Katie Hopkins - No, No, No, No, No

Those mentioning the serial unpleasantness of career motormouth Katie Hopkins are invariably given one standard reply: don’t even mention her, because it will only encourage her. If only she were ignored, all would be well. Sadly, her latest outburst shows that there can be limits to ignoring her: an incitement to racial hatred should not go unchallenged. And not when it revels in seeing others dead.

Happy with your new pal, Dave?

Under the headline “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants”, Ms Hopkins has been allowed by the Sun (hello, Stig Abell) to assert “NO. I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in the water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad … I still don’t care … Because in the next minute you’ll show me pictures of aggressive young men at Calais, spreading like norovirus on a cruise ship”.

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It gets worse: “do I feel pity? Only for the British drivers, who get hit with a fine every time one of this plague of feral humans ends up in their truck”. Then she begins to lose it: “these two populations are the same. The migrants harassing Brit truckers at the ports are the same as the vagrants making the perilous trip across the Med”.

Leaving aside for a moment the idea that those who have trekked thousands of miles to flee conflict across the Middle East and the Horn of Africa and have secured enough money to pay the people smugglers to get on to a boat heading for Italy are not vagrants, but people - that’s as in human beings, Katie - who have not fetched up at a port in Libya as some kind of lifestyle choice. So what is her solution?

She wants us to “get Australian”, and “threaten them with violence until they bugger off”. She goes on (unfortunately) “Once gunships have driven them back to their shores, boats need to be confiscated and burned on a huge bonfire. Drilling a few holes in the bottom of anything suspiciously resembling a boat would be a good idea, too”.

She’s not finished with the racism, either: “Some of our towns are festering sores, plagued by swarms of migrants and asylum seekers, shelling out benefits like Monopoly money … Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches”. And, as Jon Stewart might have said, two things here.

Alex Andreou has asked the obvious question: “Can @metpoliceuk explain why this by @KTHopkins is not "racial hatred" caught by POA1986, PtIII? @TheSunNewspaper”. Perhaps Stig Abell, the paper’s managing editor, would care to respond. After all, he did take to Twitter the other evening to reproach Mil The Younger with “Miliband using Syria to embellish his self-image is pretty ugly”. His pundit just did rather more than that.

Instead, Abell is happy to give Ms Hopkins a well- remunerated berth, to jovially refer to her as “Satan’s Mother-In-Law”, and pretend she’s just “told it like it is”, rather than use his paper as a platform to stir race hatred and incitement. That is the real problem: those who encourage Katie Hopkins the most are the Murdoch press.

Abell is presiding over an operation that has effectively said this kind of thing is OK, nothing more than free speech. Well, it isn’t, and it isn’t. This Wild West show of ignorance, bigotry and inhumanity has more than run its course. It’s time it stopped.