Tim Farron

My plan to end the abuse of MPs 

In football, a player can be sent off the pitch for violent conduct or ‘using offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures towards another player’. If a footballer attacks another player rather than the ball, they are disciplined. This is an accepted and acceptable approach to a game where passions run high. A similar approach could be applied to the unacceptable abuse of politicians such as Anna Soubry and a number of journalists, over Brexit. Why are standards that are applied on the sports field somehow lost in real life? By all means play the ball (whether that’s Brexit, the EU itself, May’s deal or no deal) with a passion. But if you go for another player, you deserve a red card.

The crowd of angry men protesting at Soubry outside Parliament are extreme physical examples of the Twitter abuse dished out routinely by online trolls. At least one of them appears to be seeking crowdfunding to become a professional political agitator. There are a small number of people being given more exposure than they should. However, politicians need to avoid making their actions seem semi-legitimate – and emboldening them – with warnings of civil unrest if, for example, a second referendum is considered. It is unhelpful to suggest that the threat of violence might be determining Government policy. (To head off accusations of pro-Remain bias, I equally condemn the way in which the Rees-Moggs were harangued on their doorstep. The point is that none of this should be an acceptable way to conduct a disagreement.)

When debates descend into physical and verbal intimidation, we are truly plumbing the depths of emotive black and white politics. There is a fine line between loyalty and blind tribalism. Tribalism can lead us to treat people outside our tribe as worthy of – and responsible for – every calamity that we can imagine, escalated in our minds to a level of desperate wickedness.

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