MPs and political candidates are facing “industrial” levels of intimidation and harassment, a minister has warned, as the government outlines plans for stricter punishments for those found guilty of abuse.
Rushanara Ali, the minister for democracy, said her colleagues were suffering worse harassment than ever before and warned this was deterring many young people from becoming politically active.
With two MPs having been killed in recent years and multiple candidates saying they were harassed during last year’s election campaign, the government says it is acting before further acts of violence are committed.
“In the time that I’ve been an MP, we’ve lost colleagues – my friend Jo Cox, Sir David Amess,” Ali said. “We also had the horrific situation of Stephen Timms being attacked in the first week that I was elected in 2010.
Rushanara Ali, the minister for democracy and MP for Bethnal Green and Stepney. Photograph: UK parliament
“What we’ve seen is the level of abuse and hostility increasing to the point where in last year’s general election, there was industrial-scale abuse and threats and intimidation – creating a chilling effect on our democracy.”
She added: “Week in, week out, I hear of colleagues across different parties – particularly women, but not exclusively – being threatened and intimidated.”
Ali was one of several candidates, several of them Muslim women, to be targeted by pro-Palestinian activists during last year’s election. Videos showed campaigners following and shouting at her supporters in Bethnal Green, east London, while another image showed a fake Labour leaflet depicting her with devil horns.
Her colleague Shabana Mahmood had to call the police twice in the course of one weekend to complain about harassment while out canvassing.
But MPs say the harassment is not related to a single political cause, and is due more to a fragmented electorate who increasingly distrust their MPs while finding it easier than ever to contact or find them.
Cox was killed by a far-right terrorist in 2016 and Amess by a supporter of Islamic State in 2021.
A report by the Electoral Commission after last year’s election found that 55% said they had experienced some kind of problem with harassment, intimidation or abuse, and 13% said the problem was serious.
Vijay Rangarajan, the head of the commission, said earlier this year: “Addressing the abuse and intimidation targeted at candidates and elected officials is crucial to safeguarding individuals and their families, but also the health of the UK democracy more widely.”
A separate report by a panel of MPs convened by the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, warned: “The nature of threats and abuse facing politicians today is a significant change from recent history and current trends suggest it could get worse.”
Ali said she had received multiple death threats in the last year.
“Only yesterday I received a threat to torture and kill me,” she said, adding that she had received similar threats via email and through the post during the election campaign.
“A number of colleagues have had that sort of experience,” she said. “So we’ve got to make sure that our democracy is safe and that people are protected when they decide to enter public life.
“I spent my whole life campaigning to encourage people into politics, young people, women, people from diverse backgrounds, men and women. And I fear that if we don’t take action, then more and more people will be put off.”
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Ali said the government would take three concrete measures to make life easier for candidates and their supporters, and to discourage people from harassing those involved in politics. The measures will be included in an elections strategy paper, with the aim of including them in a bill at an unspecified point during this parliament.
The first is that candidates will no longer be required to publish their home addresses on election material. At present, people standing for parliament have the option to remove their addresses from nomination forms, but not if they are acting as their own agents, which some do.
The government’s changes will allow everyone, including council candidates, to remove their addresses from the forms even if they are their own agents. It will not go as far as recommended by the MPs on Hoyle’s panel, however, who said that even the option of including home addresses on election forms should be removed.
Second, ministers plan to change legal guidance so that it will be considered an aggravating factor if someone is found guilty of harassing a candidate, campaigner or staff member. This will allow judges to hand down tougher sentences to those offenders.
Finally, the government is planning to change the law to ban those found guilty of intimidating or abusing a candidate from standing themselves as a candidate in future.
The measures reflect some, but not all, of the recommendations made by Hoyle’s group of MPs in their report.
That panel also suggested giving MPs protection by the Home Office during an election campaign, introducing ID and address checks for all candidates, and allowing returning officers to expand the exclusion zone around a polling station under certain circumstances.
Ali said: “It cannot be right that MPs, councillors and other others who seek public office are threatened with murder. Sadly, that climate of hostility has led to us losing two of our colleagues.
“This is about making sure that those people who are in public life, and those who seek to be in public life … receive the protection they need, and that people aren’t put off politics. Because we are seeing increasing evidence of people not wanting to be in public life, not wanting to be in politics.”