Toxic language of MPs’ Brexit debate fuels threat of civil unrest
Acategory five political hurricane blew through the hallowed halls of the Palace of Westminster this week. Few if any politicians could remember such a toxic and heated atmosphere as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to apologize, back off or resign after the UK’s Supreme Court had found unanimously that his decision to suspend Parliament had been unlawful and that he had misled the Queen, Parliament and the country. This was not the finest week for the mother of parliaments.
The British attorney-general provided the overture. Geoffrey Cox ranted that this was a “dead Parliament” and had “no moral right to exist.”
But the storm clouds well and truly opened with Johnson’s response to an angered and impassioned speech from a female Labour MP about his use of language.
The MP linked the continued death threats she and others have received for months and months to the pejorative language the prime minister had been using such as betrayal and “surrender act,” the term he used to describe the act of Parliament that may compel him to seek another extension to the Brexit deadline from Brussels. The member reminded the premier what had happened to the female MP Jo Cox who was murdered in an act of far-right terrorism during the referendum campaign in 2016.
Johnson’s response was chilling. “I’ve never heard such humbug in all my life.”
In fairness much of the language deployed in the chamber on all sides was embarrassing. Johnson was likened to a dictator. The shadow foreign secretary had the previous week crassly compared the Liberal Democrats to the Taliban, but she had the courage to apologize.
The Brexit debate has triggered the use of terms such as traitor, treason, betrayal, saboteur, enemy, surrender and coup, when everyone knows how toxic the atmosphere is. Yes, some have trawled through the archives to find prior use of such terms by critics, but never deployed at times of such dangerous division and polarization. Even the prime minister’s own sister described the remarks as “tasteless.” Far from Johnson apologizing, he doubled down. The next stage of the strategy was to fuel the threat of mob violence and civil unrest. An unnamed “senior Cabinet minister” told a newspaper that if Brexit was overturned, the country risked a “violent, popular uprising.”
The threat of violence saw further attacks and threats on MPs. The Liberal Democrat leader received a threat to her daughter. Phones to MPs had to be taken off the hook. One of the key lawyers involved at the Supreme Court has been advised to wear a stab vest and may even leave the country. An election will be called in the coming months if not weeks, and it promises to be the ugliest and perhaps most violent in British history. Yet the degrading of the political debate is not accidental. All too often it has become part of a deliberate strategy either to win votes, to polarize and to drag everyone’s discourse into the gutter.
Johnson utterly believes that the anger and rage of his opponents helps him. The terrifying thing is that those who do not wish to get down low and ugly, put themselves at a serious disadvantage.
The media loves the clashes. Sober, grounded and responsible speech does not fire up the social media world let alone grab headlines. Freedom of speech and hate speech run headlong into each other. In this painful collision what should come out on top? Everyone should be wary of stymying political debate, indeed at times it is a relief to see the public engaging in politics as opposed to switching off.
Yet, the freedom of speech hardliners need to consider the impact of incitement. When it sinks this low, mob rule comes that bit closer. When your elected politicians act like a riotous mob, the rest of society will follow.