I found myself, last week, agreeing with former hard left shadow chancellor of the Exchequer John McDonell MP. Responding to a Labour Party tweet, he said the Labour Party is “better than this”.
He’s right. The offending tweet was one of a series attacking Rishi Sunak. In it, Labour asks “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” It goes on to talk about the last 13 years of Conservative record.
At a technical level, its nonsense. Politicians, through our constitution, cannot pass sentence on criminals – that’s for the courts and judges to do. Rishi Sunak wasn’t even an MP for 5 of the 13 years Conservatives have been in power. He has only had control over the wider justice agenda for a few months, since becoming PM. And the truth is, the sentencing panel, which decides sentences for offenders, included Labour leader Kier Starmer when he was Director of Public Prosecutions.
To be fair, Boris Johnson attacked Kier Starmer personally when he suggested that, as DPP, he let off Jimmy Saville. Personal attacks on opposing individuals is not new.
But in playing the man, not the ball, we poison the well of political discourse. And we see bad practices.
Last year, the Government brought in a Bill to clean up our rivers. This comes after we introduced pollution monitoring on our rivers back in 2013. But opposition parties proposed an amendment that demanded an immediate solution to a structural problem with the extensive, Victorian waste systems. It simply wasn’t possible without creating an immediate backing up of sewerage into peoples’ homes, and a cost on every household in the country of up to £48,000. Conservatives voted in favour of the pragmatic and plausible solution but are now accused of voting to continue to pollute our rivers.
When politics gets so grotty, everyone loses out. The argument stops being about policy and ends up persecuting individuals. This is not a new phenomenon but in the world of new media, vile online attacks are perpetrated on individual MPs. After the murder of two MPs, security is heightened and colleagues of all parties suffer.
My experience of the last 13 years is that Parliament has 650 MPs who care deeply about their communities. We all have different policies, largely grouped by parties. So, whilst I disagree with John McDonell on most things, he is right to say that politics should not be about personal attacks. We are all better than this.