There’s a petition doing the rounds at the moment that demands that the UK
“Stop all immigration and close the UK borders until ISIS is defeated.”
It’s not something I agree with, but that’s not what we’re going to discuss. It’s been widely reported that Tina Reeves, who started the petition and who clearly has a finely tuned sense of irony, lives in Spain.
What caught my eye was a little link at the bottom of the page that says ‘get petition data’:
So I clicked it. If you do that, you see something like this, which lists out the number of people who’ve signed the petition who live in a particular country, or if they’re in the UK, it shows the parliamentary constituency in which they live.
It’s actually the same data that you can see if you click the ‘Show on a map’ link below the number of signatures (which stands at a baffling 430,000-odd at the time I write this).
But having the data in a spreadsheet (you can chuck the Json file into Excel and strip out the formatting, or there are tools that will give you the data as a table) allows us to find out some interesting things.
Here’s the data by UK parliamentary constituency. If you use the selectors at the top of the columns you can sort by size, to see which constituencies are most (Ealing, Dulwich, Brent) and least (Cannock Chase, Basildon, Doncaster) well-disposed towards immigrants.
This obviously isn’t a statistically valid sample, for various reasons, but it is interesting. It’d also be good to map those constituency numbers against the size of the electorate in each, and the balance of votes from the May 2015 general election, but I don’t have time for that at the moment. I’ll try and revisit this later.
And here it is by country. I assume the high figures for Spain and the UAE are to do with British immigrants (sorry, ex-pats) in those countries. Amazingly, two people in Syria seem to have signed it. I was pleased to see that no-one from Sri Lanka has, though.
If you’re in the mood for more geography, the map linked from this petition shows you where people who hate West Ham live, this one shows an obvious result to do with Teesside steelworks, this one shows what I assume are the locations of the UK’s big dairy herds (and tells you that no-one in London cares about milk prices) and finally this one shows you where the UK’s biggest tokers are (surprisingly well spread, except for a large swathe of red, which should really be green, across Scotland’s central belt).