The age of rage
“Many members of Parliament now regard death threats the way the rest of us think about long commutes or boring meetings,” said Helen Lewis in the Financial Times: as “a grim but unavoidable part of the job.” At a Westminster Hall debate last week, it was revealed that the Conservative whips’ office dealt with “at least three credible threats” to Tory MPS every week. Labour’s Paula Sherriff said that the last election was the “most brutal” in memory. Another Labour MP, Diane Abbott, “a rare black woman at the top of politics”, revealed that she had racist and sexist abuse directed at her every day, both online and offline. “I’ve had death threats,” she said, “I’ve had people tweeting that I should be hung if ‘they could find a tree big enough to take the fat bitch’s weight’.”
“We haven’t begun to understand the phenomenon of online abuse,” said Andrew Marr in The Spectator. In the real world, I’m approached to talk about politics “by friendly, wryly sceptical and tolerant strangers”. Whenever I venture on to Twitter, I’m sucked into “a deep pit” of paranoia and loathing. Perhaps the actual people and the Twitterers are “two separate species – Homo sapiens, Homo iratus – but I rather doubt it. Social intercourse produces civility; anonymity rips off the smiling mask.” The “rising tide of vitriol” is probably an inevitable consequence of our “hyperpartisan age”, said Lewis. In the US, “very unfavourable” views of Democrats by Republicans, and vice versa, more than doubled between 1992 and 2014, according to the Pew Research Centre. The internet is certainly part of it: a 2015 US study found that “access to broadband internet increases partisan hostility”. But it may also be that “political beliefs have replaced other identity markers as the most acceptable form of tribalism”. Human have an inbuilt desire to form groups, and “keyboard warriors” choose to lump their political opponents “into a dehumanised mass”.
At any rate, there is now “an arms race of rage in British politics”, said Janice Turner in The Times. “Escalated by social media, it leaches into real life.” The abuse on Twitter and the slashing of Tory MPS’ tyres are “part of a spectrum whose end point is the murder of Labour’s Jo Cox”. We should be “alarmed and ashamed” that the BBC’S political editor Laura Kuenssberg now reportedly has a bodyguard, after getting so many violent threats. But instead of taking concrete steps to clamp down, both Right and Left cling “to a childish stance: the others do it too, their trolls are worse, their threats more vicious”. When Abbott was asked by a Tory MP if it was acceptable for demonstrators at a Labour rally that she addressed to carry a model of the PM’S head on a spike she refused to condemn it. “In any society, there is a link between behaviour at the average and at the extreme,” said Sonia Sodha in The Observer. If we all tried to be more civil to each other in our political rhetoric and online, “it wouldn’t get rid of abuse altogether, but I bet it would help”.