We can’t let mob rule stand in the way of democracy
ANNA Soubry is made of strong stuff. She has to be.
I defy anyone to watch the wobbly footage of her making her way to parliament – her place of work – surrounded by angry, ignorant, shouty men without feeling awe and admiration.
Soubry, the Conservative MP for Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire, is a vocal opponent of Brexit. Her constituency voted remain.
Having observed from her place on the backbenches what a slam dunk disaster leaving the EU would be, she now backs a second referendum.
As one of the few Tories brave enough to say this in public, she has been called a traitor and a saboteur.
Given that no one has talked about anything but Brexit since the referendum in 2016, she is regularly interviewed on TV.
This has made her a target for the kind of man – and it was only men who crowded around her on Monday – whose idea of political discourse is calling an MP a “Nazi” and excitedly chanting “scum”.
Perhaps they don’t know any insults with more than four letters.
To Soubry’s huge credit, she carried on walking.
When they asked her how she dares to support leave when she has a small majority – it’s 863 – she is right back at them with the statistics about her swing.
She even manages a laugh when one of them thinks the prominent leave campaigner Femi Oluwole, who spotted the hubub and came over to check if she was OK, is Tottenham MP David Lammy. There is just about 20 years and five stones of bodyweight in it.
Let’s be clear – these smirking thugs draped in Union Jacks are not out to change anyone’s mind.
This is not a debate. It’s intimidation performed for clicks, filmed and streamed live to rightwing social media accounts.
Brexit has opened the door to the mouth-breathers who inhabit this festering underworld.
Opinions that they would previously have only typed on to their laptops once their mums had gone to bed are now aired in polite society. The only difference is that Jacob Rees Mogg uses longer words.
This has given them the confidence to gather outside the Houses of Parliament and barrack MPs, journalists and members of staff trying to do their jobs. Soubry is far from their only target.
On Monday the same mob taunted Faisal Islam, political editor of Sky News, with racist insults.
Guardian journalist Dawn Foster reported on Twitter that she, Soubry and Sky News’s Kay Burley were surrounded by a group of men screaming a sexual suggestion so gross that I’m not going to repeat it here. Enough to know that it involved a pole and an EU flag.
All this happened in one of the most heavily policed areas of London.
The Houses of Parliament, as anyone who has ever passed in a bus never mind been to visit will know, crawls with police officers. Yet none intervened to help Soubry get to work or journalists get on with their job of reporting the biggest constitutional change to the UK since the war.
It’s less than four years since Jo Cox, another MP trying to get on with her job, was murdered.
In that time, the hate and division that prompted Thomas Mair to shoot her with a sawn-off rifle, then stab her twice, has multiplied.
It’s bad enough that we are so close to a no-deal Brexit that the Government are stockpiling fridges and paying lorry drivers to sit in a trial traffic jam.
We can’t let the politicians who can navigate us back from the brink be intimidated out of a job.