Katie Hopkins has finally broken her silence on the escalating refugee crisis. Thank God for that, if there's been anything missing from the mainstream media, it's been crazed commentators with a rank xenophobic disposition, viewing the world through bizarre Nazi Germany-tinted lenses.
David Cameron fell to public pressure earlier this week, pledging to accept an extra 20,000 refugees from Syria and expanding our foreign aid budget to cope with the crisis. As Green MP Caroline Lucas pointed out, it is a pitiful amount of just 12 a day, compared to Germany who have so far taken in 10,000 a day.
Hopkins tweeted:
What kind of hard hitting, emotionless policies would she like Cameron to be pursuing, given his policies are currently doing the bare minimum to make us look not absolutely one hundred per cent emotionally deficient? Allowing people to struggle and drown instead (a policy the EU seemed to be following due to its very slow reaction to the crisis earlier in the summer) as if it will act as some kind of deterrent? It won't. These people are desperate, fleeing unimaginable circumstances. They are not stupid, they know the risks and will take them for a whisper of a hope of a better life in Europe. The practical solution is for people fleeing to be taken in by Europe, not just the morally right solution. Are we to be forever fighting off poor, desperate refugees and clearing their limp, lifeless, bodies, lungs filled with water, that wash up on our shores? Does that sound like a more practical solution?
Sadly, Katie Hopkins isn't much into facts and statistics either (come to think of it, nor are most politicians). Immigrants are sixty per cent less likely to claim benefits, compared to British born people. Last year two leading UCL economists published a journal, which showed that EU migrants made a net contribution of £20 billion to the UK taxpayer between the years 2001-2011. Sorry to break it to you, Daily Mail readers, but asylum seekers when they come here are not showered with benefits, but given a meagre £36.96 a week per person, so £5.28 a day. Facts mean nothing to people like Hopkins. In similar fashion, across the Atlantic Donald Trump is proposing to amend the right to citizenship to those who were born in the US to immigrant parents (so-called anchor babies) and branded Mexican immigrants criminals. Ironically, America's most well known landmark is inscribed with the words: give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
In a bizarre way, Hopkins is right when she questions why we are so galvanised by a single image of a drowned toddler. Just not in the way she means it. It should have never have gotten to the stage where we can see people drowning, before we were moved enough to help. We should have learnt from previous experience, when Jews were fleeing Germany in the 1940s, that sometimes a human tragedy is so great that we must take action and not wait for the bodies of the young and helpless, to roll onto our beaches. Changing Katie Hopkins' mind won't happen. But to you, I would say do what you know in your heart and your head is right and support refugees coming here. You will not regret it.