How political violence and conspiracy became mainstream in Britain

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0:43Kim Leadbeater:To this day, I think it was perhaps one of the most, if not the most, disturbing and chilling days of my journalistic career. The political atmosphere and the political culture of Britain today is in a darker, dangerous, more noxious place. We are so much more willing to believe in conspiracy theory. Well, I've read it. Well, yeah, you may have read it, but it's bullshit. In our fractured algorithmic politics, your only incentive is to get heard. Your only incentive is to make noise. Police! Stay where you are! Police! Stay where you are! Police! Stay where you are! Stay there! Stay where you are!

1:24OK. With me? Up. Yes, yes, yes. Subject here! Stand still. Yes, yes. There we are for me. That is the police body cam footage of the arrest of one of those responsible for the firebomb attack on Keir Starmer's home and on his former car. It wasn't a straightforward crime. These were people trying to stir up division and fear paid for by the Russians. It's 10 years since the murder of the MP Joe Cox, which was meant to mark a turning point about division and anger and rage. But are we getting worse as a society? Welcome to The News Agents.

2:10It's John. And it's Lewis in Manchester. And in the past 24 hours, three different stories, seemingly unrelated, but actually broadly part of the same thing. As we heard at the intro there, the arrest of those two people found guilty of conspiring to carry out arson attacks on Keir Starmer's property. The ban being proposed by the government for under-16s on social media and this the 10th anniversary of the dreadful murder of the Labour MP Joe Cox. And at the heart of it is division, polarisation, misinformation, anger, rage and what can be done about it. Because when Joe Cox was murdered, the clarion call was we must do something to detoxify political debate.

3:06We must be able to learn to respect that people have different views and that if a democracy is to thrive, You can't just go around killing people you disagree with. And yet, arguably, here we are 10 years on from that murder. And although the Joe Cox Foundation is doing great work, you'd have to say that we feel as a country more polarised than ever. Indeed.

3:31Kim Leadbeater:And Kim Lebbeater, who, of course, is Jo Cox's sister and indeed her successor, but one in her old constituency in Batley and Spain. She's been interviewed as part of the 10 year anniversary. And I think it is very interesting what she had to say and chilling as well. Just listen to this. All the evidence shows that female MPs have more abuse, more threats. And what shocked me when I first got elected was how that has become normalized, not just by society, but by the MPs themselves. So they were very quick to reel off a list of court cases, people who've been arrested, you know, death threats, rape threats, all those things that have just become part of the job.

4:12And we've really got to sort of challenge that because that shouldn't be part of anybody's job. And I do think this is a political problem, but it's also a problem with society. and I've said this a few times recently I can't believe I go to my local hospital for a blood test and there are signs up saying please be kind to the staff so when did we become a country where we have to put a sign up saying could you just mind being a bit nicer to people and not abusing the people who are actually trying to help you you go to the local supermarket and the staff are wearing body cameras because they've faced such abuse and sometimes physical abuse and being attacked now I think we all just need to take a step back and think is that what we want our country to look like?

4:49And I really hope the answer's no.

4:51Kim Leadbeater:So there, Jo Cox's sister, who of course was the first MP to be assassinated for decades in Britain, previous ones generally related to the IRA, and saying that she thinks division in the UK is probably worse now than the run-up to Brexit and on that fateful day when her sister was killed by a far-right thug, Tommy Mair, on the streets of her own constituency and just before we get into the details of kind of that and about um what that might mean and why that might be i sort of just listening to her and just thinking today when i sort of realized or in the last day or so that it was a 10-year anniversary of that i a can't quite believe it's been a decade it almost seems like yesterday and i think one of the reasons that it seems like yesterday is that i actually remember going up there on the night that she was killed in Burstall, which is in the constituency.

5:44Kim Leadbeater:I was still a producer then at Newsnight, and I went up with Kirsty Walk, who presented the show there that night. And I do think that to this day, I think it was perhaps one of the most, if not the most, disturbing and chilling days of my journalistic career. And I say that partly because I have this image just sort of indelibly sketched on my mind of arriving there in this absolutely kind of very normal, typical Yorkshire town, sort of, you know, brown and black brick in every direction, lovely little library, lovely little high street, surrounded by ticker tape from the police or police tape.

6:23And just in the middle of the street, you could literally see Jo Cox's high heels,

6:29Kim Leadbeater:where she had run away, taken them off as she was being pursued by this far right lunatic wielding a gun and a knife. And seeing something like that doesn't leave you. And I remember that night thinking that it almost felt straight away, and I think this was true, that Britain had politically changed somehow. The fact that an MP had been killed in that manner in the heat of a referendum campaign where the politics could not have been more charged. At the time, I sort of felt, and there was a lot of commentary, and Kevin Ledbetter has referred to this, that it would almost be a kind of jolt, a kind of warning, a kind of sense that Britain was maybe looking over the edge and looking over the precipice of a different type of politics.

7:20Kim Leadbeater:And it felt that, however gingerly, Britain might pull back. And I'm not saying, by the way, that what I mean by that is that Romaine was going to win or should have won or had some monopoly on political civility. I'm not saying that. But certainly that referendum campaign had been one of the most politically charged and noxious at times of any type of politics that we had seen. As I say, there had been all of this commentary that actually Britain had sort of veered into that and would go back. Of course, what we know in a succeeding 10 years, it is that it has been the opposite. And I sometimes reflect and can't quite believe that, you know, in my journalistic career so far, I've reported on not just the assassination of one MP, but two MPs.

8:06Kim Leadbeater:And in the previous decades, the assassinations that had taken place had, as I say, largely been connected, didn't happen very often, with the IRA and the troubles and the armed struggle on the island of Ireland. This has been something quite different. And I think that Kim Leadbeater is absolutely correct to say that the political atmosphere and the political culture of Britain today is in a darker, dangerous, more noxious place than it was when her own sister was assassinated. yeah that is quite something to consider yeah it's so interesting hearing your reflections of that i mean i was you know years ago one of my first jobs as a political correspondent at westminster was to cover the eastbourne by election that had been brought about by the assassination by the murder of ian gall uh by the ira who was the tory mp and someone uh close to margaret thatcher and that just seems like a bygone generation, mercifully.

9:02You know, yes, there was trouble last week in Belfast, which you reported on, Lewis. But the troubles per se, as the troubles, you know, IRA prepared to launch mainland attacks, that is mercifully behind us. 2016, when that murder of Joe Cox happened, I was Washington based, and was so profoundly shocked because I was thinking, but that doesn't happen in Britain. This is what happens here. It happens here in America, where we've seen political violence, you know, as we've been a continual thread through American political history. And what you had in 2016 that I was reporting on extensively was, of course, the election of Donald Trump and whether there had been Russian interference in that election.

9:50And all the intelligence agencies concluded that, yes, there had been, interference, although Donald Trump would never, ever accept it and always called it the Russia hoax. But Donald Trump failed to understand what it was. It wasn't just that the Russians were saying, vote Donald, which broadly, that was the overall sense of the messaging. They were sowing dissent. They were sowing division in the country to turn one American against another. And that brings us to the second story that we were just talking about, which was these two guys found guilty of conspiring to carry out arson attacks. Now, you know, they were two relatively kind of low-life young men of Ukrainian descent, which in itself significant, but employed by a Russian agent with the code name El Money on Signal and asked to carry out attacks when they didn't even know what they were doing.

10:49But this was clearly a Russian effort to sow dissent, to bring division into the country, to be anti-Muslim, to be anti the right, giving mixed messages to whichever group happened to be that they're being targeted so that everyone would hate one another. and this seems to be a new political reality that we face in britain today and it's been you know iranian inspired attacks on jewish targets where you know low lives are paid a few quid and they go and set light to an ambulance or they set light to a synagogue and so it was in the case of starmer as well where they targeted a house that he used to live in his old car and a couple of flats in islington something else i would say about um joe cox in

11:39Kim Leadbeater:particular and what happened to her and what we've happened since because it was definitely the start of seeing more political violence in Britain um shaped I would say by the sort of the online political culture that was in place then and has become more sophisticated since the fact that the main arena that our politics now takes place is in is online we've seen more political violence during that time we've seen the threat as well not just successful but the threat of political violence online. I mean, I just reflect, for example, all those people defending Elon Musk over the course of the last week rarely seem to ever reflect on the fact that as a result of what he has said, there is a member of parliament and former minister who now requires round-the-clock security protection as a result of some of the conspiracies he spread about her.

12:25Kim Leadbeater:Just a small microcosm, an example of what I mean. But something that I think is particularly dispiriting and disturbing about the reaction to political violence since then is that whenever there is political violence now everybody always says the same thing we can't allow this to change us um we they come out with the same sort of sort of bromides but what we've seen basically and it has happened to some extent on both sides of left and the right is when political violence happens excuses to some extent are made for it and there is blame against the other side for the political culture that they say that side alone has created what do i mean by that well i remember john in in the wake of joe cox's murder um there was obviously some reflection and it had to be quite sort of tepidly expressed because it was so traumatic and politically difficult at the extent to which was it really a coincidence or or can we be sure that it was really a coincidence that the only assassination that we had seen up to that point for decades had taken place in the middle of a referendum campaign where the atmosphere was deeply toxic let's never forget that thomas mayor the man who murdered him, the court later heard, not only was he a far-right extremist, he had neo-Nazi sympathies, white supremacist literature around his house.

13:44Kim Leadbeater:The trial heard that he shouted phrases such as Britain first and keep Britain independent and talked about death to traitors, freedom for Britain. Now that was all taking place when perhaps it wasn't always explicitly put, but that sort of atmosphere, those sorts of sentiments, they were being readily expressed in the political debate around the referendum, which was reaching its crescendo at that time. And it was legitimate to talk about, I think, and was not talked about enough, actually, in the aftermath. To what extent was it that we can say, was it a coincidence that that assassination happened at that time when we hadn't seen anything like it before?

14:23Kim Leadbeater:But Farage and others would have said, and the Leave campaign at the time said, no, this guy's just a madman. He's just a complete madman. It's a complete coincidence. Okay, fair enough. But when we see left wing political violence, for example, when Charlie Kirk was so appallingly assassinated, what was we didn't hear people like that going, oh, it's just a madman. Oh, it's it's just someone just acting totally randomly. They say that the political culture up to that moment has contributed to that happening in all likelihood. Now, my view would be to say that all are kind of correct, that these things rarely come completely out of nowhere.

15:00Kim Leadbeater:And every side has a responsibility to try and regulate that sort of politics. But what's so depressing since Joe Cox's murder has been that that so seldom has actually happened, that when someone on your side, quote unquote, gets killed or gets hurt or gets threatened, then it's a complete outrage and politics is responsible. But when it's on the other side, it's the other way around. And I don't think we have adequately dealt with that at all in our politics since. And actually, it's got far worse. I mean, you know, when Thomas Mayer was talking about traitors, freedom for Britain, how much more, John, in that time, in these last 10 years, has that accusation of treachery or being a traitor been made?

15:38Kim Leadbeater:Those sort of existential accusations. It's so much more common now than it was even 10 years ago. And we wonder why stuff like this happens. Yeah, look, I think you make the point very well that you've got to condemn violence on all sides, wherever it happens. And you can't be kind of giving dog whistles that sort of kind of encourage it. And I would say that, you know, what Nigel Farage said in the wake of the appalling policing of what happened in Southampton and the and the death there of a young guy where the police didn't seem to take his injury seriously. and the idea that it was just because he was white and there's two-tier policing and then Nigel Farage coming out saying you know look I wouldn't be surprised if there was more trouble on the streets of Southampton over the coming nights and you think come on that is almost kind of an enticement to young people to think right okay I'm going to start throwing things at the police again and also our reaction to some of these things I think we are so much more willing to believe in conspiracy theory look at what happened after keir starmer's house that his uh you know he'd rented out to i think his sister yes when there was a fire there what did people say there was this whole absurd idea conspiracy theory that was about rent boys and keir starmer and that was everywhere john it was everywhere online it was everywhere and people i know people I think of as kind of educated sophisticated able to discern what is utter bullshit and what is not saying well I gather there's I gather there's something in this whole rumor about Keir Starmer and Rent boys what do you think I said we know nothing we know absolutely nothing there is absolutely nothing we know at this stage well I've read it well yeah you may have read it But it's bullshit.

17:33And I think that people's willingness to kind of go down these rabbit holes where they are fed crap and just think, oh, well, that sounds like a plausible one. I'll retail that down the pub or at the golf club. I just think it's nonsense. And I think that as well is corrosive to our political debate and our ability to make rational judgments. I kind of thought it was, you know, look, I kind of think it was pretty bold what the government announced yesterday to saying that under 16s need to be protected from the social media algorithms. Christ, a lot of over 16s need protecting from it as well, where older people are peddling absolute nonsense on the basis of no factual information and just thinking, well, it sounds like it might be true.

18:19I'll tell people it is true.

18:20Kim Leadbeater:So I think that's right. I think that this the reason I fear this is going to get worse before it gets better is because of, you know, what I think about so much now is basically being a sort of deeply algorithmic politics. Right. Which is even if you compare stuff to 2016, 2016, you still had, well, the broadcast media, traditional media, which was deeply imperfect, by the way, I'm not saying that, you know, that was got everything right. But the traditional media was still more powerful, more dominant. It definitely had a stronger mediating function. You know, there's those sorts of rumours that you just heard there to talk about there, John, would have been, you know, they still were far more suppressed if we had that sort of environment still.

18:57Kim Leadbeater:But also in 2016, we had a less fragmented politics than we do now. And the thing about and these two things feed into each other. But the thing about our current political situation is that, you know, when you have sort of two or two and a half big tent party politics, it means that the leading politicians of those parties and those coalitions, because they're big tents, their incentive is to soothe. Their incentive is to try in the main, not always. You do get more combative politicians sometimes like Margaret Thatcher, but their incentive generally is to try and bring people together to bridge the divide because your party, by definition, is a big tent.

19:32Kim Leadbeater:you have to do that in our fractured algorithmic politics your only incentive is to get heard your only incentive is to make noise you're either whether it's true whether it's not true whether it's half true whatever your incentive is to say the thing that the relatively small slender number of people in your smallish tent want to hear and as a result you get a politics which is far, far sharper edged than anything that we saw before. And, you know, if I think, I mean, what you also get is a politics which is more existential. You know, if I think about, again, even the last 12 months, John, I think this is quite new.

20:13Kim Leadbeater:We're starting to see, and we've seen it particularly in the wake of the terrible case of Henry Nova. We're starting to see a politics which is starting to talk, for example, in deeply existential terms about the idea of the white majority in this country. Again, this is very American, not something we've really seen before. The white majority in this country being discriminated against, being suppressed, their rights being put as second order or second tier, two tier by comparison to the minority. Now, these threads have always sort of existed under the surface to some extent in British politics.

20:47Kim Leadbeater:That was basically the argument of Enoch Powell in Rivers of Blood in 1968. But in 1968, he lost his job on the front bench of the Conservative Party. Today, he'd probably get a more senior job of whatever party that he happened to be leading. and you know let's see we saw Nigel Farage literally last week take to his new substack where he wrote 6 ,000 words 6 ,000 word thesis all about this idea that white people are now being suppressed in their own country now when politics starts to look like that and is being algorithmically driven because that did extremely well as you as you might expect then what you start to get is is is a politics where it's not just the case as it used to be that it was basically about left-right economic bargaining it's not just a case as it used to be that um people would treat their opponents as that political opponents now it seems our politics is driving us to political enemies i was thinking about a quote from roger scrutin the conservative philosopher dead now he once said um, so paraphrasing slightly, but he said something along the lines of, you know, um, the left problem, they won't talk to me because they think I'm evil as a conservative.

21:59Um,

22:00Kim Leadbeater:I'll talk to them because I just think they're mistaken. Now, what I think has happened in politics in this algorithmic age is basically everyone has become a bit like the old left, as Roger Scruton was describing. Everyone has come to believe that everybody is not, But there are people who disagree with them are not just wrong, but they're malign and they're seeking to destroy your or our or their way of life. And I think it's leading us into a politics which, as Kim Ledbetter is saying, is much darker than it was even 10 years ago. Lewis, you said something a moment ago, which I kind of been mulling on since you said it, which is, you know, it's going to get almost it's going to get worse before it gets better.

22:38Or, you know, the things can improve. I feel pretty gloomy about it. I I've just been following some of what's been happening in America and in terms of the use of deep fakes and AI to generate completely false images of politicians. And that is all being passed around on the social media. So you have no idea what is real. And it's pretty unpleasant. You know, the latest one is a sort of a Texan Democrat, James Tallarico, who may win the Senate for, you know, and there's an attack ad where he is dressed up in a dress singing a song about trans rights. Now, it's obviously false, but it's so kind of ghastly.

23:19And, you know, and it's not just that one side is using it. Everyone will use it. Everyone will use deep fake AI to cast aspersions on political rivals, but also to try and mislead the electorate into believing something that is completely untrue about them, about their behaviour. And there are just no boundaries in any of this, it seems. And so I don't know how you bring back that sense of responsibility. You know, Joe Cox 10 years ago was meant to have been the kind of the siren going off saying we've got to change. And 10 years on, you think, have we? Not really. It's got worse.

23:59Kim Leadbeater:and i think it's got worse as well i mean it's easy to blame political actors and it's um but i do think as i say this this this new type of politics that we're seeing you know it i think it's sort of boiling our brains you know politically interested people there are more politically interested people now i think than there were 10 years ago as someone you know you think politics really matters i think that's a really good thing and i'm glad of that but i think it's also true to say that um we've talked a little bit about this before in terms of the fact it's become harder to do journalism in the age that we're living in.

24:29Kim Leadbeater:I think the number of people who are politically interested and willing to have their views and assumptions challenged is becoming slenderer and slenderer by the year. Because again, what algorithmic politics does is that there is never any reward for stepping outside your tribe, right? There's never any reward. If, I mean, I sort of go back a little bit to, you know, that conversation we had And when I did that documentary about Keir Starmer with Channel 4, you know, and the sort of fury from some people that we talked about at that time who were almost like, Lewis, we think of you as sort of being on the left.

25:02Kim Leadbeater:Like, why are you going for Keir Starmer? It's like, yeah, but like, you know, it's got to be possible. It's got to be possible. Journalism requires a kind of base layer where you are able to say, look, I know you think this, but have you ever thought about thinking this? And the problem with the way that online life works is that the thing that is rewarded each and every time for you as a journalist or as a politician is to be telling the people who follow you exactly what they expect to hear from you. And in a way, if you go back, John, I suppose when you start your career or even like when I first started getting interested in politics in terms of like opinion formers and journalism, in a way, the reward was to be slightly different.

25:47Kim Leadbeater:right if you had a column say or let's say podcasts existed at that time the chances are the thing that you would be rewarded for is sometimes being a bit counterintuitive yeah or a bit iconoclastic is you're sort of reading a column or an opinion form you say oh i wouldn't expect them to think that because if you're saying the same thing over and over again each and every week then actually that's quite boring and your readers don't want that and your editors don't want that and you want to surprise and and regale and actually sort of say or tell your readers something surprising or have a scoop or a report that's surprising or cuts against the grain.

26:19Kim Leadbeater:Online life, online political life, journalistic life is exactly the opposite of that. You will never get reward from your people for saying something that they don't like or surprises you. And to be honest, you won't get reward from the other side either, because they either won't see your stuff because algorithmically it won't be sent to them. But if they do, there's very little reward for anyone on that side to either sort of praise you or endorse you or whatever, or you're might likely just think, well, this is just a one off. So I just think that what this politics is doing to us and what that sort of algorithmic politics is doing is driving us ever more week by week, year by year into a place where almost into almost hermetically sealed bubbles.

26:58Kim Leadbeater:And that's not a new observation, but I do think it is accelerating. And I think it makes genuinely makes democratic politics harder to sustain in a way that we've known it before. Well, in a moment, we're going to talk to Jake Richards, the justice minister, for his view on whether politics has become hermetically sealed and whether it is still OK to criticise your own government.