Let's Sign A Petition - Just How Brexity are the Brexiteers?

Where the keenest Brexiters Live

Just how strong is the level of support for leaving the EU?  We know that it is an opinion expressed by about half of voters in the referendum, and the subsequent polls indicate it hasn't changed much in the first few weeks since the vote.  But it was a binary choice - you had to come down on one side or the other.  Are outers or remainers more committed to their opinion?


It's an impossible question to answer of course.  Most of us don't even know our own minds that well.  But it is important.  Brexit is going to be a tough thing to deliver and if it turns out that people didn't actually want it that much in the first place then a lot of time and treasure is going to be going to waste over the next 10 years or so.  And just how much time are people prepared to give it?

We can get a clue from a petition that calls for the government to sign Article 50 now.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/133618

At the time of writing this has pulled in 121,531 votes.  That isn't a huge number compared to the 4 million who signed the one that was supposed to be about having a second referendum.  But it still seems like a pretty significant figure.  To put it in context a petition about the Human Rights Act has pulled in about 75,000.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/125604

So if over a hundred thousand people are motivated enough to sign a petition which doesn't even alter the direction of travel - just asks for it to speed up - then I think we can be fairly sure that they represent a hard core of very determined Brexiters.  These people quite likely know what they want.  And there are enough of them to form a very effective pressure group.  This is especially the case when you look at the geographical breakdown of the voters they correspond quite closely to areas where UKIP gets a lot of support.  It is helpful to have a heartland in a country that elects on a first past the post basis.  They don't even have to win seats.  Simply by threatening the sitting MPs majority they can extract a lot of concessions if they are well organised.

In some ways, the existence of UKIP might even be harmful to the cause of the ultra-Brexit enthusiasts.  It might be a lot more efficient for them to act as a pressure group within the Conservative Party.  That gives them a direct input into the decision making process. The Conservatives don't have quite the formal democratic structure that the other 4 national parties have, but they still can't afford to offend their members too much.

I can't think of any way of quantifying the strength of this strand of opinion.  But my guess is it is too big to be ignored.