The killing came almost five and a half years after the murder of Yorkshire MP Jo Cox, in a crime where the UK’s Crime Prosecution Service subsequently confirmed that her killer is officially classified as a terrorist.
One MP killed by a far-right terrorist; another by an alleged Islamic terrorist. There have been other murders and attempted murders – in 2010, MP Stephen Timms barely survived stabbing by an Islamic terrorist. In 2000, Andy Pennington, the aide of Lib-Dem MP Nigel Jones, was murdered trying to protect Mr Jones, by a disgruntled constituent who seemed to have forgotten the help the MP had given him previously.
But in the wake of the death of Ms Cox, there were calls for a kinder, gentler politics.
In the wake of the death of Sir David, there have been calls for a kinder, gentler public and political discourse.
Only days after the latest killing, Mark Francois MP called for a new ‘David’s Law’ in memory of his friend, to curb online targeting of MPs and end anonymity on social media.
And here is where we run into problems.
Let’s be clear: the political and public discourse in this country has been dreadful for years. And the online abuse of politicians – or anyone else – is unacceptable. Threats of death or rape are inexcusable. Any improvement would be most welcome.
But whatever Mr Francois might like to think, it’s probably not Facebook or Twitter where someone was groomed to be a terrorist and the murderer of Sir David, should that be proven in court to be the case.
Yet the MP for Rayleigh told the House of Commons that he was “minded to drag Mark Zuckerberg [CEO of Facebook] and Jack Dorsey [CEO of Twitter] to the bar of the house … if necessary kicking and screaming so they can look us all in the eye and account for their actions or rather their inactions that make them even richer than they already are”.
There’s a certain lack of self-awareness here – and not just in terms of the violent actions he was prepared to carry out – but because Mr Francois is himself a rabble-rouser, to use a rather old-fashioned term.
In 2019, he compared Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission from 2014-2019, to Hitler, noting that “Herr Juncker in the bunker would say that, wouldn’t he?”
He told his fellow Conservative MP Phillip Hammond, a minister at the time, “up yours” on Radio 4 regarding Brexit and, on another occasion, went full Luftwaffle, noting: “My father was a D-Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German. Neither will his son!”
Bombast and rhetoric to amuse the masses. But not grown-up politics.
I have no reason to believe that Mr Francois isn’t deeply upset by the brutal murder of his friend, but he himself is part of a deeper, wider problem.
And he is far from being alone. In the wake of the murder, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner was accused by several commentators of aiding this situation with her recent description of Conservatives as “scum”.
No – it didn’t cause the murder in any way (it seems that the accused had been planning something for two years, so it’s not the pandemic either), but it doesn’t help.
As Andrew Rawnsley makes clear in today’s Observer, such language is not new. Winston Churchill suggested Labour would institute a British Gestapo, while Nye Bevan called the Conservatives “lower than vermin”. Neither played well with the public – but neither had anything to do with a social media that didn’t exist.
But back to Mr Francois. His party leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has had many columns published in the Daily Telegraph containing lies – ‘EU to outlaw prawn cocktail crisps’ is one of the more obviously egregious.
The Daily Mail also excels in this – and in whipping up hatred and distrust. It’s spent decades demonising public service workers – teachers and social workers in particular. I recall my mother singing from the Mail hymn sheet about how teachers, untrained in sport, were refusing to do unpaid overtime, meaning that we didn’t win much at the Olympics.
As the UK has seen in recent years, splashing the cash – via the National Lottery, to fund training properly – Is What Actually Works.
To be fair to my mother, when she heard counter points – such as why should anyone do unpaid overtime in something they’re not qualified in – she acknowledged that those points were logical.
But are we less respectful than previous generations? Social media amplifies things, but otherwise, I really don’t think it’s so simple.
In the last year of his life, my father was grumbling about Gary Lineker’s politics. “I can’t respect people with different views to mine,” he opined. “Oh,” I responded, “so you don’t respect me?”
That, apparently, was “different” – presumably in that blood somehow defies one’s own logic somehow. But, y’know ... Mail readers. In those last months, I started taking him a regular copy of Private Eye. We never discussed the contents, but he actually stopped the carers picking him up a Mail every day. Something had jolted him – and one day, he ruefully hinted that it was the Eye, when he told me not to pick him up a Mail when I went to the shops for him.
Yet I also recall, a week or so before the 2016 referendum, his shouting at me, over the phone: “I don’t want to be ruled over by the Nazis!”
And I think back to some of the things he said over the decades and it was little different to what happens on social media – albeit without the ‘coarse’ language. Because for my parents, saying ‘fuck’ was far worse than much else.
Furriners were to be despised (well, until you met them personally). The English, the English, the English were best ... “I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest”. As Flanders and Swann put it. Satirically. Yet my mother in particular seemed to hold it ups as a second national anthem.
For clarity here, I am no social media saint – but a lot of what I’ve written here expresses why I get so exasperated that I swear about and indeed, to, politicians. What recourse do we have when the prime minister can lie in the House of Commons with apparent impunity, yet anyone saying, in the House of Commons that he does so, is punished?
Why is wearing a tie in the House of Commons (for men, obviously) important, yet the prime minister lying is less so? And let’s be quite clear ... Boris Johnson lies almost as readily as he moves his lips – and that is a fact. Most of his Cabinet are little better.
But the Murdochification of British media – together with the demands of 24-hour digital news media and the need for click bait for revenues – are other factors that have brought us here.
Social media is without doubt a problem that humanity has nowhere near solved yet, and it needs dealing with, but it is *not* the origin of the issues that we face now – specifically in the UK – in terms of public and political discourse, and pretending it is, can only be convenient for others who are part of the problem.
The murder of Sir David Amess was – as every murder is – awful. But to try to pretend that it is somehow and primarily the result of the failings of social media issues is, while those failings most certainly exist, a deflection from reality.
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