“When I was a new member of parliament, you might get one racist letter a week,” the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said last year. “Now, some days, we can get hundreds of items of abuse. It’s the volume of it which makes it so debilitating, so corrosive, and so upsetting.”
In July 2017, the Conservative MP Simon Hart told a Westminster Hall debate that the Whips’ Office received “at least three credible threats to colleagues every week”. In November, the Tory Remainer Anna Soubry said that she had received 13 death threats after the Daily Telegraph named and pictured her on its front page as a Brexit “mutineer”. The Lib Dem deputy leader Jo Swinson told me that in 2015, someone threw a brick through the window of her mum’s car. “Was that because of the election, because she had a Swinson poster in the window?” she asked. “There’s a level of vitriol in Scottish politics where I hope we can put the genie back into the bottle, but it’s hard. It’s unhealthy for democracy.”
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