UK has no plans to ban Trump over Muslim comments

Britain has no plans to ban Donald Trump over his comments about Muslims despite a growing number of calls for his exclusion, the country’s Treasury chief said Wednesday.

British politicians have condemned Trump’s proposal for all Muslims to be barred from entering the US in the wake of violence by Islamic extremists, and official bodies in Britain distanced themselves from the Republican presidential nomination hopeful.

A university revoked his honorary degree Wednesday, and the Scottish government dumped Trump as an unpaid business ambassador.

Some Britons say the remarks amount to hate speech and have called for Trump to be barred from the UK, where he owns a Scottish golf course. An online petition has surpassed the 100,000-signature threshold that means a committee of lawmakers must consider it for debate in Parliament.

Finance minister George Osborne told lawmakers that Trump’s “nonsense” views “fly in the face of the founding principles of the United States.” But he said it would be wrong to “ban presidential candidates.”

Answering questions in the House of Commons, Osborne said “the best way to confront the views of someone like Donald Trump is to engage in a robust democratic argument with him about why he is profoundly wrong.”

— AP