Horror and dismay must not keep our MPs hidden away

ONE of the great virtues of our noisy and sometimes badtempered parliamentary democracy is that it makes politics more peaceful. The divisions and discontents of our society are given a voice in the Westminster chamber, in a way so many countries lack.

Opposition is able to speak loudly. Government has to respond. Ministers are heckled, jeered at and mocked. Those of us sitting at home can feel that our frustrations and disappointments are recognised and understood at the very top.

This is why the ferocity of clashes across the Commons floor is a national asset, not a thing to be regretted. Many Americans, for instance, watch Prime Minister’s Questions and wish their Congress was so rumbustious and alive. We have a safety valve which they do not.

But sometimes it fails, either because some people are so selfish and fanatical that they refuse to be governed by Parliament and its laws, or because of some other sort of violent, intolerant zealotry or disproportionate fury.

We have seen, in a number of recent tragedies, the eruption of savage violence into our politics. And now we have the killing of the much loved MP Sir David Amess, just a few years after the murder of the equally beloved Jo Cox during the Referendum campaign.

Both are mourned, and always will be, by their devastated families and by a nation united in grief and sympathy. Yet how did it come to this? We must find out, not least because such violence, especially the use of knives, is all too common on our streets nowadays.

The Southend MP was himself well aware of the problem, long before tragedy came to his door.

After a machete attack on the MP Nigel Jones in 2000, as a result of which his assistant Andy Pennington tragically died, Sir David wrote: ‘The British tradition has always been that Members of Parliament regularly make themselves available for constituents to meet them face to face at their surgeries.’

But, he added, after regretfully summing up the precautions he would now have to take: ‘These increasing attacks have rather spoilt the great British tradition of the people openly meeting their elected politicians.’ Later he said of Jo Cox that she had been attacked ‘in the most barbaric fashion imaginable’.

And the same is true of the killing of Sir David. But how should we respond?

This is harder. Horror and dismay are a bad basis on which to build policy. It is all too easy to mandate apparently tough new safety rules and restrictions. Experience shows it is incredibly hard to undo them later if they turn out to have unintended, unwanted consequences.

We can never wholly eliminate risk. So let us be very careful when it is suggested that MPs should in future minimise their contact with the public, for safety’s sake, or even cease direct meetings altogether.

It is that contact which makes our MPs proper representatives – not just of the contented, happy and well-off (who need them less) but of the poor and the unlucky, the troubled and the marginal, who tend to besiege their surgeries.

These attacks have undoubtedly made it harder for MPs to meet the public. But surely it is not beyond us and the police to devise precautions that allow direct contact to continue, while making such assaults much harder.

In these sad times we should neither jump to conclusions nor rush to judgment, but instead plan sensibly for the future.