Boris Johnson came to the House of Commons to answer questions on the Trump visa ban with the opposition benches in full outrage mode. The policy is wrong, ill-considered and a blunt instrument. But those in the Chamber who see it as a sign the US is on the road to fascism are getting things out of proportion. As Johnson said you can see it as ‘divisive and wrong’ without resorting to 1930s parallels or wanting to disinvite Trump from his State visit.
There were a series of irate questions from the Labour benches. Yvette Cooper demanded that Johnson ‘for the sake of history, for Heaven’s sake have the guts to speak out’, Dennis Skinner called Trump a ‘fascist’ and Mike Gapes labelled Theresa May an ‘appeaser’. But the most difficult question came from one of the people who ran Johnson’s leadership campaign, the Tory MP Jake Berry. He asked why, given that this ban was one of Trump’s election policies, the Foreign Secretary hadn’t raised it with Trump’s transition team and the Prime Minister with the President in her talks with him. The question left Johnson distinctly uncomfortable.
In a sign of how the Trump issue is energising Labour MPs, they were organised enough to ask about a Channel 4 report that emerged while Boris Johnson was at the despatch box; Gary Gibbon has blogged that the May team had been alerted that the ban was coming when they were at the White House on Friday. Boris Johnson didn’t attempt any verbal cleverness in reply to these questions, and just stuck to the line he wouldn’t comment on confidential conversations.
One thing that does appear to have been cleared up by the statement is that Boris Johnson has secured an exemption for UK nationals, regardless of whether they are dual or not, from this ban. ITV’s Robert Peston is reporting that this deal will also apply to those with Canadian, Australian and New Zealand nationality – in other words, it is a Five Eyes exemption.
Towards the end of the session, Johnson told MPs that he thought Donald Trump’s ‘bark was worse than his bite’ when it came to his campaign rhetoric versus how he will govern. The UK government must hope this is the case. The US is, as William Hague put it recently, the ‘indispensable ally’ for the UK in security terms. London needs this relationship to be a functional one, and that will be a lot easier if Trump doesn’t follow through on his more extreme campaign rhetoric. In this case, Trump has. But it was striking how in the White House statement on Sunday night there was a softening of the rhetoric rather than the usual Trumpian doubling down.
In the Chamber, Johnson reiterated that the government stood by the State Visit invitation that it has issued to Trump. I suspect, though, that the visit will not occur within the next 90 days. Johnson said he hoped that the US political system would bring ‘balance’ to the policy in the next few months. Whether it does or not will tell us much about the Trump presidency.
Comments