A who’s who of left-wing personalities and activists in Great Britain marched in front of 10 Downing Street in London, protesting President Trump’s executive order on refugees and calling on Prime Minister Theresa May to cancel a state visit by the president later this year.
Downing Street earlier stood firm on the decision to extend an invitation to Mr Trump, saying: ‘We look forward to hosting the president later this year.’
The SNP’s Westminster leader Angus Robertson fired up the thousands of activists in London with a chant of ‘no state visit’.
He added: ‘Friends, first they came for the Muslims, but we say something and we say no state visit for Donald Trump.’
Left-wing activist Owen Jones, who helped organise the protest in London, said: ‘Today we say with defiance, with determination, we will not stay silent.’
But a defiant Theresa May has stood by the decision to issue an invitation to Donald Trump to make a state visit to Britain in the face of the outcry over his controversial travel ban.
The Prime Minister, who became the first world leader to meet the new US president in the White House, faces demands from a petition signed by more than 1.4 million people to call off the visit.
But appearing at a joint press conference in Dublin with Irish prime minister Enda Kenny, Mrs May was adamant it would go ahead.
‘The United States is a close ally of the United Kingdom. We work together across many areas of mutual interest and we have that special relationship between us,’ she said.
‘I have issued that invitation for a state visit for President Trump to the United Kingdom and that invitation stands.’
The list of organizers and attendees appeared to contain no one to the right of Karl Marx. No prominent Tories or members of the Liberal Party spoke to the multitudes.
In addition to London, there were demonstrations in cities across Great Britain as well as in Scotland.
It appears that President Trump will be subject to this kind of abuse everywhere he goes — especially in Western Europe. The same kind of hysteria that has gripped the left in the U.S. appears to have crossed the ocean and infected the continent. There is no way to rationally address their concerns or debate the issue because reason and logic escape them.
If you were to ask the average protester what exactly Trump’s executive order says, I doubt if more than a handful could give a coherent answer. All they know is that they have been told to hate Trump by their leaders and to parrot the exaggerated, hysterical misinterpretation of the order advanced by leftists in the U.S. and abroad.
There is reasoned opposition to be made to this order. But few on either side of the Atlantic seem willing or able to form it. Instead, apocalyptic rhetoric rules as liberals try to outdo one another in saying how bad the order is and how evil the president is.
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