A petition to prevent President Donald Trump from meeting Her Majesty (and fam) if and when he goes ahead with a planned visit to the United Kingdom later this year is going gangbusters.
At the time of writing this very sentence, the petition is sitting at 684,719 signatures, but it’s going up by a rate of a little over a thousand signatures per minute. It smashed its target of 100,000 while Australia was still asleep.
The parliamentary petition, started by Graham Guest, says that Trump “should not be invited to make an official State Visit because it would cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the Queen.”
“Donald Trump’s well documented misogyny and vulgarity disqualifies him from being received by Her Majesty the Queen or the Prince of Wales. Therefore during the term of his presidency Donald Trump should not be invited to the United Kingdom for an official State Visit.”
“I think we should make it very clear we are extremely upset about it, and I think it would be totally wrong for him to be coming here while that situation is going on,” Corbyn told ITV.
“I think he has to be challenged on this. I am not happy with him coming here until that ban is lifted, quite honestly.”
He was backed up by several Tory MPs, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and Mayor of London Sadid Khan (who’s the first Muslim to become mayor of a major Western capital, let alone London).
“I am quite clear, this ban is cruel, this ban is shameful, while this ban is in place we should not be rolling out the red carpet for President Trump,” Khan told Sky News.
The trip was announced during UK Prime Minister Theresa May‘s visit to the White House, although no date has been set.
May has finally made some kind of stand against the order, despite the fact that she was literally holding hands with Trump the day after he signed the order.
She’s ordered her foreign and home secretaries to speak to their US counterparts, in particular to secure the rights of UK nationals.
That includes Olympic champion Sir Mo Farah, who wrote on Facebook that “Her Majesty the Queen made me a Knight of the Realm… President Donald Trump seems to have made me an alien.”
