More than a million people have signed an online petition calling for a new general election in the UK, just months after Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to power in an historic landslide for the Labour Party.
Filed on Wednesday, the petition accuses Starmer and Labour of going “back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election,” and calls on Parliament to debate a re-do of the vote. As of Sunday afternoon, it has attracted more than a million signatures, with around 2,000 new signatures added per minute.
Petitions reaching 100,000 signatures must be debated by Parliament, unless “the issue has already been debated recently or there’s a debate scheduled for the near future,” according to the government’s petition site.
The Labour Party holds a 163-seat majority, meaning the chances of any debate ending in a vote of no confidence or a new election are low. However, Starmer will still have to sit and listen as his performance to date is discussed.
Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice and MP Rupert Lowe have shared the petition on their social media pages, with Lowe writing that it “may not force an election, but it will definitely send Starmer a message.”
Starmer took office in July, after his party seized on widespread dissatisfaction with Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government and won Labour’s largest electoral victory in more than a century. By the end of October, however, his approval rating had plummeted from a post-election high of +11 to a dismal low of -38, according to a survey carried out by More in Common.
This drop in approval has been blamed on a number of unpopular decisions by Starmer, including his axing of £300 ($390) winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, his early release of thousands of prisoners to ease jailhouse overcrowding, and his recent budget, which contained £40 billion ($50.1 billion) in tax hikes.
His imposition of a 20% inheritance tax on farms has been pilloried by farming organizations, who argue that while family farms and associated assets can be worth millions on paper, their actual incomes are so low that this tax would effectively bankrupt whoever they pass the business to.
In an interview with the BBC on Friday, Starmer said that axing fuel payments to pensioners “makes sense,” and that there were “lots of decisions” made in the budget which he would have preferred “not to have had to make.”