May says she is ‘horrified by stories from colleagues’ as Commons debates abuse suffered in real life and on social media

Theresa May has ordered an investigation into intimidation experienced by candidates during the last election after a barrage of complaints by MPs about death threats and harassment.

The prime minister asked the committee on standards in public life to prepare a report, saying she was “horrified by stories from colleagues about the scale and nature of the intimidation, bullying and harassment they suffered during the general election”.

Some MPs are demanding an end to anonymity online and calling for a new code of conduct for members of political parties, which will be considered by the watchdog as it prepares recommendations for No 10.

Racism, misogyny, threats: politicians who have suffered abuse Read more

May’s announcement came as MPs debated the abuse they suffered in real life and on social media. Many MPs have already moved to improve their security since Labour’s Jo Cox was murdered by a rightwing extremist in 2016, but a large number have complained of a new level of harassment in the run-up to the 8 June vote.

Simon Hart, the Conservative MP who called the debate, said the party’s whips office had been dealing with “at least three credible threats to colleagues every week, including death threats, criminal damage, sexism, racism, homophobia, antisemitism and general thuggishness around and after the election”.



He said he considered elections to be a few weeks of “robust banter followed by a shake of the hand and a pint in the pub” when first elected in 2010, but the latest contest was characterised by “swastikas on election boards, offensive slogans and language on posters”.



Another powerful intervention came from Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, who said she receives racist abuse, including use of the N-word, “over and over again” every day – both online and offline.



“We are talking about mindless abuse and in my case the mindless abuse has been characteristically racist and sexist,” she said. “And just to outline I’ve had death threats, 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’.



“There was an EDL-affiliated Twitter account BurnDianeAbbott, I’ve had rape threats, described as a pathetic, useless, fat, black, piece of shit, ugly, fat, black bitch.”

Some MPs vented their anger at social media companies for failing to stop aggressive and threatening language. David Jones, a former Conservative cabinet minister, said: “Logging on to Twitter is like wading through sewage; it is a deeply unpleasant experience.”

“If you try to make a complaint to Twitter you get completely ignored... we are seeing this anarchic media that is causing misery to people – not least to people in this house,” he said.



Logging on to Twitter is like wading through sewage Tory MP David Jones

Rehman Chishti, the Tory MP for Gillingham and Rainham, said a Labour member in his constituency told him to “fuck off back” to a certain country, which the police are now investigating.



However, MPs disagreed about the causes and motivations of the abuse. Some Conservatives attributed higher levels of intimidation than normal to supporters of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, while claiming he has not done enough to discourage name-calling and threats by his followers.

Andrew Percy, a former minister, said that in this election he had experienced a new level of vitriol. “I was subjected to anti-Semitic abuse, my staff were spat at, my boards and property attacked,” he said, arguing that the aggression was politically motivated and sinister.

“The elephant in the room here is it is being motivated by the language of some of our political leaders when they accuse people of one political side of murder, when they dehumanise them in the way that is happening at the moment,” he said.

Abbott strongly disputed this characterisation, saying abuse has been going on for years and is not limited to one part of any political party.

“I think the rise in the use of online has turbocharged abuse because 30 years ago, when I first became an MP, if you wanted to attack an MP you had to write a letter, usually in green ink, you had to put it in an envelope, you had to put a stamp on it and you had to walk to the post box,” she said. “Now they press a button and you read vile abuse which 30 years ago people would have been frightened to even write down.”

Paula Sherriff, a Labour MP, also said it was wrong for some Tories to suggest it was “only one party doing it”.



She could not remember a single day over the last two years in which she had not received some sort of abuse “whether that be death threats or a picture of me mocked up as a used sanitary towel and various other things”.

“This last election was the most brutal I can certainly imagine,” she said, but argued the issue needed to be examined from a non-partisan viewpoint.

Labour has also accused the Conservative party headquarters nationally of running a nasty campaign full of smears and untruths about opponents, particularly about Abbott.



Some MPs cautioned colleagues against thinking they were the only targets of online threats and harassment. Yvette Cooper, the chair of the Commons home affairs committee and one of the first to raise online abuse as a political issue, said the government should think more widely about the problem of abuse.



“The problem is not just about the targeting of MPs – it is about the nature of the public and political debate in our democracy,” she said. “Nor should it be about any one party, it is about the responsibility we all have to make sure no voices are silenced in our democracy.”

• This article was amended on 13 July 2017 to correct the year Jo Cox died.

