The end result of a discourse dominated by online abuse is an environment where political opponents are no longer seen as normal human beings, warns Progress strategy board member Christabel Cooper
Britain has thankfully had a relatively short record of violence directed against at political figures. The last sitting member of parliament to be assassinated before the tragic murder of Jo Cox, was Ian Gow, killed by an IRA car bomb in 1990. But last week, a 22 year old man came before a London court accused of buying a machete with the intention of murdering Labour MP Rosie Cooper. The alleged regional leader of banned Neo-Nazi group National Action will stand trial alongside him, accused of encouraging the murder. Coming less than 18 months after the shooting and stabbing of Jo Cox on the streets of her constituency by a neo-Nazi sympathiser, it is difficult to imagine how chillingly terrifying this must be.
It would be easy to condemn the handful of deranged or evil individuals responsible for this criminality, and leave it at that. But these alleged crimes come against a background of increasingly aggressive acts against political figures across the spectrum – the brick thrown through Angela Eagle’s constituency office window, the monstrous online abuse directed towards Diane Abbott, a sign on a bridge in Manchester during the Conservative party conference reading ‘Hang the Tories.’
Politics has always been a brutal business and we often find ourselves angry and outraged by the actions or ideas that our political opponents advocate. There is nothing wrong with this. Properly directed, anger can drive action and ultimately change. But the focus seems to have shifted away from what politicians do and towards who they are. Britain is increasingly fragmented into tribes – Brexiteer, Remainer, Corbynite, moderate, Tory – and politics has often become reduced to a series of black-and-white judgements based on which tribe someone belongs to, without any assessment of whether what they are actually saying has any merit. Meanwhile, the increased influence of social media allows battalions of cowardly keyboard warriors to egg each other on in heaping abuse on political figures, in a way that they would not dare to do in real life.
There is clearly a gendered aspect to this abuse. The most conspicuous targets have usually been women. Eagle came in for noticeably more abuse than Owen Smith during last year’s Labour leadership contest, despite playing a smaller role in it. Gina Miller, the prominent anti-Brexit campaigner has been forced to hire bodyguards. For some people, there is something existentially threatening about women holding strong opinions.
The end result of this level of abuse is to create an environment where political opponents are no longer seen as normal human beings and are reduced to the level of cartoonish villains. When it comes to religious extremism we accept that the spread of hate-filled texts and images ends up normalising the idea of violence, dehumanising its targets and creating an environment where potentially, a small minority of individuals can feel justified in turning virtual violence into reality. But we seem less willing to accept this when it comes to political extremism, despite the murder of one MP and an alleged plot to kill another.
Too many people seem to have forgotten that democracy is a structure designed to enable people to disagree with other – and to enable people to continue disagreeing with each other, rather than threatening them if they will not submit. Suppressing opinions through actual or planned violence is clearly anti-democratic, but so is abusive behaviour designed to intimidate and dehumanise opponents. We can fight the battle of ideas with ruthless determination, but disagreement with a person’s political views can never be a justification for malicious personal attacks of any kind.
––––––––––––
Christabel Cooper is a member of the Progress strategy board. She tweets at @ChristabelCoops
––––––––––––