Revoke Article 50 petition calling for Brexit to be cancelled hits 5 million signatures

Petition rejected by Theresa May is most popular ever submitted to Parliament website with highest rate of sign-ups on record

An online petition calling on the government to revoke Article 50 and cancel Brexit has attracted more than 5 million signatures.

The petition, started in late February, became the most popular petition ever submitted to the parliament website after it hit over 4 million signatures on Saturday.

The record-breaking number came as an estimated one million people marched through London demanding a second referendum on Brexit.

The parliament website has crashed numerous time since the petition leapt in popularity on Wednesday following Theresa May’s appeal to the British people to support her as she demanded MPs back her deal.

But Ms May rejected the message of the petition on Thursday, when a No 10 spokesperson said failing to deliver Brexit would cause “potentially irreparable damage to public trust”.

The petition also has the highest rate of sign-ups the website has ever had to deal with, according to the House of Commons petitions committee. At one point nearly 2,000 people were signing up every minute.

Bristol West and Hornsey and Wood Green in London tie for the two constituencies with the highest proportion of sign-ups with 33 per cent of the electorate having signed it, according to the website livefrombrexit.com.

Caroline Lucas’ constituency Brighton Pavilion comes in third place, with 32 per cent of the electorate supporting the petition.

Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency Islington North has the tenth highest proportion, with 30 per cent of voters having signed the petition.

And in pro-Brexit Labour MP Kate Hoey’s Vauxhall constituency, 25 per cent of voters have signed the petition.

By contrast, just 2 per cent of voters in Walsall North, Conservative MP Eddie Hughes’s constituency, have signed the petition.

A “heat map” of the petition shows the areas where the greatest support lies, with petition responses mirroring Remain-voting areas in the 2016 referendum. This includes London and cities and towns with a relatively high student population such as Warwick, Canterbury, Oxford and Cambridge.

As the petition attracted attention, conspiracy theories arose suggesting that a small proportion of signatures from addresses listed as overseas meant that Remain campaigners had been adding fake signatures.

Others suggested that the technical problems on the parliament website were a plot to prevent further signatures.

But in a tweet, the petitions committee clarified that 96 per cent of the signatures are listed as from the UK.

They added that overseas signatures were valid, since “anyone who is a UK resident or a British citizen can sign a petition. This includes British citizens living overseas”.

The woman behind the petition, Margaret Anne Georgiadou, says she has received multiple telephoned death threats after it rapidly gained signatures this week.

The 77-year-old, who is currently in Cyprus, said she deleted her Facebook account following the “torrent of abuse” online.

In a tweet on Saturday, she wrote: “Who wants Brexit so much that they are prepared to kill for it?”

On the petition itself, Ms Georgiadou wrote: “The government repeatedly claims exiting the EU is ‘the will of the people’.

“We need to put a stop to this claim by proving the strength of public support now for remaining in the EU. A People’s Vote may not happen – so vote now.”

Ms May ruled out halting the Brexit process when in Brussels on Thursday, telling reporters: “I do not believe that we should be revoking Article 50.”