British Prime Minister Theresa May has invited President Donald Trump to Great Britain this summer.
And a lot of people aren’t happy about it. To be more exact, 1.8 million Britons signed an online petition calling on the Conservative government to deny Trump the honor of a state visit.
The petition states that because of his “well-documented misogyny and vulgarity,” the U.S. president “should not be invited to make an official State Visit because it would cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the Queen.”
Now Parliament is debating the matter. The debate is scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time. You can watch it live on C-SPAN or below — and you can expect it to be lively, with adjectives like “wazzock” and “stupid” hurled at Trump.
So it went last year, the first time a petition on the British government’s website led to a parliamentary debate about Trump. Back in January 2016, after more than half a million people signed a petition calling on the then-candidate to be banned from the United Kingdom for inciting hatred, British MPs weighed in.
“His words are not comical,” Labour MP Tulip Siddiq said in that debate. “His words are not funny. His words are poisonous.”
“My view is that, yes, I would probably ban The Donald because it would do him some good,” former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond added. “He wants to ban all Muslims from the U.S. I want to ban all Donald Trumps from Scotland.”
Responded pro-Trump Conservative MP Philip Davies: “We should celebrate more often politicians who stand up and say things that are unpopular. I think in this country we could do with rather less political correctness and more straight talking across the board.”
Parliament ultimately decided not to ban Trump a year ago. It’s not likely to derail his state visit this time either. House of Commons Speaker John Bercow has declared that Trump will not be allowed to address Parliament, a high-profile slap at the American president. But Prime Minister May insists the state visit — Queen Elizabeth II’s possible embarrassment notwithstanding — will happen.
— Douglas Perry
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