Mike Freer
Reflections on Being Hounded out of His Constituency by Extremists

A - Every MP encounters abuse, women MPs especially. Women MPs also get threatened with sexual violence, which men tend not to, but every MP will get a level of abuse, whether it’s emails or graffiti or demonstrations. A few will get more serious abuse. And so one of my colleagues in North London actually is a labour MP was followed round, was out taking her daughter, pushed her through the local park and was abused and followed around. Quite often MPs are now, people are following them, shouting their views at them and filming it at the same time. And so every MP has that level of abuse. It’s variable depending I think on the seats I think metropolitan seats will tend to be slightly worse, but I think that’s every MP will get it. In terms of my successor, my successor is a labour MP and well I mean it’d be interesting to see how other, if any constituents are on the line take a view. But you know, many of the reassurances to the Jewish community on the Labour Party stance on Israel and on Gaza have very quickly been watered down within weeks. The views of the incoming government shifted quite dramatically. So things like arms embargoes, dropping our objection to the international criminal courts prosecution of Netanyahu, all of which were reassured that, you know, they were in lockstep with the outgoing government. And then within weeks that support for Israel has been quite notably weakened and watered down.