A controversial British columnist has set the world’s eyes on Australia in a column urging Britain to follow our country’s lead on asylum seeker policy.
The article, published in Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun last Friday, likens migrants to “cockroaches” and describes Australia’s asylum seeker policy as “an Aussie version of sharia stoning”.
Hopkins praised Australia’s ability to “threaten them with violence until they bugger off”.
“It’s time to get Australian,” she wrote.
“Australians are like British people but with balls of steel, can-do brains, tiny hearts and whacking great gunships.”
“Their approach to migrant boats is the sort of approach we need in the Med. Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.”
Hopkins described British towns as “festering sores, plagued by swarms of migrants and asylum seekers, shelling out benefits like Monopoly money”.
The columnist’s characterisation of Australia’s asylum seeker policy as violent and intolerant has sparked discussion across the country. As ABC columnist Jeff Sparrow wrote, “Australian politicians – with a few notable exceptions – would not speak quite so crassly. But in essence Hopkins is right.”
“That’s what deterrence means,” he wrote. “By definition, it’s predicated on making seeking asylum a worse experience than whatever the refugees are fleeing.”
Hopkins’ call for Britain to follow Australia’s lead was described by The Independent as “so hateful that it might give Hitler pause”.
A petition to fire Hopkins has so far amassed just over 240,000 signatures.
But this week, the response to the column heightened – not only are the public calling for Hopkins to be sacked, they are also urging the UK’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner to lay criminal charges against her and the Sun’s editor, David Dinsmore.
Britain’s Society of Black Lawyers has written to the police to formally request that both Dinsmore and Hopkins are charged with incitement to racial hatred under Britain’s Public Order Act.
The Society’s chair, Peter Herbet OBE, is also compiling a formal submission to the International Criminal Court requesting the pair be charged with incitement to commit crimes against humanity.
“The recent comments by the Sun journalist Katie Hopkins, authorised for publication by her Editor and senior staff, are sadly some of the most offensive, xenophobic and racist comments I have read in a British newspaper for some years,” Herbert wrote in a letter address to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe.
He notes that Hopkins’ use of the word “cockroaches” is a reference to a description used “with devastating results” during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
“Given the huge circulation of these comments in the Sun and in the media generally, the propensity for racial violence against people of African descent in the UK is obvious,” he wrote.
Hopkins column was printed in the same week that as hundreds of hopeful migrants died at sea when a large boat carrying asylum seekers from Northern Africa capsized in the Mediterranean. There have so far been only 28 survivors found, meaning as many as 900 passengers died, including as many as 100 children. Among the small group of survivors was the boat’s captain, who has since been charged with multiple counts of manslaughter.