This is thuggishness, pure and simple. There’s no other way of characterising the ugly scenes unfolding outside parliament, where prominent remainer MPs, journalists and activists now run a daily gauntlet of intimidation.
It was painful to watch an unbelievably composed Anna Soubry battle her way into her office through a crowd of protesters chanting “scum” and calling her a Nazi. Soubry is as resilient as they come and she kept her dignity, but she looked so horribly vulnerable in this situation crackling with barely repressed violence. It is even harder to see police officers stand by and do nothing as a handful of men in hi-vis costume hold public debate hostage by screeching abuse at pro-remain MPs, journalists and anyone else they recognise from the telly. (I say anyone; there’s a wearily familiar pattern emerging, and it’s that women, people of colour and other minorities get it worst. Sky TV’s Kay Burley tweeted that she now needs personal security just to get on and off College Green, where broadcasters have been conducting live interviews with MPs for decades without this kind of interruption. The anti-Brexit campaigner Femi Oluwole and my colleague Owen Jones have also been targeted.)
Inevitably some will question whether this rabble is being given more latitude than the religious preachers of hate they have increasingly begun to resemble.
Yet the police are in a difficult position, damned if they intervene and damned if they don’t, given what these people surely crave is martyrdom. Like their idol, the convicted English Defence League thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, they’d presumably turn any court appearances into Facebook feeding frenzies and fuel for conspiracy theories. Crack down, and you give them what they want. Stand back, and you not only give them the oxygen of daily publicity as they gleefully film and upload confrontations for the enjoyment of armchair thugs everywhere, but create a physically menacing new norm ignoring every lesson supposedly learned from the tragic death of Jo Cox. The life of a politician is necessarily exposed to the public, and not everywhere they go is as well policed as parliament.
The Metropolitan police says it is reviewing footage to see whether criminal offences such as harassment may have been committed. But it’s the overall strategy for policing this new form of made-for-Facebook direct action, which more closely resembles stalking than conventional political protest given its daily nature and fixation on individuals, that needs reviewing in conjunction with the parliamentary authorities and arguably broadcasters, too.
Parliament is a place of work, not just for politicians and reporters but for researchers and secretaries and cleaners, not to mention the hundreds of ordinary people coming in and out every day for meetings about often sensitive and distressing matters. None of them should have to run this gauntlet.
And if the short-term impact is toxic, then the longer-term one is even more troubling. How many MPs watch the death threats piling up against their more outspoken colleagues and decide now is not the time to be brave? How many people, watching Soubry struggle to be heard over the chants of “traitor”, would think twice about going into elected politics as a career? These protesters surely do not represent most leave voters, but they are a logical extension of a public debate so splenetic and hate-filled that reasonable people eventually give up and leave the room.
For that is the ultimate purpose of it all, the one that must be frustrated at all costs; not democracy, but the antithesis of it. The mob vigorously asserts its right to free speech, but then uses it only to intimidate other people out of exercising theirs. All those who had a hand in bringing us to this point – newspapers who ramped up sales with headlines about traitors and “enemies of the people”, high-profile leave campaigners who even now seemingly can’t bring themselves to condemn this behaviour, apologists in all parties for violence against their political opponents, social media companies which allowed the most vile bullying routinely go unpunished on their platforms – should be actively trying to undo the damage they have done. Beware the argument that people shouldn’t say online what they wouldn’t say on the street. This is what happens when they start screaming it in people’s faces instead.