U.K. petition against Trump state visit attracts over 1M signatures

LONDON — A movement to prevent President Trump from making a state visit to the United Kingdom gathered pace Monday as a public petition against the trip received more than 1 million signatures. However the British government said the visit, likely to take place this summer, will still go ahead.

The surge in support for the appeal, created last year by Graham Guest, a lawyer based in Leeds, a city in northwestern England, follows Trump's refugee and travel ban that affects millions of Muslims.

"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," the petition says. It adds that Trump's visit would “cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the Queen.”

British Prime Minister Theresa May announced Friday that Trump had accepted an invitation by Queen Elizabeth for a state visit. Prior to Trump's executive order, the petition had less than 10,000 signatures.

Now that the online document has attracted over 1 million signatures, many more than the 100,000 needed to secure a debate in Parliament, it will be discussed by parliamentarians on Tuesday. May's office told the BBC on Monday that there would be no dis-invitation.

Trump's executive order suspended all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days. The order also bars the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely and halts entry to the U.S. for three months to residents from the predominantly Muslim countries of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

The move sparked chaos at airports and protests around the world. In Britain, it has drawn broad backlash from politicians across the political aisle.

Speaking to ITV's Good Morning Britain program, Nadhim Zahawi, an Iraqi-born member of the British Parliament who came to the U.K. as a child, said the ban was "discriminatory," "wrong" and "counter-productive." Zahawi is from May’s ruling Conservative Party.

“We will protect the rights and freedoms of UK nationals home and abroad. Divisive and wrong to stigmatise because of nationality,” Boris Johnson, the British foreign secretary, tweeted late Sunday. The British government said the executive order only applies to people travelling from one of the seven countries named in the order and that the only U.K. citizens who are dual nationals of the named countries who might be subject to further checks are people traveling to the U.S. from one of the seven nations.

The clarification came after Mo Farah, the Somali-born British Olympian who lives in Oregon, said Trump’s order had made him an "alien."

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Farah, 33, came to Britain from Somalia at age 8. The athlete, who won gold in the 5,000 meter and 10,000 meter races in the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II earlier this month for "services to British sport.”

A spokeswoman for Farah said he was relieved following Johnson’s statement, but fundamentally disagreed with the order.

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May, who last week became the first foreign leader to meet with Trump in person during a visit to the U.S., was criticized by politicians including Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, for initially failing to condemn the executive order.

Her office later said in a statement: "Immigration policy in the United States is a matter for the government of the United States, just the same as immigration policy for this country should be set by our government.

"But we do not agree with this kind of approach and it is not one we will be taking.”