Katie Hopkins endorses a death threat towards a Tory MP

Anna Soubry is a Tory MP who supports remaining in the EU and is against the Tory government’s hard Brexit policy. I disagree with all her political opinions but here there’s an agreement. Katie Hopkins is a waste of skin but she’s got an undue level of influence thanks to the media giving her a platform. She’s also vocal on Twitter where she’s regularly Tweeting crap, and should normally be ignored but in this case, she can’t be ignored.

Jo Cox was the Labour MP murdered by a far right extremist during the EU referendum campaign and it isn’t hard to see what ‘someone Jo Cox Anna Soubry’ means, and in the current climate that’s a clear and obvious call to kill another elected MP who opposes Brexit.

The man who Tweeted that is being held by the police for questioning, but still Hopkins hasn’t withdrawn her support for what is a death threat. So here’s where we are; the far right are empowered and major mouthpieces on the extreme right like Hopkins feel happy to support calls for murder. If TV or radio producers hire Hopkins they’re hiring someone of the far right, not someone that’s ”good telly”.

Does anyone think Brexit is a good thing apart from the hard to far right anymore?

Let’s hunt and kill Katie Hopkins!

Imagine the scene. It’s live television. Davina McCall or Dermot OLeary is presenting a programme where famous media mouthpiece Katie Hopkins is being hunted through the streets of London by a variety of people. Hopkins is being chased by a pack of hungry dogs and manages to escape being torn limb-from-limb but as she staggers into the finale at some huge site, say the O2 Arena, she’s hounded by the crowd but just as she staggers up to thank McCall and say something offensive for the hell of it, a loud shot rings out and she’s killed by a Syrian refugee holding a gun plastered with the logos of soft drink companies as after all, this would be commercial television.

As the last of her live bleeds away all she can hear is the presenter saying ‘come back next week where we’ll be hunting and killing Rupert Murdoch‘ and the blackened, shriveled husk that is her soul cries out as it all goes black for her.

Now this is obviously horrendous and I suggest anyone thinking that hunting and killing Katie Hopkins is a good idea should realise that this is just me shamelessly taking an old Bill Hicks sketch and using it for my own purposes…

This is all exaggerated as after all if you’re a human being that constantly goes on about machine gunning refugees, picking fights with people like Jack Munroe because she clearly gets off on it, or generally acting like the country’s biggest arsehole then this isn’t anything. This is water of a ducks back to even suggest hunting Hopkins through the streets of London and forcing her to hide in alleys and drinking her own piss in order to live is just a giggle. It’s free speech someone like Hopkins would proclaim!

And yes it is, but the thing is that suggesting someone should be hunted and killed in all seriousness is barbaric. Suggesting in all seriousness that refugees should be shot and that anyone that falls in the glare of those cold, dead blue eyes deserves the venom spat out past her thin, lifeless lips isn’t just barbaric, but psychotic, and it’s not as if she spouts opinions that are alien to some. Far from it, she’s a Tory and she’s someone that sees life as an adversarial game where ‘winning’ is all that matters, even if that means dehumanising others, and in doing so, dehumanising herself.

I’m not saying she’s up for redemption. I don’t think she is but as we get ready to gird ourselves against the Tories it’s worth remembering that people like Hopkins are not unique. They shouldn’t be ignored and they need to be combated head on but people like Hopkins should remember this. At some point her kids are going to be old enough to Google their mother, and find out for themselves what she’s been saying so they’ll decide for themselves whether their mother is a good, decent moral person or a borderline psychopath suffering from some sort of narcissistic personality disorder. If they decide the latter then Hopkins has brought it all upon herself.

In the meantime let’s get ready to fight her ilk. It’s going to be bloody tough but if you want to wipe the rictus-like smile off that palid face without her being hunted by packs of hungry dogs the only way of doing it is to take these people on head first and never, ever let them ‘win’.

Why Katie Hopkins and Edwina Currie are genuinely evil

I’m sure most people in the UK are aware of who Katie Hopkins and Edwina Currie are, but to call them ‘genuinely evil’ seems somewhat harsh, until of course you watch their performances (and I use the word ‘performances’ in every sense of the word) on Five’s The Big Benefits Row last week.

Now I didn’t watch the programme live, but I have seen Channel 4’s Benefits Street, and commented on how morally, and ethically wrong it is previously, I didn’t want to watch the programme because frankly a programme called The Big Benefits Row isn’t exactly setting out to have an informed, intelligent debate, especially one hosted by the likes of Matthew Wright.

The programme itself is what you’d expect. It’s a mass of disinformation, polemic ignorance, racism and the sort of moronic bigotry that’d get you far in the Tories and UKIP.  From the start it’s a mess and Hopkins sets her plan out by instantly dismissing the fact that the majority of people on benefits in the UK are actually in work and she wants to concentrate on the people who don’t work. From the off she dismisses any fact-based conversation for instantly going to a debate of personalities. It’s not a statement of ignorance but utter disregard for debate. As the programme does point out, benefits fraud amounts to less than 1%, the majority of people claiming benefits are employed and most people claiming benefits are pensioners. Sadly, these facts are lost in a morass of people shouting and shouting and shouting at each other.

In the midst of all this shouting is Hopkins proclaiming how easy it is to find work, and that ‘most people’ on benefits are having kids to have more money and on and on and on. Now she might like to have the veneer of the pantomime dame but there’s a dangerous side to her in that by giving her credibility and allowing her to speak without pointing out that she’s not dealing in facts, or that when she claims she’s a successful businesswoman that she is in fact, lying. She’s not in fact a successful businesswoman and as Terry Christian points out in this programme, she’s voicing opinions for money and here’s where the evil comes in. She’s speaking the most outrageous, spiteful lies not because she especially believes in them (though she clearly does in most cases) but because they get a reaction, and once she gets a reaction she’s invited on programmes and paid well to talk shite.

She’s genuinely evil because she says she speaks for ‘hard working people’ but being on the dole is exceptionally hard. It’s fucking painful at times. It’s a job unto itself but because Hopkins sees life as a succession of zeros on a bank statement, it’s only ‘hard working people’ who matter (incidentally, these people are likely to be claiming some sort of benefits to survive) when she’s given up on the concept of society. She doesn’t want a society where those who caused the worst recession in living memory are brought to justice, let alone pay their fair way in society. She wants the suffering to continue because it means she remains in employment in horrible programmes like the Big Benefit Row.

Then halfway through this programme, the producers wheel out Edwina Currie who suggest foodbanks will put supermarkets out of business. Foodbanks need to see a number of things to prove you’re desperate enough to use them, so you can’t walk into a foodbank off the street and get a week’s shopping for free. You have to be desperate. You have to be at the very bottom of society in order to qualify.

Currie, like Hopkins, doesn’t care for facts. She never has. She again wants to be invited on these programmes to make her opinions dominate all others, hence the rather vicious attack live on air on Jack Monroe, which Monroe discusses here.

Of course there are questions Currie wants to avoid, such as why she decided to let Jimmy Savile a position at Broadmoor where he had access to vulnerable people without screening him, or indeed without having any qualifications apart from being on the telly and having powerful friends. When the blogger, Fleet Street Fox, asked Currie this question in the green room for the Big Benefits Row, Currie replied:

“He was a DJ and TV presenter,” I said to her. “Don’t you think it was a bit incongruous to ask him to head up a task force to run the place?”

“Oh no,” said Edwina. “He’d already been there for years because he set himself up as the head of entertainments or something.”

Again, there’s no engagement in anything like fact, reality, or indeed anything like personal responsibility that her decision may have caused vulnerable people suffering because people like Currie don’t care. They display sociopathic reasoning so Savile can get the keys to Broadmoor because he’d been there for years anyhow, or that people on benefits need to be punished because they’re not ‘hard working’ but that ‘wealth creators’ need to be defended even though it’s those same ‘wealth creators’ who would be able to bail this country out should any government actually grow a pair of bollocks and get the tax these people don’t pay or to put it basically in language Currie and Hopkins will understand, these people steal from hard working people. They steal from the disabled who are being persecuted, or the children not getting a full education or from the NHS, or from pensioners or from anyone who isn’t lucky enough to be part of the minority who can slide through life without paying their way in society.

Now do I think that Currie and Hopkins are genuinely, seriously Doctor Doom levels of evil. No, Doctor Doom at least would use facts, and seeing as he’s fictional he’s at least got more grounding in reality than the dreadful personas Hopkins and Currie create for themselves to make their living, or remind people that once they were important. The reality is that debating these people are pointless. They’ll never debate properly and they want anything to descend into a slanging match because they’ll make the one or two talking points they want to make and walk away thinking they’ve done their job. It’s that job and the message that’s evil. It poisons the waters of debate and makes facts something that you don’t want to talk about because that gets in the way of pumping out propaganda, let alone treating people as human beings.

Seriously, fuck these people. That’s all that should be said in regards to them.