The sixth stage of grief
How MPs turned the killing of Sir David Amess into a moral panic about social media.
Image by LoboStudioHamburg via Pixabay
Grief is an emotional mugging and victims react in ways personal and inexplicable.
Some withdraw; others weep in the express checkout queue in Tesco. Some want to fight; others want to flee. It is considered impolite to complain about the chosen coping mechanism. What, however, if the mourners are the nation’s lawmakers and they have decided law-making is what will get them through?
In the two weeks since the killing of Sir David Amess, we have seen expressions of sorrow, disbelief, anger and fear. Some MPs may have been traumatised by the loss of their colleague and the suddenness and violence involved. Sir David was killed performing a duty every MP performs weekly, a duty deemed semi-sacred in our parliamentary tradition. Only five years ago, another MP was killed performing the same duty. The enhanced security measures adopted then have been proved insufficient by visceral demonstration.
Some MPs feel afraid going about their business, especially women and minorities. Then there is the escalating hierarchy of oddballs drawn to MPs: the chain email senders and the conspiracy theorists, the ones who prompt unease but may be harmless and the ones who don’t but aren’t. MPs have more than themselves to worry about: there are spouses and children and staff, too.
Something was going to give eventually and the death of Sir David appears to be the breaking point. In the hours after his killing, a conversation started up about MPs’ safety and much of it was devoted to the obnoxious communications many are sent via social media. The conversation came about the way many of our national conversations do: politicians and journalists, two sides of a toxic codependency, began talking and quickly reinforced each others’ prejudices. Something had to be done about social media.
The events leading up to the death of Sir David and the culpability for them are now before the courts. That process must be allowed to conclude without prejudice. However, to settle on social media anonymity as the culprit requires not only limitless reserves of denial and sturdy fortifications against reality, but an implacable inventiveness.
Mark Francois was not the first into the fray but he was the most impassioned. In a Commons tribute to Sir David that was part eulogy and part opening argument for the prosecution, the Conservative MP complained that ‘we came here to try’ and ‘for this, we are now systematically vilified day after day’. He noted that ‘we are legislators’ and ‘I humbly suggest that we get on and do some legislating’. He proposed ‘toughening’ the Online Safety Bill ‘to ensure that our colleague did not die in vain’; indeed, he dubbed it ‘David’s Law’.
Francois may have been speaking from grief but his words were dangerous, crass and opportunistic. He not only parlayed the death of his colleague into a proposal for a change in the law unrelated to that colleague’s death, he advocated a sweeping crackdown on the speech and privacy rights of the general public. Outlining the parameters of his legislative coping strategy, Francois said:
‘[W]hile people in public life must remain open to legitimate criticism, they could no longer be vilified or their families subjected to the most horrendous abuse, especially from people who hide behind a cloak of anonymity, with the connivance of the social media companies for profit.’
Not only MPs, but ‘all our councillors, who are sick and tired of reading on Facebook after every planning committee meeting the night before, that it must have been a brown envelope job’. Even ‘our GPs who have carried on tending to the sick throughout the pandemic but who are now being vilified online, along with their loyal receptionists and staff, just for trying to do their job’. MPs may be hellbent on avoiding the issue of Islamism but if rage-tweeting about doctors appointments ever becomes the primary weapon of the global jihad, Parliament will have us covered.
The legislative overreach being pushed here is radical and disturbing. An MP suggested, in a speech well-received across the House, that social media be regulated in such a way as to prevent the citizenry vilifying parliamentarians (and councillors, GPs, and GPs’ receptionists). Not threatening, not libelling — vilifying. Francois has made a name for himself as a blokey populist scornful of the Westminster bubble and yet here he was calling for a cross-party stitch up to ban the hoi polloi from calling MPs mean names.
What Francois proposes is the kind of authoritarian crackdown on political speech that, were it being implemented in Poland or Hungary, would spur MPs into a frenzy of tweeting, Early Day Motion-laying, and speechifying. This is entirely in line with modish thinking about expressive liberty and selective defences of freedom. What is an attack on democracy when lawmakers do it in other countries is the only way to safeguard democracy when lawmakers want to do it here. Politics is no longer a debate about the proper balance between liberty and equality but a contest to decide on which rationale your liberty will be taken away.
We might be able to overlook Francois’s speech if his appetite for censorship was not shared by government ministers. Digital, culture, media and sport secretary Nadine Dorries admits passing the Online Safety Bill ‘might not have changed what happened last week’, yet claims her colleague’s death highlighted how ‘the online arena remains the home of disgusting, often anonymous abuse, and a place where people are radicalised’. Note the casual elision of ‘anonymous abuse’ and (presumably terroristic) radicalisation. Note also that, in conflating these two phenomena, it is anonymous insults that get top billing.
Dorries announced the government had ‘decided to re-examine how our legislation can go even further to ensure the biggest social media companies properly protect users from anonymous abuse’. She cited her own experience: an anonymous account posted that it ‘wanted to see me trapped in a burning car, and watch “the flames melt the flesh on my face”’. A horrible thing to read about yourself, for sure, but, as Dorries herself acknowledged, ‘the author was tracked down to a dorm room at Oxford University, albeit slowly’ because ‘the police already have the powers’.
The Online Safety Bill was already an illiberal mess. Now the government intends to make it more illiberal so that anonymous trolls can be traced — even though police already have this power and are already using it — all because an MP was killed in a way that, two weeks on, has still not been shown to have involved social media anonymity. Dorries says the strengthening of the Bill will make social media companies ‘hand over the data more quickly and rapidly remove the content themselves’ and ‘force platforms to stop amplifying hateful content via their algorithms’. This goes far beyond identifying users who issue threats or incite violence from anonymous accounts and effectively rewrites the terms and conditions, as well as the enforcement practices, of private enterprises. It’s the kind of legislation Boris Johnson once would have lambasted for spaffing away government time on interfering nanny-statism.
Removing anonymity might make it marginally less likely that a social media user posts a threat, since some may be unaware their IP address can be traced, but anyone who really wants an MP (or anyone else) to feel afraid wouldn’t have to look very hard to find alternative avenues. What removing anonymity would do is narrow the scope of what social media can be used for and who could use it for those purposes. A whistleblower with limited tech skills might see it as an obvious platform for getting information into the public domain, but put additional verification requirements in his path and he may change his mind. A teenage boy from a conservative Muslim family may be attracted to it as a place where he can set up a fake profile and be open about his sexuality or his wish to be seen as a girl rather than a boy. Force him to verify and you take away the security that anonymity gives him.
The scope of viewpoint diversity would also contract. For now, it is still possible to express views outwith the political consensus because certain social media sites allow users to do so with sufficient anonymity to prevent it costing them their job, associates or reputation. Deny them that protection and whole swathes of viewpoints become too risky to express. Who would still want to venture reservations about accepting large numbers of young, single males from Syria? Or deriding the notion that a bloke with a beard is a woman if he says so? Or suggesting that the reason so many educated women are so miserable is that they’ve reached their thirties and forties without getting married and having children, only to realise their careers and their cats aren’t all that fulfilling? We may disdain these opinions but the only difference between them and our opinions is that ours have not been forced into anonymity yet.
Mark Francois’s proposals are absurd. The government’s plans are absurd. The whole thing is absurd. So far we have seen no evidence that social media anonymity played a role in Sir David’s killing. It has not been contended by the police, Home Office or security services. Proponents of compulsory verification have not explained how this would have prevented Sir David’s killing or similar events in the future. All we’ve had is anguish and assertion and a rush by MPs to the sixth stage of grief: legislation.
A senior Tory MP told The Spectator’s James Forsyth that all parliamentarians should be offered a firearm for their protection. Anyone who proposes that a Glock 19 be issued with every pass to Portcullis House shouldn’t be allowed to run a parody MP account on Twitter, let alone serve as a real MP in Parliament. These are the level heads currently milling just how severely to regulate digital communications.
This convulsion has all the hallmarks of a good, old-fashioned moral panic, something MPs are always more than happy to accommodate. Social media anonymity follows in the venerable footsteps of video nasties, dangerous dogs and Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin as a social evil Parliament has tried to legislate out of existence. It will be just as effective. Social media users who threaten MPs with violence should continue to be prosecuted under the laws we have. Security for MPs should be reviewed with a mind to making them, their families and their staff much safer than they are now. Political parties should adopt stronger disciplinary measures against factional and ideological intimidation of MPs. But the already dismal Online Safety Bill should not be made more dismal still. The law is there to uphold order, not to accommodate Parliament’s every technophobic spasm or take the place of the grieving process.
Grief is one thing but there may be another motive at work: revenge. MPs have had it up to here with threats, and abuse, and hatred, and insults, and trolling, and ridicule, and disrespect, and the public in general. Some look at that spectrum of contempt and believe the legal line should be drawn far beyond threats. They are, as Mark Francois says, legislators and why shouldn’t they legislate to grab back some of the respect — or perhaps deference — they used to be shown? Put the public in its place. Show them who’s boss. Get back to normal, civilised politics.
How far MPs go down this path will tell us whether the 57th Parliament and its all-out war to stop Brexit was an aberration or whether its successor is just as contemptuous of the public and that contempt crosses all parties and persuasions. To hear MPs speak in the wake of Sir David Amess’s killing, and for the last five years or so, is to grasp the extent to which some have come to believe themselves in grand, all-encompassing combat against extremists, racists, transphobes, Russian bots, Covid deniers, and enemies of liberal democracy, and the extent to which all these foes are in fact the voters, their shifting attitudes and voting patterns, and the political upheavals these are causing.
There are real threats against MPs and a small number of individuals dangerous enough to carry them out; that must not be overlooked. But there are no laws that can be passed or safety measures adopted that will satisfy those MPs who not only feel threatened by menacing statements and criminal actions, but by a public they no longer understand and a politics they no longer shape.
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