I signed the petition to stop Donald Trump from coming to the UK. Then I realised how wrong I was

This wrong-headed petition provides grist to the argument often used by the likes of Trump that the far-right are the ones being oppressed, rather than the ones seeking to do the oppressing

First things first, full disclosure: I signed the petition. It came up on my news feed, a bunch of my mates had ‘liked’ and ‘shared’ it, so I thought why not?After all, Donald Trump is an odious sac of ignorance and greed.

Then I realised almost immediately that this is the exact reason why I shouldn’t have signed the petition.

Let’s get one thing straight, right off the bat — this petition won’t work. And I think the majority of signatories know that.

Under paragraph 320 of the Immigration Rules the UK Home Secretary is able to deny entry to non-citizens in certain circumstances. The relevant circumstances are where a person’s presence would ‘provoke others to terrorist acts’, or ‘foster hatred which might lead to inter-community violence in the UK’. I think it’d be difficult to establish either one of these conditions. Furthermore, from a political perspective, it’s hard to imagine the British government taking such an extreme stance towards an American who, like it or not, wields considerable power and influence.

However, the legal and political likelihood of this petition succeeding is beside the point. What’s really troubling is that people are signing it at all.

Trump’s entire angle is to play on public fear and harness it for his own political gain. His rhetoric is premised on a desire to make people afraid of certain groups in order to create a mandate to marginalise them. He wants to build walls between demographics: walls that are both social and now, it would seem, literal. And once these walls are built, and once the fear is created, the public will need to elect somebody who’s man enough to preserve these divisions.

To any reasonable and open-minded person, this narrative is intuitively gross. It exploits people’s vulnerabilities and ever-so-slowly warps the human predilection for self-preservation and patriotism into an appetite for oppression and conflict.

Yet the walls Trump seeks to build between Muslims and ‘the rest’ are not dissimilar from the walls that the petition is seeking to build between us and him. We don’t like what he’s saying because it offends our intuitions about what is fair and what is just, so we try to physically constrain him from doing so. This is not a principled way of discrediting opponents, nor is it particularly effective.

For one thing, it provides grist to the argument often used by the likes of Trump that the far-right are the ones being oppressed, rather than the ones seeking to do the oppressing. Fear, the lifeblood of Trump’s campaign, is heightened as those who agree with him begin to feel persecuted for doing so.

As I write this I find myself thinking back to 2009, when there was considerable controversy in the UK over the appearance of Nick Griffin (leader of the far-right British National Party) on the mainstream politics show QuestionTime. Unsurprisingly, lots of people were furious that he would have a platform for his ‘poisonous politics’, and it was argued that by having him on the show there was a risk of his views becoming normalised.

They were right to flag the risk, but what was always more likely to happen was that he’d get on stage and be exposed for the ignorant bigot that he is. And that’s exactly what happened. He was annihilated. Fast-forward six years and he’s all but vanished from the British political landscape.

As much as I hate the platitude of blaming social media for every modern societal defect, I do think that these days people are far too quick to seek to censor opinions they disagree with. E-petitions have become a convenient way of fostering a kind of modern mob mentality, and it’s dangerous. Free speech is too often only seen as desirable when people agree with what’s being said. Which kind of defeats the whole point.

The best thing we can do to Trump is embrace his idiocy with open arms and expose him for the chump that he is. Petitions requesting he be banned from countries only serve to strengthen his narrative and perpetuate a troubling double standard.