Toxic political climate is deadly
REVER SINCE June 16, 2016, when Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death on the street by a crazed white supremacist, a ghastly clock has been ticking down towards the next political killing here in the UK.
Why? Because despite the “lessons” supposedly learned after poor Jo’s horrible end, the political atmosphere in this country has become steadily more toxic.
Yesterday, on an otherwise perfectly normal, even mundane Friday lunchtime in the coastal Essex constituency of Southend West, it happened.
Sir David Amess MP, 69, one of the gentlest, kindest, most punctiliously polite MP ever to grace the House of Commons, was brutally cut down, stabbed multiple times.
Amess was in, of all places, a church. He was there to help and advise constituents at his regular Friday surgery, a quiet duty he has been performing without fault for decades since he entered Parliament almost 40 years ago as a fresh-faced, enthusiastic 30-something.
What a dreadful, dreadful end to a life of uncomplaining public service.Amess was so savagely attacked that he never even made it to hospital.
He died at the scene, in that little Methodist church, despite heroic efforts to save him.
You will probably be reading this less than 24 hours after his terrible end, so it is simply too soon to
know why this happened. But what we can say is this.
Sir David Amess was, in the eyes of some, automatically “scum” – purely because he was a lifelongTory.That stupid, irresponsible, moronic term of abuse has increasingly become the reflex, unthinking suffix to the word “Tory”.
I suppose there are some extreme corners of the human zoo for which the word “scum” may be appropriate. I can think of a few. But democratically elected members of Parliament slightly on the right of the UK’s political centre? Really?
Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner refused to apologise last month after calling senior Tories “scum” at her party’s conference.
I am one thousand per cent certain – make that one million per cent certain – that she is as appalled and horrified by yesterday’s tragedy as anyone else.
Everything I know about Angela Rayner makes me believe she is a person of good conscience, decency and honest political passion.
But her outburst is a symptom of our times.
What was once a healthy cynicism directed towards politicians of all stripes has deteriorated into simple-minded hate, sometimes even within our political system itself.
Social media carries a heavy responsibility for this. Anonymity allows a level of abuse, bullying and threats hitherto not experienced in this country.
It is my deepest hope and prayer that yesterday’s foul killing of a decent, civilised man will open our eyes to the poison that now slops around in the well of public debate.
We must drain it, purify it, and swear a self-denying ordinance that prohibits the kind of casual abuse that so cheapens public life – in this awful, awful, case,A public life: David Amess’s.
Let that promise be his legacy.