PETITION DEMANDING CURBS ON REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFUL IS GROWING FAST AND IS NOW UK’S MOST POPULAR
Issie Lapowsky | Wired.com
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump may be gaining support at home after proposing that the country ban Muslim people from traveling to the US. But across the pond, a petition to ban Donald Trump from traveling to the United Kingdom has just become the most popular petition on the government’s website.
Posted just two days ago, the petition has already reached 458,230 signatures and counting. At the time this story was written, it had garnered 7,861 signatures in the last hour alone. That puts the Donald petition ahead of a September petition urging the government to accept more asylum seekers and increase support for refugee migrants in the UK, which led to Parliament’s announcement that the country would resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees.
Not that Great Britain doesn’t have its own immigration opponents. In third place is a petition to do just the opposite, asking the government to shut down all immigration completely, an idea that has already been struck down by Parliament.
Because the Trump petition has gotten more than 100,000 signatures, the government will now consider debating the issue in Parliament. While banning Trump outright may seem outlandish in the US (though not nearly as outlandish as banning an entire faith group from entering a country whose Constitution protects freedom of religion … just sayin’) there is precedent for this kind of thing in the UK.
The country has banned people for “unacceptable behaviour” in the past, including celebrities like Martha Stewart, Chris Brown, and Mike Tyson. The UK has also banned promoters of hate speech, like Stephen Donald Black, a Ku Klux Klansman and founder of the white supremacist internet group Stormfront, which, incidentally, has had to upgrade its servers thanks to the traffic boost it’s getting from Trump-related content.
The UK government, for its part, is already signaling that the Trump ban won’t stick.
Either way, it seems Trump is, as ever, undeterred. Though we have to say it’s fairly disconcerting to see a presidential candidate making international enemies before he’s even gotten the nomination—especially when that enemy is a long time ally.