In the twisting and turning of Brexit, yesterday (20th March), 9 days before the UK should have left the EU, the Government finally (after weeks of it being clear it was inevitable) sought to delay the date of leaving. The “Remain” grouping were hoping for a long delay (forever, preferably…) rather than the short 2 months requested to complete the Brexit deal, so were somewhat disappointed.
This led to a massive increase in discussion (in the Remain camp) about Revoking Article 50, the act passed by parliament to mandate leaving the EU, and a subsequent petition which has hit c 700,000 signatures at the time of writing this (despite the site going down due to overload, partly by supporters crashing the site by “DDOS’ing” it to see where the count had got to).
We had a look at it this morning, this is a diagram based on daily tweet sampling, the blue line is “revoke” discussions, and as can be seen it is climbing rapidly (the “dip” means is at 11 am today, by midnight it shoud have overtaken yesterday’s value considerably). But to give a sense of scale, last week’s discussion of a Brexit no-deal occurrence/avoidance/facilitation shows that “Revoke” is still fairly small beer, the petition notwithstanding, mainly because “REvoke” is almost completeley limited to the Remain camp whereas “No Deal” is widely discussed by all sides. What is interesting is that the “peoplesvote” trope, which has been the main “Remainer” hope for some months (see our previous post here) and had gained fresh impetus last week, has returned to normal volumes as “Revoke” becomes new Remain call to action.