Is #RevokeArticle50 the biggest petition in UK history?

As the Revoke Article 50 petition hits 5 million signatures, I’ve been looking around for evidence of bigger petitions.

So is it the biggest in UK campaigning history?

Short answer – Yes.

Longer + caveated answer – I’ve not yet found any evidence of a petition that has had a bigger overall total, but it’s still got some way to go to top the Chartist who got a third of the adult population at the time to sign there petition in 1842 – for contrast the Article 50 petition is at approx. 10% of current adult population of 52,403,344.

++ Updated list on 26th March ++
The top 8 that I’ve come up with are (links are to sources):

For those who are interested a few notes;

  • The 1842 Chartist Petition was signed by approximately one in three of the adult population – the logistics of achieving this are amazing.
  • A Chartist Petition that was handed over in 1848 with a declared 5.75 million signatures, but upon counting the Commons Committee for Public Petitions found it to contain under 2 million signatures.
  • Jubilee 2000 petition was signed by over 24 million globally.

To reach these figures I:

It’s also interesting to note that there are some campaigns which saw significant public protest – see here for a full list of biggest protest marches – like the 2 million people who marched against the Iraq War in 2003 but for which there is no evidence of a petition of a similar size set up at the same time.

Please do use the comments section below to suggest other petitions that should be included – I’d love to put together a top 10.

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