Disability LinkSpam (warning, may contain Katie Hopkins)

[davidgillon]

For non-Brits fortunate enough never to have encountered her, Katie Hopkins is a former contestant on <i>The Apprentice</i> who has gone on to build a career based on attacking whichever minority group she thinks she can get away with in the most outrageous way possible, and has found her natural home at Murdoch's 'The Sun'. Past exploits include suggesting the wife of Labour Leader Ed Miliband should have her head stuck in a gas oven (doubly egregious as Miliband is of Jewish extraction), attacking the Scottish nurse who caught Ebola while working in Sierra Leone, attacks on people with dementia, and describing migrants as cockroaches and applauding the drownings in the Mediterranean. Her most recent attack labelled Labour Ed Miliband as looking like he was 'on the Spectrum' while doing a live-tweet of one of the leader's debates, and it's clear she didn't mean that in any sort of positive way. "ED STOP LOOKING AT US. You are weird. Look at people not a machine. Try and act off the spectrum"

But here's a rather good response from Lucy Hawking, daughter of Stephen Hawking and whose son has autism:

Dear Katie Hopkins. Stop making life harder for disabled people

I'm not sure I agree with her line about occasionally needing to apologise if her son stares, as I don't feel disability related behaviours need apologising for, but otherwise she nails it, Hopkins is an unpleasant flashback to the attitudes of the 70s.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Hopkins sounds more like a flashback to Uriah Heep, frankly.

Oh hey we can trade. I am repeatedly stunned by the low levels of UK politicians: I know Labour turned Neo-liberal a couple decades back but still!

You can have your jaw drop that my state, which pioneered public employee unions, elected Scott Walker twice.

[davidgillon]

Not so much Uriah Heep as a braying ass (and that's unfair to the donkey).

[nanila]

I did wonder what pit of iniquity had produced KH. "Contestant on The Apprentice" explains that rather perfectly.

[davidgillon]

"Contestant on The Apprentice" who dropped out before the final episode so she could claim she would have won it if she had stayed in...

[cxcvi]

So, a socialite for the busniness generation?