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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
John Crace

Trump wants to destabilise European democracy. Where on earth is parliament?

Seema Malhotra
The government left it for Seema Malhotra, the lowest-ranked minister in the Foreign Office, to mumble through a couple of weak defences of Trump. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

’Twas the fortnight before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Apart from a few exceptions. The Labour backbencher Matt Western had managed to secure an urgent question on President Trump’s new national security strategy and the Commons itself was remarkable for its absences. A roll-call of dishonour.

Take Nigel Farage. You would have thought he would have had a lot to say on the subject. After all, when Barack Obama had intervened in the Brexit referendum campaign to say the UK would be at the back of the queue for any trade deal with the US, Nige had been outraged. How dare the president try to interfere with the democratic processes of another sovereign country? So now that Donald Trump was threatening to do much the same thing in countries all across Europe, surely this was the time for Nige to make a stand. This was surely a point of principle for him. Were he to have any.

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