Hopkins heats up free speech debate
Over the weekend I switched my phone over to voicemail and hid under the bed in the spare room in case the BBC called and asked me to defend Katie Hopkins again following her latest attempt to stuff both feet in her mouth by commenting on the drowned migrants in the Mediterranean. The last time Hopkins decided to poke the chatterati with her selfie stick, she described a Scottish nurse suffering from ebola as ‘a sweaty jock’.
There were howls of outrage, mainly lead by Janey Godley, a Scottish ‘comedienne’ who’s about as funny as a dose of ebola and who has a mouth that would make a Clydeside welder blush. Godley called for Hopkins to be charged with hate crimes and racism. I had the unenviable task of trying to defend her right to free speech on BBC 5Live, despite the fact that the poor nurse’s life was hanging by a slender thread as I spoke. It was a tough gig but I felt someone had to stand up for Hopkin’s freedom of expression, however distasteful I found her words.
Well, Hopkins has been at it again when she used her Sun column to describe hundreds of desperate people fleeing North Africa in ridiculously overloaded boats as cockroaches and then went on to suggest that we ought to send gunboats to make sure the flotilla of migrants is turned back towards the hellhole that is Libya. The outrage was as predictable as Hopkin’s words.
What can you possibly say about someone who speaks with such callous disregard for such a huge loss of human life? Just a day later another boat capsized and up to 700 migrants, including many women and children, were thought to have lost their lives. However, until Hopkins opened
her mouth there had been very few signs of outrage about the situation in the Mediterranean, but as soon as she wrote her words of hate, an assortment of leftists and the permanently outraged, including Russell Brand, called for Hopkins to be silenced. Others phoned and tweeted the police in their droves, erroneously reporting her for a hate crimes. Others suggested she was inciting racial hatred despite the fact that she didn’t mention the race of the migrants.
Let me say it once more for the complete avoidance of doubt… I think that the column Hopkins wrote was distasteful in the extreme but it certainly wasn’t a hate crime. It offended me almost as much as the people criticising her who should have, in my view, been directing their outrage at the situation in the Mediterranean and the EU, which appears to be paralysed with fear and completely unable to sort the situation out. Southern Italy and, to a lesser extent, the Balkans are being overrun by economic migrants and refugees fleeing war in the Middle East. And let’s not forget that much of the unrest and war was fanned by the West’s meddling in the first place.
The media and the outraged are now calling for the resumption of search and rescue teams in the Mediterranean following the downscaling of Italy’s Marenostrum operation. The truth is, and I suppose we should thank Katie Hopkins for making this clear, we have just two options in this situation: either we send gunboats to go after the scum trafficking those poor souls desperate to leave Africa and the Middle East, or else we relax our immigration rules and lay on reliable transport to ferry these people safely to the countries they are trying to reach. Calling for more search and rescue teams to try to pick up
She may have said things that many think hateful but the permanently outraged appear to be more concerned with hating Katie Hopkins than fixing the problem of migrants being trafficked in the Mediterranean.