While watching MPs in the House of Commons debate banning a politician they find disagreeable, my first thought was to wonder how this chamber once ruled one-quarter of the globe. If Trump becomes president we could not ban him from visiting; if he doesn’t, he doesn’t matter anyway. Either way, having controversial or even obnoxious opinions does not make someone a danger, and we do not need ‘protection’ from them. It is all the more embarrassing when you consider that this country has hundreds if not thousands of genuinely dangerous extremists living here.
I’m not sure what to make of this; my instinctive reaction to Trump is that he is rude and unkind, and sometimes appears to be a left-wing person’s idea of what a conservative is – overly macho, xenophobic and liable to violate their Care/Harm Foundation. But I appreciate politics is irrational, and when I see MPs moralising about how much better they are (Tory MPs trying to be sanctimonious is a particularly gruesome sight) I have a strange urge to defend the Donald to the hilt.
Not that Trump is that conservative, for as Michael Brendan Dougherty points out in The Week, he is in fact a nationalist, and on many issues he is not just un-conservative but positively European. Ross
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