What can we make of a petition to call an election?

I’m sure many of my readers have seen the petition from a couple of weeks ago on the official government petition website, calling for a new general election just months after the current one.

I’ll give credit to the individuals who started this petition—they know full well it won’t achieve the goal they’ve stated. It's been started primarily as a "news story"—something for the right-wing press to latch onto and whip up commentary about. It quickly garnered over 2 million signatures, which, though a sizable number, still falls short of the people who voted for this government. In fact, it’s well below the number of people who voted against this government—who are, of course, about twice as many. It also appears that many signatures come from outside the UK, which confuses me somewhat. I was under the impression that those outside the UK couldn’t engage with petitions on the site—but I must have been mistaken.

Looking at the petition objectively, it was clear from the start that it was never going to result in the general election they were calling for. The system just doesn’t work like that. I can’t remember exactly when the petition site was set up or under which government, and I’m not sure if it’s ever led to any significant legislative change. My guess would be "very limited." But what it can’t do is overturn "democratic votes" or lead to anything that the government of the day is opposed to—regardless of how flawed those votes may seem.

In response to the petition, many pro-EU people have pointed out that the previous "Let’s have another referendum" petition garnered three times as many signatures in just its first week—though I think that was more about numbers than expecting any tangible result. I, for one, was part of that group, and I signed that petition knowing full well that it wouldn’t result in anything.

To me, however, the issue with that EU petition wasn’t about repeating the 2016 referendum; it was about having a vote on the Brexit deal once we knew what it was,

This new one is about asking for a rerun of the same general election with the same rules, hoping—presumably, since it’s mostly right-wing voices making the noise—that people will have forgotten the last government. But in this country, governments have more than five months to serve.

So is there legitimacy in complaining about who won the election? Yes, to an extent. Labour gained a majority of over 160 seats with less than 35% of the vote. If people are genuinely unhappy about that, they should be advocating for a change in the electoral system, not asking for an immediate rerun just because they didn’t like the result the current system threw up.