General Election Campaign: Abuse and Intimidation

Matt Warman Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

“Where’s my shotgun?” Those were the words I heard from the receptionist at a venue where I held a surgery a year to the day after the murder of Jo Cox. I should confess that my reaction was to think of it as just another example of the casual contempt with which many members of the public treat politicians in this day and age. Wrongly, I rather brushed off the comment, which in any other context would be treated as pretty obscene. I say that that was wrong partly because of the upset it caused to my staff, who were helping me with the surgery. They are by no means thin-skinned, and I do not think that I am either, but they see a continuum, as the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) has said, from the contempt—particularly online and very often in person—that starts as casual abuse but somewhere crosses a line and can become some form or other of very real abuse and pose a threat to people in real life.

In my judgment, I have never experienced any serious abuse on the scale of some of the extraordinary and quite moving examples we have heard today, and I do not want to pretend that I have experienced anything that equates to any of those examples. However, I want to talk about the continuing contempt with which the public—in small numbers, but often at great volume—treat politicians. I want to pose questions, to which I do not necessarily have any answers, about whether everyday contempt and abuse are to some extent the building blocks or enablers of greater levels of much more extreme abuse, as well as about the extent to which we can tackle it or should put up with it.

Several Members have talked about the role of social media companies, particularly Twitter and Facebook. It seems to me that, as has been mentioned a couple of times by the hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham P. Jones), we need to tread a very careful line between reining in free speech and setting the right parameters for debates that are rightly robust, given the gravity of the decisions we as politicians have all signed up to take.

Some Members have suggested that the way in which Facebook or Twitter deal with complaints of abuse are inadequate, and in some cases the evidence we have heard shows that that is clearly true. However, it strikes me that I do not want to live in a country where those who set the parameters of free speech are Facebook or Twitter. Whether or not we like it, it is down to us to set the parameters of free speech. I would like the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary to set out what constitutes free speech, not Mark Zuckerberg or the founders of Twitter, although I mean no disrespect to their remarkable achievements.

[Graham P. Jones]

I am enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s arguments. Does he share my view that free speech arises where a debate is able to reach a conclusion without being interrupted or stopped by abuse, and where such a democratic debate is based on discourse and an exchange of views?

[Matt Warman]

Absolutely. Although we would never seek to end the debate on Facebook, if the hon. Gentleman sees what I mean, we must acknowledge that some of those debates will ultimately end with a vote in this Chamber. That is the case that we as politicians must continually make.

I do not pretend for a moment that we will ever convince everyone to be nice or to agree with us on the internet—nor should we seek to do so—but we should realise that part of tackling the smaller building blocks enabling larger problems of abuse is relentless political engagement, whether that is in the form of the Education Centre a few hundred yards from the this Chamber or all of us continuing to hold our regular surgeries whatever a receptionist may say. We should not blame Facebook or Twitter for the abuse we face. Ultimately, we have to acknowledge, as the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton said, that we are sometimes experiencing the unpalatable real face of views that are sincerely held by members of the public. If we find those views unpalatable, it is surely our role to have the debate we just talked about and try to change some of those minds, but that is harder than ever in the social media age. Whatever the size of a constituency, there will always be more constituents than Members of Parliament, so we cannot engage with every single individual, much as we wish we could.

As a number of speakers said, politics should be a debate about policy, but the fact is that in every election campaign we all make politics personal. We talk about our own characters and about why people should vote in a representative democracy for one representative rather than another. We should be careful about having our cake and eating it, and saying, “We should talk only about policy, but here on my leaflet is a picture of me and my family.” To tackle all of those things, we have to say that politicians ultimately set the boundaries of free speech and that, by working with social media companies, we will ensure that free speech is properly experienced in the real world.

Ultimately, we should acknowledge that there are hugely passionate debates online and in person, which we should protect, because of the gravity of the decisions we take in this place. We should be clear about where we draw the line between abuse and free speech. In recent years, thanks to social media, the line has become a lot blurrier and the area has become a lot greyer than we might wish it to be. If politicians are to tackle the small building blocks of abuse, we have to address that issue much more clearly—I do not for a moment suggest that it is of the same order of magnitude as the extreme forms of abuse that we have heard about today, but if we are to tackle the social media side of the problem, which so many people have spoken about, we have to acknowledge that we hold the solution in our hands, and we cannot pass the buck to others.