Jo Cox Civility Commission

Baroness Shah Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shah (Lab)]

My Lords, first, it was a wonderful list from the noble Lord, Lord Bates, which I will also be printing a copy of, because it was very uplifting.

I did not know Jo Cox. I never had the privilege of hearing her speak. But in the years since her murder, I have come to understand her through the words of those who did, and they describe somebody who believed with total conviction that politics could be a force for good, that public life could be conducted with decency, and that you could argue hard but still treat your opponents as human beings worthy of respect.

It is in that spirit—Jo’s spirit—that I support the work of the Jo Cox Foundation and the Jo Cox Civility Commission. There are two recommendations in particular that I wish to speak on today: the urgent need to regulate social media platforms, and the responsibility of all of us to model the behaviour that we want to see.

I have spoken before in this Chamber and in this House about the abuse and intimidation of elected councillors. I have described cars being set alight, candidates stalked, and a candidate punched unconscious on a doorstep. There are brilliant councillors, such as Stockton council leader, Councillor Lisa Evans, whom I spoke to earlier, who experience horrendous online abuse, including doctored AI images of herself being published online. She now says the abuse is something she is used to.

This normalisation is unacceptable in our democracy. Over the past few weeks, many of us from many minority communities have begun to question whether we are truly welcome in this country any more. Something has shifted in our discourse, and there seems to be permission to say whatever we want and to behave without boundaries, regardless of the impact, from both the left and the right. I said then that we are failing the people who make local democracy work, and I say the same again today.

I know from speaking to colleagues, councillors, MPs and activists that the scale of the problem has significantly worsened. Through the Jo Cox Civility Commission, we have a clear, cross-party, evidence-based framework of what needs to be done. First, on social media, the commission calls on platforms to acknowledge the dramatic significance of local politicians—not just MPs and Peers but councillors—and to provide better and faster routes for reporting abuse and misinformation. It calls on Ofcom to address specifically the abuse of elected representatives. The evidence of what happens when platforms abandon that responsibility is now stark and quantified.

The House may be aware of the work of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Its report, Safety Off, published just this month, should be required reading for anyone who doubts the scale of what we face. In January 2025, Meta rolled back its content moderation policies, cutting proactive enforcement of rules against violence, incitement, hateful conduct and bullying. The CCDH predicted a surge in abuse. When it analysed nearly 8 million Facebook comments directed at Members of Congress, it found that abuse did not merely surge; it skyrocketed. Overall, abuse comments tripled and violent threats and hate quadrupled—and it was not directed only on one side of the political aisle. The CCDH named its report Safety Off because that is precisely what Meta did: it switched off safety. When a platform with billions of users removes guardrails against violent conduct, violence surges. That is not correlation; it is causation. The platforms know it and they choose it anyway.

I am mindful that we are speaking in a British context, and there are benefits to social media, but the platforms and algorithms are the same, and the business model that rewards engagement is the same. This crosses borders: it shapes the environment locally, nationally and globally. Research makes it clear that the majority of councillors who experience abuse experience it online. It is targeted and co-ordinated, and disproportionately affects women, people of colour and those from minority communities, precisely the people whose presence in our politics makes it more representative and more reflective of the country it serves. When abuse drives out people, we are not just losing individuals; we are making our politics narrower and, in doing so, making it weaker.

The commission’s second recommendation is harder. It asks all of us involved in politics to model respectful behaviour—in the Chamber, online and in public life—and it asks us to consider carefully the impact of our words on public discourse. I think of Jo Cox here again. Those who knew her speak of somebody who, by instinct, was a builder of bridges; who did not mistake loudness for strength or contempt for conviction; and who understood that the way you argue matters just as much as what you argue for. We live in a political moment that rewards the opposite: when outrage drives engagement; when inflammatory language spreads further and faster than measured argument; when the easiest path to a news cycle is to treat your opponent not as somebody with a different view but as an enemy to be destroyed; and when jokes are made about an arson attack on the Prime Minister’s home. Politicians at every level are not merely victims of this culture but, sometimes, the architects.

When a public figure uses demonising language, it does not stay within the walls of Westminster—it travels, it gives permission and it is heard by the councillor chairing a planning meeting or by the activist sending a message at midnight. Online and offline abuse feed each other. What is said in public life shapes what is considered acceptable online, and what is permitted online shapes what happens on our streets. The commission asks us to take responsibility for that: not to be silenced or to abandon robust debate—Jo Cox herself fiercely believed in that—but to recognise that there is a difference between challenging an argument and degrading a person and between holding a power to account and making public life uninhabitable.

Ten years on from Jo Cox’s murder, the threat to our democracy has not receded; it has changed shape, moved online and become faster and more persuasive, and it is actively enabled by the choices of the wealthiest companies in human history. The response that the commission calls for is, yes, to do the practical things—regulate the platforms, protect the candidates and resource the police—but also to do the harder thing of being the politician that you want others to be. I truly believe that we can, and I remain defiant against hate and division. We

“have far more in common than that which divides us”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/6/15; col. 675.]

That remains one of the most important sentences in modern British politics—and, a decade on, it remains work that we still have not finished.