Britain First gets ‘hundreds of membership applications’ after Trump retweets

Britain First claims it has received hundreds of new membership applications after Donald Trump retweeted three anti-Muslim videos posted by the far-right group’s deputy leader Jayda Fransen.

Paul Golding, the group’s leader, told The Times that Britain First received hundreds of membership applications in the 24 hours after the US president retweeted the three videos to his 43.6 million followers.

“Its membership was previously estimated at fewer than 1,000,” reports The Times.

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The group’s Facebook page “has been gaining supporters at a rate of more than one per minute since the president’s tweets”, adds The Sun.

Golding told The Times that Fransen had also gained more than 25,000 Twitter followers since Trump posted shared her tweets on Wednesday.

Fransen claims that the president’s actions amounted to an endorsement. She has also called on Trump to intervene in her forthcoming trial on charges of using threatening, abusive or insulting words in a speech at a rally in Belfast in August.

Fransen - who is on bail for religiously aggravated harassment over a separate incident earlier this year - said in a video posted online: “On behalf of myself and every citizen of Britain, and for every man and woman who has fought and died for us to have freedom of speech, I am appealing to you for your help.”

Attention has now turned to whether Prime Minister Theresa May will cancel Trump’s planned state visit to the UK. Justice Minister Sam Gyimah is the most senior Conservative politician to voice his opposition to the visit, saying he was “deeply uncomfortable” about the idea.

“Whitehall sources” say plans are being drawn up for Trump “to make a pared-down visit to London in February to mark the opening of the new US embassy”, reports Politico.

“If he still wants to come, there’s really not much we can do to stop him,” one UK official told The Times’s political editor Francis Elliott.