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© Katie
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Students at London’s
Brunel University staged a mass walkout during a speech by controversial
right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins. The university lecture hall was packed ahead of
Hopkins’ address. As she made her opening comments, however, students stood and
turned their backs on her before filing out in protest.
The
debate had been due to discuss whether or not the welfare state still had a
place in Britain, and was being held to mark the university’s 50th anniversary.
“It
was mainly that we didn’t feel that she fitted the debate and she wasn’t the
right person to be speaking,” Joe Nicell, Brunel Students’ Union communications
manager, told the Independent.
RT report continues:
Nicell
said the protest had been planned for some time after students first raised
objections in October.
Speaking
to the paper, Brunel Students’ Union President Ali Milani called Hopkins the “physical
manifestation of online trolls” who offered no “valuable intellectual insight”
to the discussion.
“The
inclusion of Ms Hopkins has been met with widespread outcry from the student
body and the Students’ Union,” Milani said.
In
one of her most controversial recent tirades, Hopkins was roundly criticized
for calling refugees “cockroaches” in a column for the Sun newspaper in
September.
“No,
I don’t care,” she wrote. “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.”
Some of her other hits
include proposing the House of Lords be gassed, saying holidaymakers stranded
in Egypt following the Sinai air crash were “betting their family’s lives on
cheap tan” and suggesting “euthanasia vans” might be the answer to Britain’s
ageing population.
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