More than 40,000 people have signed UK Parliament petition asking the government to stop all immigration to the UK “immediately”.
The petition, which appears on the official parliament website, comes as Prime Minister David Cameron promised to accept thousands more refugees following a social media storm over photographs of a Kurdish boy Aylan Kurdi.
Cameron said yesterday that Britain would take refugees direct from camps on the Turkish-Syrian border rather from in Calais, in order to dissuade more from travelling across Europe. He also pledged to “continue to save lives at sea”, and also hinted at military intervention in Syria.
A petition calling for Britain to take more refugees soon reached over 100,000 signatures, piling pressure on Cameron, but a counter-petition is now gathering speed.
This petition, which says that many immigrants are “trying to change UK into a Muslim country”, had nearly 45,000 signatures at time of writing, with around 1,300 people signing each hour.
Its popularity suggests growing frustration among members of the public at Cameron’s climb down. Although previous petitions have made very similar calls, none has received so many signatures in such a short space of time. According to Parliament’s petition website it is now receiving new signatures at a faster rate than the one calling for more asylum seekers to be let in.
Earlier, Breitbart London reported that Tory MP Gordon Henderson has written in a Facebook post that Britain cannot afford to take in countless numbers of migrants, and that taking too many refugees will encourage more to come.
“There is another problem with simply letting into Europe the hundreds of thousands who are contributing to the current migrant crisis that is fast becoming a catastrophe. It is this: if Europe accepts those migrants then their place in the boats coming across the Mediterranean will be filled by another wave of migrants. Such a mass movement is not sustainable,” he said.