Show caption ‘There is a really serious issue …’ Diane Abbott, Anna Soubry and Paula Sherriff. Composite: Suki Dhanda/Linda Nylind/Getty Women in politics ‘We don’t have bodyguards, we are completely vulnerable’: female MPs on the fears they face Since Jo Cox’s murder, politicians have learned to take threats seriously. With toxic abuse coming from all sides of Britain’s political divides – and female, gay and ethnic minority MPs experiencing the worst of it – is this culture of intimidation undermining democracy? Gaby Hinsliff Tue 25 Jul 2017 10.43 EDT Share on Facebook

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Paula Sherriff tries her best not to be paranoid, or let it get in the way of her work as an MP. But, ever since her friend and colleague Jo Cox was murdered in the street a few miles from where Sherriff lives, she has found threats of violence against her hard to shrug off. Her house bristles with security devices, she is buying personal alarms for her staff and, when we speak, she is about to discuss the latest threat with police. She doesn’t advertise her movements in advance if possible because “there’s always the chance someone could be waiting outside for you. We don’t have bodyguards, we don’t wear flak jackets; we are completely vulnerable. I sometimes go to events on my own and it’s a case now of looking over your shoulder.”

It would be less surprising were she employed in some covert, high-risk occupation. But Sherriff is the Labour MP for Dewsbury in West Yorkshire and this is just life for a shocking number of backbenchers now – especially if they are staunch feminists (Sherriff led the campaign to scrap VAT on sanitary products), EU remainers or sufficiently supportive of immigration to provoke the far right. This constant background hum of rage is their new normal.

“I had a woman send me a message saying that if she had another leaflet put through the door with my face on it, she was going to get her dog to shit on it and – well, I can’t remember if she was going to rub it in my face or send it back to me,” says Sherriff, recalling the general election campaign in June. “There are a number of horrible local social media sites; one mocked up a picture of me as a used sanitary towel in reaction to the campaign I ran about tax.”

The “I know where you live” letters are both unsettling and commonplace for her female colleagues. “Nearly every single one is involved in some sort of police case, restraining order, having to go to court or waiting for their homes to be secured.”

A rally in London to celebrate what would have been Jo Cox’s 42nd birthday. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/PA

And that’s why Sherriff found it “absolutely infuriating” when the Conservative MP Simon Hart opened a parliamentary debate on the abuse and intimidation of MPs earlier this month by listing admittedly shocking offences – swastikas daubed on posters, broken windows, keyed cars – all apparently perpetrated by leftwing activists against Tories. Sherriff has had her share of hard-left abuse, having backed Owen Smith against Jeremy Corbyn in last summer’s Labour leadership contest. But the threats she sees now come mainly from the right and she is exasperated by the refusal to acknowledge that there are perpetrators and victims in all parties.

“There is a really serious issue, and suggesting only one cohort of people is doing it completely undermines the argument,” says Sherriff. “I know there are people in my party who do it, and it makes me very ashamed; I unequivocally condemn it. But I felt really angry after that debate because I just felt as if it had been hijacked. Simon seems a decent type, I spoke to him afterwards, but it was almost like an attack on Jeremy and on the left.”

Until very recently, female politicians across all parties could unite in condemning the misogynist abuse they face. But now it has begun to divide them. Tory MPs say the thuggish behaviour some experienced in June is a new, distinctly hard-left phenomenon, which Labour isn’t condemning strongly enough. The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, spoke movingly during the debate of the racist and sexist abuse she has received for years, including calls for her to be hanged “if they could find a tree big enough to take that fat bitch’s weight”. But there was irritation when she declined to condemn images of severed Tory heads appearing at leftwing rallies, along with “ditch the bitch” placards aimed at Theresa May.

Tory MPs point to a survey of Twitter abuse conducted by the University of Sheffield and BuzzFeed during the last general election, covering everything from racist and sexist abuse to milder insults, which found Tory men received most abuse overall. (The four most abused individuals were more evenly split: Jeremy Corbyn, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan are united only by their prominence in politics.)

But the longer-term pattern on and offline may be different, with Lord Bew – the chair of the inquiry May has ordered into the abuse and intimidation of MPs at the last election – suggesting that female, gay and ethnic minority MPs get the worst of it. Many in Labour are suspicious of May’s motives in ordering an inquiry focusing on one election when they have experienced such abuse for years, fearing it being used as a stick to beat the Corbynite left while rightwing hate is played down. “I did want to condemn, but I felt I was being drawn into a narrative that said this is really about the left,” says Abbott, who is widely agreed to suffer more online abuse than any other MP in parliament. “I’m a card-carrying feminist. I’d never agree with the denigration of anybody and certainly not with the denigration of women in politics. Of course I’d condemn severed heads and calling people bitches.

“But I think there’s a real issue about the nature of political discourse generally.” She has, she says, little confidence in May’s inquiry because “nothing the Tories said indicated that they are trying to find common ground”.

It’s what perpetrators [of domestic violence] do to women to try to control them

What neither side disputes is that the boiling rage long evident in online politics is now spilling into real life. Both Labour and Tory politicians say constituents were threatened at the last election for displaying posters in their windows. Politicians’ staff and families have been targeted; there are reports of MPs’ elderly parents being physically confronted, having their cars vandalised or their private information published online. Female MPs in particular continue to navigate rivers of social media abuse. Logging on daily to be told they are stupid, fat, ugly or not worth raping ultimately takes its toll. “It does get into your head,” Abbott says. “You want to think, ‘These people are nutcases,’ but it’s demoralising. It does mean that I don’t go on to social media much.”

And that, presumably, is why this happens. The aim is to silence and frighten opponents away from debate; to erode their confidence. “It’s classic gaslighting,” says the Labour MP Jess Phillips, who worked for a domestic violence charity before getting elected to parliament. “It’s what perpetrators [of domestic violence] do to women to try to control them: nobody will believe you, nobody cares, your opinion is wrong.”

Labour women use their WhatsApp group to send supportive messages to colleagues being hounded, but even the cheerily defiant Phillips says there are days when she can’t face another row. “I get invited to go on to a TV programme and as soon as I’ve agreed, I’m thinking: ‘What is this going to bring me?’ And then you do think sometimes, ‘Nah, I’ll just stay at home with the kids.’

“That’s like a woman walking around the house, risk assessing, and thinking how not to start a fight: get his tea on the table, get the kids in bed, maybe he won’t kick off. All the things you do to stop abuse – but you shouldn’t have to bloody do that.”

Those Tories who fear the chilling effect of intimidation on the democratic process are quite right. But it doesn’t begin, or end, with Corbyn’s supporters. Three summers ago, in the run-up to the Scottish referendum on independence, one of the constituents of Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson got a brick through her window. The window in question was displaying a poster supporting no. Swinson soon started finding that voters in her East Dunbartonshire seat who were against independence were too worried to put up posters or publicly support the campaign. “When we were handing out stickers saying, ‘No thanks’, I remember an elderly lady putting it on the inside of her wrist because that’s where she felt comfortable with it. It was that fear of expressing an opinion because other people will shout you down. That’s something politicians [have] always experienced, but not normal people going about their daily business.”

Scottish nationalists insist there was bad behaviour on both sides; when Andy Murray publicly backed independence, one troll said he wished the tennis player had been killed in the Dunblane school shooting (Murray was a pupil at the school at the time). But physical intimidation became a distinctive feature of the campaign. Posters supporting no were slashed with knives, anti-independence campaigner JK Rowling received threats serious enough to prompt her to call in the police, and a soapbox tour by Labour’s Jim Murphy was temporarily suspended after orchestrated heckling by yes campaigners. Insults such as “traitor” and “quisling” entered the discourse.

What happened in Scotland was mirrored in an angry Brexit referendum, in which eastern Europeans were told by strangers in the street to go home – and in Labour’s bitter civil war. For all their ideological differences, Scottish nationalism, Euroscepticism and Corbynism all began as fringe movements by those who were intensely committed; after years of being mocked and marginalised, they unexpectedly caught the zeitgeist. The fringe became mainstream, without necessarily adopting mainstream behaviour. When fast-growing anti-establishment movements, only very loosely under their leaders’ control, meet the anything-goes culture of social media, it’s a recipe for volatility.

The toxic political culture surrounding Donald Trump hasn’t helped either, with far-right sites in the US helping to drive abuse against British politicians. “Trump is the king of poison and vitriol,’’ says Yvette Cooper, who founded the Reclaim the Internet campaign against online hate after noticing young women being frightened to mention feminism on social media. “The way in which Trump led that campaign against Hillary Clinton was all about making hate normal. ‘Lock her up’ came very close to being ‘string her up’.”

Yvette Cooper … founded the Reclaim the Internet campaign against online hate. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

But it’s not just politicians who get abused online, she points out, and victims in all walks of life are entitled to a better response than MPs raging at each other. “This can’t just be about politics, and it certainly can’t just be about one side in politics.”

Depressingly, however, a speech Cooper gave earlier this month attacking online abuse prompted more of the same, culminating in the pro-Corbyn Reel Politik podcast tweeting a stalkerish snatched picture of her in a first-class train carriage, captioned, “Was it too busy in standard, Yvette?” When challenged by another user, the anonymous account spat that “Cooper is a bell-end and a busted flush, you’re a cunt, and we’re in charge for ever.”

It’s the language of teenage Facebook bullies: juvenile, testosterone-soaked, ultimately pathetic. Yet even playground insults can have consequences when they are read by unstable individuals. “It spooked me, frankly,” says Sherriff, who notes that many female MPs feel particularly vulnerable on public transport, given that their routes between home and work are highly predictable. When tracked down by the Daily Mail, two of the three young men behind Reel Politik denied writing the tweet yet neither seemed to grasp precisely what was wrong with it. Few in Labour are impressed, however, by the newspaper’s new enthusiasm for exposing online bullies so long as they’re Corbynites. Why, they ask, doesn’t the paper investigate its own incendiary language in headlines such as “Crush the saboteurs”, over a story about why remain supporters should shut up?

MPs on all sides agree media platforms old and new could do more to foster healthy debate, and that police responses could be improved. Sherriff is among Labour MPs also pushing for misogyny to be officially recognised in the definition of hate crime. But the most divisive question facing the abuse inquiry is whether politicians are tacitly fuelling it.

During his time in parliament Andrew Percy, the Tory MP for Brigg and Goole, has had to take out an injunction against a stalker, and like many Jewish politicians has experienced antisemitic abuse. But until June he’d never been confronted in his own constituency by a self-professed Corbyn activist calling him “Israeli and Zionist scum”.

“What’s different now is it has become physical; real confrontations and violence,” says Percy. And many Tories believe the language used by some of their opponents, including the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, is stirring up dark emotions. They have not forgotten that during the 2015 election McDonnell quoted a joke about lynching the then welfare minister Esther McVey. His suggestion that victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster were “murdered” is regarded as similarly provocative, regardless of whether it was referencing Engels’ concept of social murder.

“When you are speaking at rallies where people are holding banners [depicting] the prime minister’s severed head and accusing your political enemies of murder; when you say the party that won the general election – in that it got more seats and more votes – didn’t really win, that’s the sort of language you see in post-colonial dictatorships where people lose and claim they haven’t,” says Percy. The effect, he argues, is to dehumanise Tories and legitimise extreme reactions. “I’ve got colleagues who have had their houses picketed, [with] gangs outside at 2am shouting, ‘Fucking Tory scum!’ There are business that have liked the posts of a Conservative MPs, and these activists – they’re not [the established] Labour party members – come in and say: ‘We notice you have liked a Facebook post for this particular MP; that could be very bad for business.’ This is intimidation. There’s a sinister element.” Frightening people out of publicly supporting a party is, he argues, a direct assault on democracy, which is why some Tory MPs favour a specific criminal offence governing intimidation during elections.

Andrew Percy … ‘I’ve got colleagues who have had their houses picketed.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Conservatives are increasingly scared even to stand as councillors, according to the Tory MP Anna Soubry, with one young woman in her constituency backing out after being told at the school gate that “your kids will get a lot of aggravation”. Corbynism is licensing the idea that you can say whatever you like about Tories, Soubry says, just as Brexit emboldened leave supporters to think they could say whatever they liked about immigrants. “Yet he has the audacity to say that he wants a kinder politics.” While they accept there is abuse from the right, Tories tend to blame it on fringe groups such as the English Defence League rather than Conservative supporters; but leftwing abuse, they argue, often comes from within the broader pro-Corbyn movement.

Many in Labour retort that Tories, too, are playing with fire. “We had a Britain First demo [in Dewsbury] and someone came up to me and started screaming: ‘Terrorist sympathiser!’” says Sherriff. “That was language that the then prime minister was using, when you look at the mayoral elections.” Swinson was also “shocked” when David Cameron repeated grossly misleading smears against Labour’s Sadiq Khan in parliament, and was uncomfortable about the Tories singling out Diane Abbott for criticism at the last election. They should, she argues, have realised they could be tapping into so-called “misogynoir”, the double whammy of racist and sexist prejudice directed at black women.

Abbott herself says that after negative media coverage, the amount of hate mail to her office goes up. She used to shrug the death threats off, telling herself they would never really be acted on, but Jo Cox’s murder forced her to face the fact that they could, and now she reports them to police. She has not forgotten a conversation she once had with a police officer investigating Cox’s killer, a known far-right sympathiser. “When they raided his house, there was a room full of pictures of Jo. And I thought, ‘There’s a house somewhere with a room full of pictures of me,’” she says quietly.