Even by her own standards, Katie Hopkins’s latest ugly rant plumbed new depths, referring to the desperate migrants trying to escape from various African countries as “cockroaches” and recommending the best way to deal with matter, where hundreds of people are drowning, was to employ the use of gunboats. Well, thanks for that, Katie. That keeps your name in the news once more, which is all you wanted to achieve in the first place.
Her solution reminds me of what happened during the terrible genocide in Rwanda, where the world stood by as millions died in the most horrible circumstances. In fact, she is near to Hitler’s “final solution” too.
There is now a petition calling for Hopkins to be sacked from The Sun. Should we all sign it? My answer to this is no.
I do wonder what possessed the editor to print Hopkins’ vile outpourings, other than he thought it would sell newspapers. He obviously has no ‘taste test” and sees nothing beyond the circulation figures. So it’s his fault too. And The Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man with history in employing offensive people, like Kelvin MacKenzie, and he obviously sees no issue with her, either. But he printed it and the best way I deal with Murdoch’s newspapers is to not buy them. The Sun claims to know its readers and to be on their wavelength, which is even more frightening, suggesting that several million people would deal with these desperate people by shooting at them from Hopkins’ gunboat.
The obvious answer is to say that as we live in a free country with a free press, then we have to allow people free speech. But of course we don’t have a free press at all. Our papers are owned, in the main, by rich individuals or huge corporations. And no one in their right mind would pretend they report in a even-handed way. Ordinary people have no access to their pages but then neither does anyone else. The content of pages in The Sun are decided by the editor, presumably with the say so of his master’s voice. They are no more likely to allow Ed Miliband to have a page to write something than they are me. Free press? Only if you can afford it.
But because we purport to be a free country with free speech, we must accept that some people will say grossly offensive things. Hopkins may or may not really believe her words of hate, but it doesn’t matter. She has the right to offend. Just like if some idiot wants to burn a poppy, or another wants to burn the Quran – that’s the price we pay for being free, or relatively free, as we are.
I wouldn’t ban Hopkins or call for her to be sacked. I just won’t read her copy, I won’t watch her when she’s on telly. And anyway: she’s not that important. Her claim to fame is that she was a contestant on The Apprentice, the businessman’s X Factor, and she didn’t even win that.
Hopkins is making a pile by being vile. Personally, I don’t know how she can live with herself but that’s her problem, not mine.
