General election petition Merseyside won’t be fooled by

There are many credibility issues around the call for a new general election – including the involvement of Elon Musk

A petition calling for a new UK general election, which has been promoted by X owner Elon Musk, is being signed by people based all around the world who would have no say in a vote in this country – but Merseyside is not being taken in by the stunt.

Created by Michael Westwood on October 31 following the new Labour government’s budget announcement, the petition has gathered more than 2.5 million signatures, although many have questioned its credibility given that people from countries including North Korea and Papa New Guinea appear to have signed it.

Any official petition that reaches 100,000 signatures has to be considered before parliament, but with Labour having won a sizeable majority in July, it’s extremely unlikely that they would call another general election. The petition was dismissed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer this week who pointed out that ‘this is not how our system works.’

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Some X users have been urging people from all across the world to sign the petition and provided a list of postcodes so they could pretend to be UK voters – which is a rule of being able to sign the petition.

The petition has been widely circulated on social media site X, including by the platform’s owner Elon Musk, who has been a vocal critic of the UK government in recent months. It’s hard to tell from the publicly available data exactly how many of the signatures on the petition have been made by people who aren’t eligible to vote in this country.

According to the official figures though, more than 99% of the signatures on the petition were made in the UK. Almost 20,000 people gave an overseas location, with signatures coming in from almost every country in the world, including from places such as China, the USA, Russia and even North Korea.

Australia has more signatures on the petition than any other country outside the UK, with 2,831. That’s followed by Spain with 2,034, the United States with 1,594, France with 1,497 and Canada with 1,015.

You can see the number of signatures received from each country here.

As far as the UK is concerned, the constituencies where voters are most likely to have signed the petition calling for a general election are overwhelmingly Tory and Reform seats. The Essex constituency of Brentwood and Ongar is where you’re most likely to find someone who signed the petition. A total of 7,114 people, which works out as almost one in 10 (9.4%) of the electorate in the Conservative-held seat have signed the petition.

That’s a higher proportion than any other constituency in the country. Three other Essex constituencies have the next highest percentages – Castle Point (9.1%), Maldon (8.9%) and Nigel Farage’s Clacton (8.8%). The Conservatives and Reform hold 18 of the 20 constituencies most likely to have signed the petition. Only two Labour seats are in the list – Derbyshire Dales and Tamworth with 7.9% each.

Looking at the UK map of signatories, Merseyside and Liverpool have some of the lowest proportions of people who have added their names to the list. In Liverpool Wavertree for example, just 2.7% have signed, while in Bootle the number is slightly higher, but still very low at 3.7%. While there will be plenty of people in this region that have their issues with Sir Keir and his government – they will know this is merely a stunt that has no bearing on how our elections work.

Asked about the petition on ITV’s This Morning this week, the Prime Minister said: “Look, I remind myself that very many people didn’t vote Labour at the last election. I’m not surprised that many of them want a rerun. That isn’t how our system works. There will be plenty of people who didn’t want us in, in the first place. So, what my focus is on is the decisions that I have to make every day.