Revoke Article 50

[Carolina]

This petition has gone viral. Over 3.5 million signatures in 2 days .

Anyone who is a UK resident or a British citizen can sign this petition. This includes British citizens living overseas.

Worth signing if you agree. especially those who didn't have a voice in the referendum (over 15 years living in Greece) this is probably your only chance to have a say https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584

[Saravista]

This petition has gone viral. Over 3.5 million signatures in 2 days.
Anyone who is a UK resident or a British citizen can sign this petition. This includes British citizens living overseas.
Worth signing if you agree. especially those who didn't have a voice in the referendum (over 15 years living in Greece) this is probably your only chance to have a say https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584

So far as I can see it would be very simple to boost the numbers. There seems to be no check to confirm who is or not entitled to vote. The only check I could see is that you has to give an e-mail address. Anyone wanting to could create as many hotmail / gmail addresses as they had time for could stick any name down and "sign" the petition as many times as they like. There are company's to counter spam e-mail that provide the facility to have 1000 (disposable) addresses and for another US$15 up to 10,000. Mail to any of those go to the company and is forwarded. I've used them on forums when I want to make it easy for someone to mail me if the forum doen't have private messaging. If it's picked up by a web crawler and I start getting spam I either just blacklist it or suspend or permanently delete the address and send the spammer's details to the ISP and domain registrar. Same with subscriptions to newsletters and such like. At $9p.a. it's worth if for the amount of unwanted mail it stops. So if I was tempted to sign the petition more than once........... but no chance I can't stand those luvvies who think theyre brighter than us plebs just because they can act or sing a bit.

[SueA]

"Claims by Brexiteer broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer wrongly suggested people could sign the petition more than once with the same email address, while newspapers like the Express claimed more than half of signatories were from outside the United Kingdom. ........
But parliament’s petitions committee refuted the claims, saying that 96% of signatories were from the United Kingdom. ...... Just 4% of signatories are from outside the UK with the majority coming from countries with large British expat populations like France, Spain, Germany and the US."

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-st ... fAYg2vB-54

I signed and I'm not a "luvvie".

[Kilkis]

Unfortunately such claims are increasingly common and increasingly influential. A newspaper can claim anything it likes in six inch high capitals on its front page or in an eight page spread inside. If somebody bothers to check their claim and finds it is false they can complain to the regulator. If the regulator upholds the complaint the regulator can make the paper retract the original claim. It will then do that in three lines of 10 point print at the bottom of the obituaries column where nobody reads it. In order to restore some semblance of honesty the regulator should be able to force the paper to retract in the same type face, in the same position in the paper and over as many pages as the original article. That would make editors think twice about the veracity of their claims.

The persistence of false reports is astounding. Many years ago the Sun reported that the auditors had refused to sign off all the EU's accounts because of corruption. I last heard that claim repeated on Question Time by an audience member yesterday, many years after the original false report. Anybody can read the auditors reports, just follow the links. As an example here are some regulatory statements from the 2017 annual report:

Opinion on the reliability of the accounts
II. In our opinion, the consolidated accounts of the European Union (EU) for the year ended 31 December 2017 present
fairly, in all material respects, the EU’s financial position as at 31 December 2017, the results of its operations, its cash flows
and the changes in its net assets for the year then ended, in accordance with the Financial Regulation and with accounting
rules based on internationally accepted accounting standards for the public sector.

Opinion on the legality and regularity of revenue underlying the accounts
III. In our opinion, the revenue underlying the accounts for the year ended 31 December 2017 is legal and regular in all
material respects.

Qualified opinion on the legality and regularity of payments underlying the accounts
IV. In our opinion, except for the effects of the matter described in the ‘Basis for qualified opinion on the legality and
regularity of payments underlying the accounts’ paragraph, the payments underlying the accounts for the year ended
31 December 2017 are legal and regular in all material respects.

Basis for qualified opinion on the legality and regularity of payments underlying the accounts
VI. The expenditure recorded in 2017 covering spending on a reimbursement basis (3) is materially affected by error. Our
estimated level of error for payments made on a reimbursement basis is 3,7 %. Our overall estimated level of error (2,4 %) is
still above our materiality threshold, but it is not pervasive. Payments made on an entitlement basis are not affected by
a material level of error (4).

In other words the accounts were approved with some errors noted on the expenditure side. The errors were small but above the threshold below which they would be considered within normal bounds, which I think is 2 %. The errors were all on the payments side and payments are administered by the governments of the member states. Thus the errors are not really down to the EU but to governments of member states. Nowhere in the report is corruption identified. In many cases the payments made are correct but the correct paperwork may not have been filed.

To put it in perspective, the 2.4 % overall error amounts to about €6.50 per citizen. Most of that is incorrect paperwork so lets say €0.50 is actual corruption, i.e. government ministers and officials dipping their beaks. If you dropped a 50 cent piece while paying a bill in a taverna and it rolled out of sight how long would you spend looking for it?

Warwick

[Carolina]

The petition committee have said 'just 4% of signatories are from outside the UK with the majority coming from countries with large British expat populations like France, Spain, Germany and the US.'

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-st ... JUy8HEs72s

[scooby]

Because the petition won’t make any difference I just signed it 3 times with 3 email address, plenty more desperate remainers can obviously do the same.

[peebee]

Because the petition won’t make any difference I just signed it 3 times with 3 email address, plenty more desperate remainers can obviously do the same.

Everything and every news article is biased towards remain.

[Kilkis]

...Everything and every news article is biased towards remain.

?????????

Oh yes. Those pro-remain papers like the Express, the Telegraph, the Sun and the Mail have published millions of articles saying how much better it would be to stay in the EU?

Warwick

[Jeffstclair]

I am glad you responded to that Warwick, I was so stunned I had to walk from my desk into the kitchen and pour an other glass of wine ..to calm my self after reading it ...

[Kilkis]

I read it four times before I replied, Jeff, just to make sure I wasn't misreading it.

Warwick

[peebee]

Maybe it was a bit misleading, I meant TV news articles, didn't mean the cr@p in the papers.

[Jeffstclair]

Well you've got me there peebee , I never watch UK TV , I do listen to the BBC radio news a current affairs programmes ...and sometimes the bias there tends to lean towards a pro brexit view, hence the..." Brexit Broadcasting Company" shouts we hear ..... However the BBC does get complaints from both sides of the debate so I guess they are getting it about right ...

[Kilkis]

TV News channels report what is happening. Yesterday there was a march in London for a people's vote and TV News reported it. A few days ago Nigel Farage launched a "March to Leave" and the TV News reported that. The fact that there was about a million on one and 200 on the other is not the responsibility of TV News.

In interviews TV reporters simply challenge the views of the person being interviewed. If they are interviewing Jacob Rees Mogg they challenge him with views from the remain side. If they are interviewing Dominic Grieve they challenge him with views from the leave side. Some reporters are better at doing this than others but all of them do it. I think they are less analytical in most cases than they should be, i.e. there are more incisive questions that they could ask but don't but that applies to both sides of the argument.

It is interesting that both sides claim that the broadcast media are biassed against them and for the other side. That suggest to me that they are probably not biassed either way. Clearly the print media is and always has been. Social media is just chaos.

Warwick

[bobscott]

Sadly, arguments about bias are unwinnable Warwick. In my experience, people hear what they want to hear, whether it is pro or con their own particular views.

Far more interested in your assertion (which I have also made several times as well on this forum) that the Home Office in the UK is unfit for purpose, and in particular why they didn't apply the rules regarding immigration in order to limit it. Much was said by Cameron and May about bringing the numbers down, so why weren't the 'rules' applied to achieve that? Bob.

[scooby]

https://capx.co/the-unseen-benefits-of- ... ean-union/