PETITIONING Parliament has been part of the democratic repertoire of contention for many centuries. Some issues might seem unusual in 2024. A recent study has found that 30 per cent of petitions to the House of Commons between 1833 and 1918 were about drink and temperance.

Petitioning has been in the news again because of an online call promoted by Elon Musk and Nigel Farage for a new British general election to be held. It has gathered several million signatures, albeit from 183 countries. It falls very much into a favourite campaigning area of the hard right — that of manufactured outrage.

Moreover, it is certainly nowhere near the largest-ever petition in Britain. In recent times, several around Brexit have been larger. However, we need to look back to the Chartists for a petition that remains the largest in British history.

On April 10 1848, the Chartists rallied on Kennington Common for the right to vote. It was the first-ever demonstration to be photographed, but like all the best demonstrations, opinions varied widely as to how many had actually attended.

The purpose of the demonstration was to accompany a petition calling for a people’s charter to the House of Commons. In the end, the petition was carried by several horse-drawn carriages and accompanied by a limited number of supporters of Chartism, including the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor, the MP for Nottingham.

According to O’Connor, the petition contained 5,706,000 signatures. Given that the total population of Britain in 1851 was a little over 15 million, this was a huge number.

It was disputed by the House of Commons authorities. A special team had been set up in November 1847 to review petitions presented to the house, and in this case, 13 clerks had been employed from April 10 to April 13 to count the signatures.

John Thornley, one of her majesty’s justices of the peace, reported that the committee believed the petition contained 1,975,496 genuine signatures. If we suppose this was correct, it was still a very significant percentage of the total population.

It was stated that a number of the signatures, such as that of Queen Victoria, were obviously false — an echo of the claim that false names have been used to sign the current e-petition calling for another election.

One MP was outraged that women had signed it (they, of course did not have the vote, whatever their social class), while the petitions committee noted that many of the signatories were copied in the same handwriting.

O’Connor countered that many signing could not write and had to leave it to a literate petition co-ordinator to add their names.

O’Connor doubted that the 13 clerks could have countered the signatures in just three days and suggested that perhaps its sheer weight should be taken as an indication of its magnitude. Thornley noted that they had had the petition weighed, and it was found to be almost 300kg — a hefty bundle indeed.

The petition did not of course succeed in making the people’s charter law or in extending the right to vote. It did, however, provide a significant boost to Chartist agitation in the year of revolutions.

It also, I suspect, served notice on MPs that they would indeed have to significantly extend the right to vote to avoid further agitations. After the Reform League protests of 1866 and 1867 that was precisely what they did.

Petitioning can work but it takes time and it was certainly not the only strategy. The left-wing Chartist George Julian Harney, who worked with Marx and Engels, produced The Charter and Something More, a programme for social democratic change well beyond just the vote, and publicised it in his paper the Red Republican.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on X @kmflett.