General Election Campaign: Abuse and Intimidation

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith]

I agree that there is a duty on all Members of this House to be very considered in the language they use in all matters and to talk about policies and politics rather than personalities. Politics has been drifting towards a focus on personalities, and I think that is damaging.

The politics of hope will always win out over the politics of fear, and it played a role in the general election. It was positive that 2.5 million people voted who did not cast a vote in the previous general election, and that gives us a great sense of hope. If we want politics to be more representative, and if we want to encourage a diverse selection of candidates from all political parties to stand, we need to conduct our politics in the spirit of hope.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Cat Smith]

I will in a moment.

The Leader of the Labour party has always said that he does not do personal, and he insisted that all Labour candidates ran positive campaigns based on our policies and the Government’s record, rather than peddling attacks on individuals. He tweeted about that in 2016 and reiterated it in the “Question Time” debate during the general election.

As I said earlier, the Committee on Standards in Public Life is taking evidence this afternoon from three of the major political parties. As part of that inquiry, the Labour party submitted written evidence in which we outlined our support for the idea that political parties and their leaders should agree to a joint code of conduct with a framework for reporting, assessing and disciplining discrimination, racism and any other form of abuse. I hope the Conservative party will work with us to ensure election campaigns are run with dignity and respect for all candidates, and do not depend on highly personal attacks on opponents.

We must see some action on this issue. Abuse and the intimidation of candidates and the public have no place in our elections. I look forward to working with all parties to build a democracy that works for the many, not the few.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

It is a real pleasure to speak in a debate in which there is so much to agree with on both sides of the House. Members are not always good enough at standing up for themselves and the importance of being a Member of Parliament. I have suffered my fair share of electoral abuse, not so much in my current seat but when I was churlish enough to be a Conservative candidate in Islington North. On a daily basis, my team were chased down the street, were accused of being paedophiles and had things thrown at them. I know that many other Members across the House have had similar experiences. This is not the sort of environment in which we wish to pursue our politics.

I would like to make three brief points. The first relates largely to social media and how we can do more to call out the abuse that some of us suffer. When abuse on Twitter takes place, our instinctive reaction is normally to report it, block it and move on. I suggest that we all take the time to capture the abuse before we block it and report it. We should retweet it and share it to name and shame, and to let our followers, colleagues and opponents know the Twitter identity of the people who are putting the stuff around.

We have heard very good contributions from my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) and the hon. Member for East Lothian (Martin Whitfield) about how social media companies could do more, but I think we could do more as well. We could do more in a collegiate sense. If I saw a colleague or an opponent being abused online, I would want to block the abuser, too. We could even get together and draw up banned lists of people on Twitter who are abusing MPs. I do not mean abuse in the sense of, “X party has got its figures wrong” or “Y party doesn’t know what it’s talking about”; I mean physical threats, racism, sexism, homophobia—things that we all agree are totally unacceptable in modern political discourse. We could easily have a system whereby we report Twitter users making abusive threats to the head of the 1922 committee on the Conservative side and the head of the parliamentary Labour party and swap notes weekly.

My third point is about the language that we MPs use. This is a place where language is important. The House does not need reminding that the word “parliament” comes from the French word “parler”—“to speak”; we are perhaps one of the great talking shops in history. The language we use, therefore, is absolutely essential, so when we fail to condemn the language of other Members, even Members on our own side, we let the House down. I am not making a political point against the Labour party or its traditions, but I do want to make a point about one MP who happens to sit on its Benches. When somebody comes out of a meeting in which another Member has suggested that a female Conservative MP should be lynched, the correct response is not, “I didn’t say that myself,” but “I condemn what they said, I’ve reported them to the authorities and I hope that disciplinary action is taken against them.”

Similarly, in being careful about the language we use, we have to stay away from phrases such as “day of rage”. Rage is the language of uncontrolled emotion. Perhaps I am being oversensitive—perhaps it is the language of the barricade and of romantic revolution, or perhaps just a little political Viagra to some doddery old militants—but it is also the language of the flick-knife, of the boot in the face, of the garrotte; it is the language of violence, and it does not belong in the mouths of hon. Members of this Chamber.