Jo Cox Civility Commission

Lord Jamieson Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, for introducing this debate and raising the importance of community, of respect, of getting involved, and of the work of the Jo Cox Foundation. I need to declare that I am still a councillor in central Bedfordshire.

I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Bates. I thought this debate might be a bit of a downer but he really uplifted it, and I think we are all feeling much better for that. I think that is the right legacy for Jo Cox and others: for us to feel good, not bad. We should look up, not down, and recognise what a wonderful country we live in, and that the vast majority of people are good.

We need to cherish and protect that which makes our country great. We need to rely on our politicians to lead and develop our country. We want the best politicians. Politicians should not need to continually look over their shoulder for threats when they inevitably have to make what will be difficult decisions—because there will be difficult decisions for all politicians.

I particularly want to focus on councillors—I am an ex-chairman of the Local Government Association, so noble Lords might not be surprised. Councillors are embedded in their community, and in many ways they face greater risks because they are well known. It does not matter whether your address is published; most people know where you live as a councillor because you are part of that community. The LGA survey in 2025 showed that 72% of councillors had faced abuse, 50% were subject to misinformation and 25% had received threats of violence.

We want the best councillors. Traditionally, many councillors were not particularly politically driven; they basically just wanted to help their community and do what was right. Maybe it was to try to get a leisure centre built, or maybe, like me, they were fed up with too many potholes. Whatever it was, it was not because they were saying, “I am definitely a strong Labour person”—or a strong Conservative person, or whatever it was. They just wanted to do good.

That was why, when I was chairman of the LGA, I launched the Debate Not Hate campaign—which, to be topical, is about playing the ball, not the player. As the noble Baroness, Lady Shah, said, we need to recognise that what we say matters. In the age of social media, comments made will inevitably be exaggerated. They will be misquoted and distorted and frequently will snowball.

One of the reasons I like door knocking is that I get the chance to talk to somebody for five or 10 minutes. I have pretty much never walked away from a door and had somebody say, “You’re a terrible person”. They may still disagree with me, but at least we had the opportunity to realise that we were coming from different angles. We could be wrong but we were not bad. That is really important when we have our debates. We should not imply that somebody is wrong because they are bad. They are wrong because we may have a different set of values or because we do not agree with their analysis, but it does not make them bad. To say so is a shortcut that causes huge problems.

The risk—or the reality, as the noble Baroness, Lady Dacres of Lewisham, said—is that you get only the people who are thick-skinned, to which I add the highly motivated, standing. That is not good for our country or for our local communities. It is not enough to talk about community; we need to live it, be comfortable with our actions, respect each other and not give the opportunity for this foul abuse.