The government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption has warned about a “highly aggressive pro-Palestine fringe” potentially undermining the democratic process in the UK.
“You can see evidence of campaigners tripping the line from freedom of speech into clear attempts to deliberately intimidate activists and make the business of campaigning – going out and talking to fellow members of a community – a highly unpleasant experience for anyone involved,” Lord Walney told the JC.
Although this fringe was “not remotely representative of the majority of people who might come out to express their concern about what is happening in Gaza in different ways”, he nonetheless cautioned about the aggression with which the issue of Gaza was used during the general election.
Walney said it was “naive and not credible to believe that that the independent candidates who won, others who challenged, and the very vocal and aggressive campaigners that on occasion seem to have surrounded them, or certainly been operating alongside them, were entirely doing this off their own back”.
Defeated Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth has condemned the level of abuse and intimidation he received, while Labour MPs Emily Thornbury and Jess Phillips described the most recent general election campaign as the worst they had experienced.
But it was not just MPs affected by this toxic atmosphere. Campaigners for Labour were on the receiving end of threats and criminal damage, such as having their tyres slashed, he said.
According to Lord Walney, a line was crossed during the election campaign. “It goes beyond people having an impassioned debate, which we have to protect. The examples that you see that are clearly designed to try to drive people off the street and cut community contact – which is the lifeblood of our representative democracy. And it’s not acceptable.”
He has written to new Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and urged her investigate whether the abuse during the election was a coordinated “concerted campaign by extremists”.
In the past decade two MPs have been killed. Batley and Spen MP Jo Cox was assassinated by a far-right terrorist in 2016 and Southend MP David Amess murdered by an Islamist extremist in 2021.
Before the most recent general election, Walney said “MPs were being regularly harassed” and “security budgets had been significantly increased”.
The day before Rishi Sunak called the election, Walney published a near-300-page report entitled Protecting our Democracy from Coercion in which he warned of rising extremism and violent threats faced by elected representatives.
In the report, he also noted that the “phenomenon of regular marches in London and other cities protesting against the government’s response to Israel’s war against Hamas … has triggered a period of intense scrutiny on our public order framework”.
Lord Walney (John Woodcock) was MP for Barrow and Furness in Cumbria between 2010-2019. He resigned from Labour in 2018 and called then-leader Jeremy Corbyn a “national security risk”.
Although he now sits in the Lords without any party affiliation, he is confident that Yvette Cooper and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer “get it” when it comes to threats to the Jewish community and the democratic process more widely. “The new Labour government has the opportunity now to put that sense of change into practice,” he said.
