Katie Hopkins: Sun migrants article petition passes 200,000 mark
An online petition calling on the Sun to sack Katie Hopkins as a columnist had more than 200,000 signatures on Monday after she said gunships should be used to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean, prompting more than 100 complaints to the press regulator.
Her latest Sun column, in which she compared migrants to “cockroaches”, was published hours before the weekend capsizing of a fishing vessel packed with migrants, with the latest reports suggesting the death toll could reach 950.
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Ipso has received over 100 complaints since Saturday about the article. The Sun now has 28 days to put its case to the press regulator and then Ipso will rule on whether the column breached an editor’s code that bans the use of racial generalisations among other things. The ruling will take up to a month after the Sun’s response.
The most relevant parts of the Ipso editors’ code of practice are likely to be clause one on accuracy and clause 12 on discrimination.
Hopkins, a one-time contestant on BBC1’s The Apprentice and a frequent source of controversy, found herself under attack from listeners during a guest slot presenting on Global Radio-owned talk station LBC on Sunday.
The petition on Change.org calls on the Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, to “remove Katie Hopkins as a columnist”. By Monday evening it had passed its initial target of 200,000 signatures.
Hopkins wrote in the Sun on Friday: “No, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in 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 … These two populations are the same. The migrants harassing Brit truckers at the port are the same as the vagrants making the perilous trip across the Med.”
Headlined “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants”, Hopkins said: “What we need are gunships sending these boats back to their own country. You want to make a better life for yourself? Then you had better get creative in Northern Africa.”
She added: “Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit ‘Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984’, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors.”
Presenting a two-hour show on LBC on Sunday, Hopkins was challenged about the article in the wake of the capsizing of the fishing vessel just outside Libyan waters, the latest instance in Europe’s worsening migrant crisis.
One caller, Ronke from Greenwich, said Hopkins was “selling a completely false rhetoric to the nation” which was “disappointing and dangerous, really upsetting”.
When the caller said the solution was to go back to the governments of the countries where the migrants were coming from and “figure out what is going on in the first place”, Hopkins said: “I’m going to shut you down there because to be honest it’s boring the life out of me.
