General Election Campaign: Abuse and Intimidation — House of Commons, 2017-09-14
Topic: Civil Rights
Michael Alex Burghart (Conservative, Centre-right): 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.