Mass protests against Trump’s UK visit
14 July 2018
The huge protests in London and elsewhere in the UK yesterday were an outpouring of anger and revulsion against US President Donald Trump.
Organisers estimated a quarter of a million flooded into Trafalgar Square and surrounding streets. Police admit over 100,000. Tens of thousands also protested in major cities such as Manchester, Sheffield and Glasgow.
This was the first opportunity for workers in Europe to express their own views on the US president, after a week he spent threatening the European powers with trade war and demanding they speed up their own ongoing rearmament.
And whereas Europe’s rulers bemoaned their wounded pride at Trump’s pointed insults while seeking to maintain working relations, the UK protests prove that millions upon millions of workers despise Trump and everything he stands for—the enrichment of the billionaires, gutting of welfare provision, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim racism and naked warmongering.
There is no doubt that Trump’s trip to Europe played its part in galvanising yesterday’s protests, including his xenophobic outburst in the Sun against immigrants and immigration destroying British and European culture.
Prime Minister Theresa May invited Trump to visit, despite more than a million people signing a petition in opposition. She hoped to secure his support for a US trade deal post-Brexit, promising the president at Blenheim Palace “an opportunity to tear down the bureaucratic barriers that frustrate business leaders on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Instead, in the pages of the Sun Trump treated her with naked scorn for daring to seek a continued relationship with the European Union, publicly savaging her just as he had German Chancellor Angela Merkel. All while his…