Politicians being killed is clearly unacceptable and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of even very politically partisan people in this country would strongly condemn any kind of violence. However, we don't routinely have much security for MPs when they are at their constituency office, so it only takes one nutter to do something. If anything, it's sadly surprising that it doesn't happen more often.
At least up until recently, this was true in the US too. On camera, in front of a microphone, and they say the crappiest things about one another. Then a few minutes later they're shaking hands, slapping backs, and laughing about the whole thing. Hasn't even been that long since the President schmoozed with politicians from both parties as he made his way to the podium for the State of the Union. Now it's "YOU LIE!"
US political discourse is vastly more hostile than you give it credit for, as well. Veiled death threats (shooting pictures of opponents, burning in effigy, etc.) are increasingly common, particularly on the conservative side.
Huh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Congress...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_MPs_killed_in_...
UK 3 in last 30 years, US 2. For a US population of 40x larger, and easier access to guns.
Nine in the last thirty years, not including the ambassador killed overseas.
But nine is still less than the UK, adjusting for population! And that's before access to guns!
That's got to be a cause for alarm? In a society with less access to weapons?
What.
But the absolute number is larger, even ignoring the population size, so not sure what the person I was replying to means.
Britain won't accept things like Politicians being harassed, or one politician calling for other politicians to be harassed (and that's before we even get to anything Trump related).
And the amount of references I see to "civil war" when wandering across anything relating to US politics (i.e. not zero) is disturbing.
No, let's not try to dog-whistle one as acceptable and the other as not. That's exactly the thing I'm talking about.
this is the exception not the rule, and as evidence of this, it’s something that’s been turned over and over in the (especially right-wing) media for weeks now
the two MPs killed were killed by Islamic and right-wing extremists, respectively. this has no bearing on how the main parties treat each other
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/26/angela-rayn...
>the Labour leader distanced himself from her words
you’ve cherrypicked two examples that were disregarded by the parties as a whole, then discussed ad nauseam in the media. this is not evidence of anything
No the problem is just as bad across all parties. That's the worst of it - the civility and willingness to work together is down across the board.
Maybe not, but pretending they are better while ignoring the homophobia, racism, sexism and offensive class warfare from the like of Boris Johnson seems disingenuous.
The fact is that Johnson was ousted by his own party, as was Truss. That would never happen in the US because it's party before everything.
I was trying to make the point that The Conservative Party had members making some pretty average comments on a regular basis.
I remember Jo Cox, who was the conservative who got killed?
The death of Jo Cox wasn't a party political matter, it was a US-style radicalized loner.
No, only one front-bench political party routinely refers to the other as "scum". Stop pretending that both sides do it.
We've had 4 presidents assassinated in our history (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy) and there were attempts on the lives of at least 3 more while they were president or president-elect (Jackson, FDR, Reagan). There have also been a significant number of attempts on the life of presidential candidates (Huey Long and RFK were assassinated, George Wallace was shot and paralyzed) We also don't know where Flight 93 would have gone on 9/11 if the heroes on board hadn't charged the cockpit and crashed the plane in a Pennsylvania field instead of somewhere in DC. The reason why we haven't had many politicians assassinated lately is largely good luck but also because we now have Secret Service protection for all major presidential candidates.
Words like "scum" and "detest" are also not that different from the way people speak about political opponents here. Every presidential election for at least the past 20 years has involved people throwing words like "socialist", "communist", "fascist" and "theocrat" around to describe the other party's presidential candidate even when those candidates were centrists. There's always alarmist insinuations that we're going to turn into the USSR or Nazi Germany if the wrong political party wins the next election. In reality, the US will be largely the same but always getting slightly worse no matter which party wins the election. The difference between the donkeys and the elephants is that one of them makes things worse faster than the other (but people don't agree which is the lesser evil). I imagine Labour and Tory are probably the same way in the UK (although Truss did seem to be especially terrible at her job even compared to her predecessors).
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shoot...
It's nice that it looks this way, but the different parties and their supporters in the UK absolutely hate each other. Front-bench party members now routinely and openly using words like 'scum' and 'detest' to talk about their colleagues on the other side. I don't think US politics is quite that openly aggressive and hostile.
In the past few years we've had politicians on both sides killed in politically motivated attacks. I think that's a worse tally than the US as well.