

Brexit & Foreign Policy Left Foot Forward

Attempts to discredit the 'Revoke Article 50 petition' are pure hypocrisy.

Leavers thought they had ‘gottcha’ moment on Thursday.

Right-wing blog Guido Fawkes spotted that some of the signatures on the Revoke Article 50 petition – which has now had over 2.6 million signatures came from outside the UK:

The only problem is – all the pro-Brexit petitions have many signatories from outside the UK.

More than 23,000 signatures are from outside Great Britain or unaccounted for on the pro-Brexitpetition ‘Leave the EU without a deal in March 2019’, from dozens of countries. It secured a government response and a debate in Parliament.

The foreign signatures range from 7 from Russia, 8 from Saudi Arabia to figures like 592 signatures from Spain (I think they Spaniards probably do want us out after the hash we’ve made of Brexit…):

Over 2,000 signatures are from outside GB or unaccounted for a separate – again pro-Brexit – petition titled: ‘Leave the EU immediately’. That includes 345 in Spain, 299 in France, 124 in Thailand, and 101 each in Germany & Ireland…

Some right-wingers were even calling for bots to flood the e-petitions site with fake signatures on the Revoke Article 50 petition – in an attempt to then discredit it. As Guido Fawkes tried and failed to do:

It’s not clear that the far-right of 4Chan followed through with these calls. But the simple fact is, some Brits sign petitions from abroad. Some people use ‘Virtual Private Networks’ to protect their privacy online, skewing the country they appear to come from. And a few non-Brits probably do slip through – the government’s e-petition site is not perfect.

But attacks on the Revoke Article 50 petition are cheap – at least 1.3m people with IP addresses within Great Britain have signed it, as of early Friday. That’s a huge movement for reversing the disastrous direction the government are taking.

Josiah Mortimer is Editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter.

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17 Responses to “Revealed: Thousands of people outside Britain signed pro-LEAVE petitions”

  1. nhsgp

    It’s the commies. The Russians I tell you

    Interfering in our government website

    Meanwhile,

    tick tock tick tock. …

    Very cheap to set up a bot net to do this. It’s kiddie scripting stuff.

  2. Boffy

    The fact that you have to confirm from an email message seems to make it far more difficult for signatures to be just from bots, unlike having trolling messages.

  3. Clockworkchimp

    Odd that Russian IP addresses are showing up, when you need a UK IP addresses to be counted.

  4. Michael Fitchett

    I signed a related petition this morning. 2.8 million signatures, and an e-mail I received to confirm my e-address.

  5. Anthony Baldwin

    How many of these are people within their 15 year Right to Vote in their last Constituency where they lived and voted before leaving for wherever they are now living and working?
    Obviously a lot of work required for those who would gainsay this Petition having been quite happy to accept all the chicanery associated with the actual Referendum.

    Am I the only person to notice that Aaron Banks Isle of Mann Office was actually in a building named after someone called Murdoch … surely that is worth finding out if there is a link there between the the two people who were extremely instrumental in bringing about the first vote result although having people taking the opportunity to ‘give him a kicking’ must bring Cameron firmly into that frame too.

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