5,000 signatures to the petition and counting
We can now announce that we have received 5,000 signatures to our petition in opposition of the proposed developement.
The clear majority of these (over 4,200) have come from shops around Stoke Newington and our thanks go to the shopkeepers for hosting the petitions and especially to Hamdy and Suzy for doing such a great job of organising it. The rest have come from the online petition which you can still sign.
On most of the petition forms there was an opportunity for people to leave a comment and we have analysed a chunk of them to get a feel for what Stoke Newington residents feel about the proposal.
Most of the comments and concerns fell into distinct themes so we grouped them together, giving the breakdown of the most common as follows:
33% – Don't need another supermarket
24% – Would damage local businesses
14% – General objection to proposal
7% – Traffic and congestion problems
6% – Would damage the area's character
3% – Would adversely affect the local community
2% – Impact on local environment / polution
2% – Don't need large corporations / no to corporate greed
2% – No to cloned high streets
It is clear from this petition that opposition to this proposal is strong and the comments indicate that there is a wide range of concerns about the development.
These concerns are described in more detail on the Issues pages of this website so please take the time to consider them for yourself and also sign the petition if you haven't already.
Assuming all these signatures are unique and not duplicates, and assuming they are all Hackney residents (which they're not), that would equate to just roughly 2% of Hackney's population. And that's after months of campaigning and loads of media coverage.
That's some serious spinning of that number Ben.
Why compare it to Hackney's population? This issue is local to Stoke Newington and I'm guessing that these people haven't exactly been trying to reach our to the residents of Hackney Wick or Hoxton for obvious reasons and unless residents from other parts of hackney happened to go shopping in Stoke Newington then they wouldn't encounter the petition.
If you're going to give the number as a percentage then the population of Stoke Newington would be the one to compare it to.
Rob, if your argument were credible you would first have to remove all the non-Stokey signatures from the petitions. I've seen signatures on there from all over the place including Dublin and the USA!!!
If you look at the online petition, either there has been a big show of solidarity from our US cousins or people signing the petition forgot to change the country in the form.
The online petition represents 14% of the total number of signatories and the physical petition is virtually all local residents or people who shop in Stoke Newington.
This is a petition, not a referendum, so any attempt to provide a base is problematic but I would agree with Rob that to choose the population of Hackney as the base is clearly misleading for the reasons outlined above.
People don't write non-Stokey postcodes (or write "Dublin") accidentally. If Rob's point had any credibility you would first have to remove all these signatures. The fact that the 5,000 signatures (assuming it doesn't contain many duplicates) include many outside Hackney (let alone Stoke Newington) means that the petition tells us very little – apart from the overwhelming majority of Stoke Newington appears to either want a new supermarket or isn't bothered either way.