1:24 p.m. — British members of Parliament are exhausting a thesaurus using words to condemn Trump. They’ve called him “a buffoon,” “a demagogue,” “a joke.” One member called him “an idiot” about five times in three minutes.
1:31 p.m. — Tory MP Kwazi Kwarteng: “And then we would be in the absurd situation of having banned the President of the United States.”
Kwazi Kwarteng, one of a relatively small number of black members of Parliament, notes that the debate has been “sanitized” because it has ignored the long tradition of nativism and xenophobia in U.S. history.
Tory
Kwasi Kwarteng says the US has banned the Chinese, Asians and Arabs before - and this is nothing new.
“It is Martin Luther King Day and I think if Martin Luther King were here he’d be very proposed at some of the sugar-coated versions of American history presented today,” he says.
He says Trump’s views are “objectionable, hateful” but they have a history - “they are not something he dreamt up in his own head”.
He adds banning Trump would be a “spectacular own goal” because it would feed into the narrative of American independence.
He recalls what happened in 2004 when the Guardian urged readers to write to Americans in Ohio urging them not to vote for George W Bush. The stunt backfired, and Bush carried Ohio, Kwarteng says.
Nativism, says the historian and Conservative member, is very much within the American political tradition. And Trump is part of that history.
He may want to ban Muslims, but “the answer to his ban is not to ban him.” Doing so would only give him more publicity, generating “headlines around the world.” And besides, Trump could win. “And then we would be in the absurd situation of having banned the president of the United States.”
Tory MP Dr Sarah Woollaston asks whether Donald Trump is “conducive to the public good”
As a “gentle atheist” and the MP for Dartmouth, the departure point for Pilgrim fathers, she says if she was a Muslim she would find Trump’s views “repulsive”.
She adds if Donald Trump is excluded from one of the US’s oldest allies it would “send a very strong message” about how Brits feel about Islamophobia.
“Let’s as this House send a very clear message to British Muslims that we value you, we value your contribution, and we will take this petition very seriously”, she says.
But she says he SHOULD visit and “take time to visit the mosques” because that could show him how wrong his views are.
1:45 p.m. — SNP’s Anne McLaughlin: 'I'm sorry hypocrite Trump is part-Scottish"
The SNP’s Anne McLaughlin says she does not necessarily support a ban but Britain should send a message to Trump.
“I think the very fact this this petition was so popular highlights... we in these islands reject whole-heartedly excluding anyone on the basis of their religion,” she says.
And she blasts the “hypocrisy of this son of an immigrant this religious minority advocating being bigoted against other minorities.”
She says Trump’s mother was Scottish and left her homeland during the Great Depression to go to the “land of opportunity” - something for which she apologises.
“The Mexican migrants that Trump so roundly defamed are engaged in the same quest as his forebears”, she adds.
She says Trump’s views run counter to the enlightenment values that unite Britain and America.
She says other MPs have opposed banning Trump. But they have not explained the difference between what Trump said and some of the hate speech that has led to other people being banned from the UK.
She says Trump called not just for Muslims to be banned, but for them to be registered and tracked too. She says she cannot see the difference between this and what the Nazis did to the Jews before the second world war.
And people says Trump might be President. But what would Britain do if the President of China banned all Christians.
Kwazi Kwarteng intervenes. He says Christians have been banned from Mecca for years. But we do not ban the King of Saudi Arabia.
McLaughlin says she does not necessarily support the government’s policy towards Saudi Arabia.
And she says the government should condemn the racist tweets that her colleague Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh has received as a result of her stance in this debate.
She ends a mammoth, exhausting 15-minute speech by quoting Martin Luther King.
At one point she refers to a newspaper front page which may have said a majority of Muslims supported extremism.
It was one in five, actually. That’s 20%.
1:58 p.m . — Lots of amateur analysis of American politics going on in Parliament right now. Scottish National Party member Anne McLaughlin was just interrupted by a member who wanted to talk about GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz. “Where is the Republican Party going, putting one [candidate] up who’s as bad as the other?” she asked.