Katie Hopkins, a person who makes her living by courting controversy, has written a piece for the Sun which has caused outrage.
Katie Hopkins, a person who makes her living by courting controversy, has written a piece for the Sun which has caused outrage. As thousands of men, women and children die a horrible death in the Mediterranean, she writes, “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.”
Many people have pointed out that the language she uses to refer to migrants, likening them to cockroaches and a virus, is similar to the language used to dehumanise people prior to genocides in Rwanda and Nazi Germany.
But leaving aside the deliberately provocative language, do Hopkins’ views differ very greatly from UK government policy? In 2014 when Italy appealed to the EU for help with its rescue missions in the Mediterranean, it was reported that Theresa May was “a leading figure among the European interior ministers who decided three weeks ago to only offer an EU border protection operation codenamed Triton, with a third of resources and a limited remit to patrol within 30 miles of the Italian coast.”
In the House of Commons Home Office Minister James Brokenshire said, “emergency measures should be stopped at the earliest opportunity.”
The reason given was that rescue operations only encouraged people to try to reach Europe. In a powerful column in the Telegraph Dan Hodges described this policy as “Drown A Refugee To Save A Refugee” and asked, “why is the Government borrowing policy from the BNP?”
In denying the sheer terror and desperation which drives thousands of people to flee horrors we cannot imagine, our government denies our common humanity and encourages those who like to scapegoat immigrants for political purposes.
Hopkins has written about foodbank users in equally scathing terms, saying, “the massive growth in these food banks is not because more people are hungry. It is largely because we are feeding the dirty habits of people perfectly happy to live a life on the take.” She went on to say that on this she agreed with a government minister: “Gove says food bank users have themselves to blame for being ‘unable to manage their finances’. I agree.”
In many other areas of policy, the headline-grabbing views of Katie Hopkins are often just a magnified and hyped-up reflection of what our government has been saying and doing for the past five years. Blaming the poor for their own misfortunes, a hard-hearted attitude to those in distress, and a failure to empathise with people in circumstances we have not experienced has been sold to us as ‘tough love’ and sound economic management.
It is easy to be shocked by the views of Katie Hopkins, as she expresses them in such stark and provocative terms. But we need to be alert to similar attitudes when they are expressed boringly, and delivered in the language of bureaucracy and economic management.
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© Bernadette Meaden has written about political, religious and social issues for some years, and is strongly influenced by Christian Socialism, liberation theology and the Catholic Worker movement. She is an Ekklesia associate and regular contributor. You can follow her on Twitter: @BernaMeaden
Views expressed by individual contributors do not necessarily reflect an official Ekklesia view.