Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to the crowd at a Pearl Harbor Day Rally at the U.S.S. Yorktown December 7, 2015 in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. PHOTO: AFP
LONDON: The British government condemned comments by US presidential hopeful Donald Trump as "wrong" on Tuesday, after the Republican frontrunner said Muslims should be barred from entering the United States.
British Prime Minister David Cameron "completely disagrees" with the remarks, which are "divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong", a spokesperson for the Conservative leader said.
Trump called for a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the US on Monday, in the wake of a mass shooting in California by a Muslim couple believed to have been radicalised.
Donald Trump calls for barring Muslims from entering US
The statement, the latest in a series of increasingly virulent remarks by Trump in recent weeks, was quickly attacked by presidential rivals and was described as "totally contrary" to US values by the White House.
Despite broad public outrage at many of his remarks, billionaire real estate mogul is leading in polls of likely Republican voters and is the clear frontrunner for the conservative party's nomination as presidential candidate for the 2016 US election.
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In a speech on Monday, Trump read part of his statement aloud and said the ban on Muslims entering the US should remain "until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on".
His campaign did not clarify whether the proposed ban would be imposed on both tourists and immigrants, or whether it would affect American Muslims based abroad.
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