Students Stage Walk-Out In Protest at Katie Hopkins Taking Part In Welfare Debate

SHE is notoriously hard to keep quiet.

But Katie Hopkins found one group of students doing their best to at least make sure her controversial views weren’t heard – walking out on her as soon as she began to address them.

Hopkins was on a panel debating the topic, ’Does the Welfare State have a place in 2015?’ as part of the University’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

But as soon as she began to speak, students in the audience stood up and walked out of the auditorium.

Joe Nicell, Brunel SU’s communications manager, told The Independent that around 50 people took part in the protest.

Controversial: Katie Hopkins

He said objections to her taking part in the debate were raised in October, before they came up with the idea of the walk-out

He added: ‘It was mainly that we didn’t feel that she fitted the debate and she wasn’t the right person to be speaking.'

Ali Milani, the President of Brunel’s student union, said Hopkins was the 'physical manifestation of online trolls’ and suggested she had no 'valuable intellectual insight’ to add to the debate.

In a piece addressing the protest, he said: 'The inclusion of Ms Hopkins has been met with widespread outcry from the student body and the Students’ Union.

Students walked out as soon as Miss Hopkins began to speak

'It is important to note that the conversation at no point has been about banning Ms Hopkins from speaking on campus, or denying her right to speak.

‘It is instead about saying it is distasteful and incongruous for our University, as part of a 50th celebration event, to provide a platform to someone who adds nothing to the intellectual or academic discourse; and an individual who publicly utters such overtly bigoted views.’

The controversial columnist’s most infamous recent controversy saw her use a newspaper column to compare refugees to cockroaches.

And she repeated her calls for boats carrying refugees to Europe to be sent back at the Ukip conference in September.