Katie Hopkins petition: Calls for The Sun to sack controversial columnist after 'gunships' article on Mediterranean migrants

The Change.org petition surged as Hopkins presented her first LBC talk show

Controversial TV personality Katie Hopkins (Channel 5)

An online petition is calling for Katie Hopkins to be sacked as a columnist for The Sun in the wake of her controversial article on Mediterranean migrants.

The Change.org motion was set up after Hopkins wrote the piece on Friday saying that "gunships" should be used to turn back boats filled with refugees fleeing north Africa.

It described migrants trying to reach Britain from Calais as "a plague of feral humans", and proposed an Australian approach to boats of "threatening them with violence until they bugger off, throwing cans of Castlemaine in an Aussie version of sharia stoning".

Read more: Hopkins says solve migrant crisis with 'huge boat bonfire'

In its first 18 hours, the petition received 8,000 supporters - but after a new incident overnight in the Mediterranean that threatened 700 migrants' lives and Hopkins' first appearance as a host on LBC Radio discussing the issue, the motion has rocketed.

It has now been signed by more than 30,000 people, and Change.org - which previously hosted the million-strong "Bring Back Clarkson" campaign - said it was "one of the fastest growing petitions of the year so far".

Petition author Izzy Saunders quoted figures that show migrants contributed £25 billion to the British economy between 2001 and 2011, and wrote: "We live in a forward thinking society and Katie Hopkins' views should not be encouraged; this is why I ask The Sun newspaper and editor David Dinsmore to remove Katie Hopkins as a columnist, at the very least to redeem yourselves from publishing this prejudiced article in the first place."