‘Free to Be a Fool’: Behind the Scenes at the British Parliament’s Debate on Banning Trump

Natasha Hakimi Zapata reports for Truthdig from London.

Several of the Americans and Brits waiting outside the debate room in the airy Westminster Hall on Monday groaned at the thought that Donald J. Trump’s run for president hadn’t turned out to be a joke. One thing became clear: No one seemed to like Trump. Once the debate began, that sentiment was echoed by Members of Parliament on the committee that was considering two petitions: The first (and most popular in the history of the committee) was to ban the Republican front-runner from entering the United Kingdom. The second was not to ban him.

As a bit of back story, the U.K. has hate speech laws that stem from its past brushes with fascism, and about 80 people have been refused entry to date.

READ: Juan Cole: Britain’s Debate Over Keeping Donald Trump Out, by the Numbers (Video)

Across the political board, MPs called Trump a fool, a buffoon, offensive and so forth. And yet the main difference between those politicians who support a ban and those who don’t support a ban seemed to be who took Trump’s comments most seriously. While all the Conservatives seemed to strongly oppose the ban, the left’s position was a mixed bag, with many acknowledging they had conflicted feelings on the matter. Some were thoroughly disgusted by the American’s comments but simply couldn’t support banning him; others took his racist attacks more personally.

The right-leaning members made many an argument in support of freedom of speech, saying a ban would be along the same line as Trump’s own idea to ban Muslims from the U.S. (a comparison that drew more than a few laughs). On the other side of the political spectrum, some MPs—most notably several Muslim women who felt Trump’s comments were directed at themselves, their families and their communities—refused to treat his talk as a laughing matter. For them and others in the room, Trump’s hate speech represents a direct threat to Muslim believers as it ties their religion to the “death cult” of Islamic State. One Muslim MP, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, had even received threats online, according to one of her Scottish colleagues, after she had spoken out against Trump’s bigoted comments.

Another concern voiced from the left was that an American government led by Trump would ban many British Muslim citizens from entering the U.S., including some of the people in the room.

When, on several occasions during the debate, Conservative MPs said it wasn’t their government’s place to interfere in another country’s politics, I couldn’t help but chuckle. That’s rich, I thought, coming from a country with an imperialist history that still interferes in pretty much every continent on earth. I suppose many Tories wouldn’t see their country’s military involvement in the Middle East, for example, as “interfering in a foreign country’s politics.”

These same Tories also said the entire debate was a mistake, with Conservative Kwazi Kwarteng arguing that it was playing into the “media circus” already surrounding Trump. I found myself disagreeing strongly with this position; I found it commendable that a group—far more diverse in terms of race, religion and gender than any sample of our Congress could hope to be—would talk seriously and at length about the pressing issue of the effects of hate speech by a public figure, even if that figure is running for president of the United States, or perhaps especially because he is. Several politicians who supported the ban pointed to others who have been banned from Britain, comparing their actions to Trump’s and stating that the law should be applied uniformly regardless of wealth or status. And yet other MPs argued that the fact that he could be elected to lead one of Britain’s closest allies should make his case unique.

The debate went on for the full three hours it was allotted, and at the end there was a vague semblance of a vote to which some shouted, “Aye!” But, as The Washington Post points out, the Parliament does not have authority to ban a person from entering the nation. Only the British home secretary has that power.

One young man, born in Canada and a naturalized citizen of the U.K., told me he had signed the petition to ban Trump from entering his adopted country but that watching the debate had somewhat changed his mind. Some MPs brought up a point he hadn’t considered: that banning Trump “pre-emptively,” before he’d even tried to enter the country, could be viewed as a form of meddling in foreign affairs. The man said he would still support the ban if, for example, Trump tried to “import his form of nativism” into the U.K., but not if he was only traveling there on business.

By the end of the debate, I had no idea how I felt about it. I am a fervent supporter of freedom of speech, but as a member of the American media told me outside the hall, “Freedoms, even in America, are very much curtailed already.” And it didn’t sit too well with me that the politicians whose ideas about freedom of speech I most agreed with had views on most other matters that I strongly reject. When Conservatives brought up the idea that their government had no right to restrict a person’s freedom to travel, it got me thinking about Syrian refugees and whether these politicians would say the same about them. In a world or a country in which people of any race, religion or nationality could truly travel freely, such an argument may make some sense. But let’s not pretend the U.S. and U.K. don’t disallow people from entering their countries for reasons far more innocuous than the type of comments Trump has made.

As the daughter of Mexican and Middle Eastern immigrants, I, much like the Muslim MPs mentioned above, have felt Trump’s abhorrent words personally and worry about the effect of his comments on my fellow humans. Would I like to see the billionaire fool get his comeuppance and be banned, just as he proposes to ban those of a differing skin tone and belief system than his? Some part of me says yes. And yet the overwhelming part of me wants a world in which we all have the freedom to travel as we choose—Trumps and Muslims and Mexicans alike. And that part of me cannot support a ban on any person, regardless of whether he or she holds views that are diametrically opposed to every value I hold dear.

The U.K. is not my country, and I cannot vote on any such ban. What I can do is vote against Trump, if he wins the nomination, in the U.S. general election and write, freely, about how much I hate his hate speech.