MORE THAN 4% of the Vale electorate are among the 2.7 million people throughout the UK who have signed an online petition calling for another general election.
Michael Westwood, who runs three pubs in the West Midlands, says he created the petition on the petition.parliament.uk website because, as a small business owner, he will be impacted by the increase in employer’s National Insurance of 1.2%, which was announced in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Budget last month.
The petition reads: “I would like there to be another General Election. I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election.”
Mr Westwood is also unhappy with other Labour government policies such as scrapping the winter fuel allowance for some pensioners, the increase in capital gains tax and the introduction of VAT on private school fees.
The 100,000 signatory threshold for the petition to be considered for debate in the House of Commons was passed within hours of its launch on 20 November, and it gained even bigger traction when tech magnate and X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk shared it on his social media platform, writing, “The people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state.”
By Wednesday morning, more than 2,740,000 people had signed the petition, including 4,132 in the Vale of Glamorgan, or 4.377% of the 94,400 constituents.
The marginal Vale seat, which was gained by Labour’s Kanishka Narayan in July’s election, has among the highest percentage of petition signatories of any seat in Wales, slightly behind Clwyd East, where 5.653% of the electorate had signed it by Wednesday morning.
Support in Wales was at its lowest in Cardiff South and Penarth, where just 2,509 people (2.367% of the electorate) had signed the petition in a traditionally safe Labour seat currently represented by Stephen Doughty.
On a UK-wide level, the constituency where the petition has the most signatories as a percentage of the electorate is Brentwood and Ongar, a seat held by Conservative MP Alex Burghart, where 7.587% of the electorate have signed.
At July’s General Election, Labour won 33.7% of the vote, a swing of just 1.6% on the 32.1% it received in the heavy defeat of 2019. In terms of the number of votes, Labour got just over 9.7 million, a figure half a million fewer than five years ago.
Labour’s 174-seat majority came about because in more than 170 of the 251 constituencies lost by the Conservatives, the Reform vote was greater than the margin of the Conservatives’ defeat.
This was the case in seats throughout Britain, particularly in so-called ‘Red Wall’ constituencies taken from Labour by the Conservatives at the 2019 election.
In the Vale, Mr Narayan obtained a majority of 4,216 over Conservative candidate Alun Cairns, who had held the seat since 2010, but the Reform candidate Toby Rhodes-Matthews finished third with 6,973 votes, which almost certainly cost Mr Cairns the seat.
There is no mechanism by which the petition can force the government to call a general election, and its main purpose is to voice discontent among the electorate.
On holding petition debates, the UK Government website says: “Petitions which reach 100,000 signatures are almost always debated.
“But we may decide not to put a petition forward for debate if the issue has already been debated recently or there’s a debate scheduled for the near future.
“If that’s the case, we’ll tell you how you can find out more about parliamentary debates on the issue raised by your petition. MPs might consider your petition for a debate before it reaches 100,000 signatures.”
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