 Last week, Labour MP Dawn Butler announced her constituency office was having to close due to an escalation in threats of violence and racist abuse against her. Some of the shocking details of the experience of her and her staff were shared in an op-ed written by Butler published in the Metro on Saturday. I'm just going to read out a few of the examples of abuse she has received. I mean, it was very it was a very comprehensive article. This is someone who has been a victim of waves and waves of abuse, especially from the far right. Let's go through some of them. So a solid granite rock was thrown through her high street office window on a separate occasion. Staff arrived at work to find the entire shopfront had been smashed. These are all things that have happened to Dawn Butler. Someone was arrested for making a bomb threat. Another was arrested and went to court for threatening to smash the office up. A member of Butler's team was verbally threatened with violence for which the person was again arrested. This isn't just, you know, this is people getting arrested. This is serious threats. Another staff, another staffer when standing at the door of the office last year was told by a stranger, I will smash your head in. Some staffers have unsurprisingly been diagnosed with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder and take regular counseling to coax for working in the office of an MP, of a member of parliament. And a staff member was so traumatized by one violent incident that he bought a stab vest to wear discreetly under his clothes, really tragic stuff. We're going to get up a couple of quotes directly from Dawn Butler. Here she's talking about what she says were some of the worst incidents to occur. So she says an aggressive man armed with a golf club knocked on the door wanting to speak to me. A member of my staff, not realizing that what the man was carrying, answered the door and soon became engaged in a physical tussle with him to protect me and remove him from the office. It was a terrifying moment. If reading this you feel shocked, just imagine how frightened my brave staff member must have felt. I've received anonymous calls from someone at 5am, threatening my head would end up on a stake. And just a few weeks back I got death threats from the far right telling me that come the revolution, they'd be coming for me first. Again, there's more. So last last last year, Butler received death threats whilst being physically assaulted on the underground by a woman. She had met her office surgery. So at the time, the Metro reported that Butler was followed carriage to carriage by a woman who told her, I will kill you, terrifying stuff. And describing how this incident has affected her behavior, Butler said, traveling alone from parliament often late at night on quiet tube carriages is really scary. I've been trying to disguise my appearance through fear of being recognized. The person who attacked me went to prison. I would like to thank the members of public that came to my aid that day. And this is really shocking. This was something that was in the observer on the weekend. I think this is maybe the most shocking part of the whole story, actually. So she says there, I raised all this with parliament and I was told that the abuse I was receiving wasn't enough to warrant any special security measures. I was really nervous about traveling and anxious about taking public transport after that attack. How much abuse do I have to get before it was enough? So you can you can see all of that, all of those examples that Dawn Butler has given there this weekend. That would be terrifying. You know, this is someone who's put herself on the front line, public service, she's been elected as an MP. We always say, you know, Boris Johnson always say we're so proud that we've got such a representative group of people in parliament. But is it really fair for us to be asking black women to stand for parliament? And when just existing in that role gets them torrents of far right abuse threats when people have to be arrested because they've been, you know, because the threats have been credible. And then when you say, look, I put myself in this difficult position, can you give me any support for this? So no, no, no, the threats don't really seem seem serious enough. Ash, I'm going to go to you because you're no stranger to this kind of thing. I suppose first, what do you make of all this? But also what can be done about it? What should we be demanding? I mean, so I think the first thing we have to do is make sense of it because the stuff isn't random. It's the result of I think it's especially worsened because of Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party. There was an all out war on him and those who are close to him waged by the media. And it wasn't just about things like internal party management or perceived competence. He was presented as someone who wanted to destroy Britain. And he was smeared and reduced on the basis of a perceived proximity to people of colour. If you remember, that dangerous hero was at Tom Bauer, Burke's complete trash. But one bit talked about the sort of tide of human misery of Somalis and Sri Lankans and Bengalis going into his office. So it really was about presenting people of colour as themselves, an embodiment of this sort of dangerous anti nationalist politics. And so then when you have high profile black women knowing everything that black women go through in terms of misogynoir, they become heightened targets for this kind of abuse. Diana but received over half of all abusive tweets sent to MPs during the 2017 election. And it's because black women, as Malcolm X famously said, the most unprotected, disrespected woman in America is the black woman. Well, I think that's pretty true for the UK as well. Black women aren't seen as being deemed of protection in the same way that white women are. They're seen as being less than human, as being sort of dirty and monstrous and masculine. And it makes them legitimate targets for violence. So the smears and attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party and the association with anti-white racism, with Islamic extremism, with various sentiments against the British army and the British way of life. That means that the black women close to him become targets. So that's what happened. And I think that everyone who participated in that monstering of black female Labour MPs and the Labour Party more generally, shares some responsibility for the treatment of Dawn Butler. In terms of what can be done about it, it's really difficult. It's really, really difficult in an ideal world, or no, not even an ideal world. An ideal world, this wouldn't be happening. But the basic standards of Parliament should be that it looks after and it protects its MPs, especially after what happened to Jo Cox. Jo Cox was attacked in her constituency, I think it maybe was after a constituency surgery. And it was an example of random lone wolf terrorism, but something which is made possible nurtured by far-right propaganda. And I think that this environment of hostility, of the demonisation of Labour under Corbyn and continuing the demonisation of left-wing MPs, particular left-wing MPs of colour, it's what you might call stochastic terrorism. So it's putting out stuff into the public domain, which makes the likelihood of random violence increase. And so I think that's what's going on with Dawn Butler. The minimum should be that she should be offered full protection paid for by the House of Commons, and that should be available for any MP of whatever political party whose life and whose well-being is in danger, whose staff are in danger. But I think it is taken less seriously because she's on the left of Labour, and because she's a black woman. When Luciana Berger was being threatened when she was facing terrible antisemitic abuse, rightly, there was national outcry about that. When Laura Koonsburg had bodyguards accompany her to Labour Party Conference, that again became a huge news story. So why is a black female MP who's been physically attacked, whose office has been attacked more than once, why is that sort of this tiny news story that nobody's talking about? Can I respond to that? I mean, what's interesting with Luciana Berger and she got abused from all sides, but four men went to prison, I believe, for threats made towards her. They were all from the far right. There's a really important point to be made here, which is that for the media's attention on the left, particularly under Jeremy Corbyn over the last five years, they have given the far right a real free pass on this. Few would have asked people, four men have gone to prison with regards to criminal acts towards Luciana Berger. What are their politics? What are they? Well, Corbynistas, members of momentum. And this is a really concerning thing because the far right, it's not mass politics in this country, but it's a significant and I think growing presence. And we could do a whole show about why. And yes, Storm Butler was being subject to this abuse and these threats and this assault. Yes, because she's black. Yes, because she's a woman. But I mean, I would say principally because she's those things and left-wing, right? And as Ash said, her proximity to Jeremy Corbyn. And I would go even further. Yeah, the responsibility for that lies with every single journalist and commentator and politician outside the Labour Party who said that Jeremy Corbyn is a threat to the British way of life. No, he wasn't. He was articulating by historical standards, a perfectly vanilla social democratic political offer. His only threat was to people like Jack Straw and Tony Blair by potentially unveiling the secrets around things like torture, extraordinary rendition, collaboration with criminal states, effectively in the case of Gaddafi and Libya. Those are the people that had a great deal to fear from a Corbyn government, not ordinary people. And I think actually the worst thing about it all is you see Jack Straw today go on Sky News and denigrate Jeremy Corbyn. I think people like Jack Straw actually also bear some responsibility here because when you have people who've been at the top of public life for 10, 15, 20 years saying that a certain subset of politicians, actually in many instances ex-colleagues are beyond the pale, illegitimate, have no place in public life. This is going to happen. This is a natural consequence. And we saw this happening in the general election. There were multiple instances of labor volunteers, members of the public who were canvassing for labor, being assaulted, being hit, older women, people who were disabled. And it got very little media scrutiny. And the reason why it was given very little media scrutiny is because they were advancing a politics that is deemed to be, like I say, beyond the pale historically, it isn't. We need to have a big conversation about this because as the coronavirus gets worse, we're going to have to ultimately recalibrate our sort of economic model in this country. And if this 25%, 30% of the media unhinged people, by the way, often people like Melanie Phillips, so I used to lengthen the underbroke manifesto, people like Dan Hodges, this is going to get worse. This is going to get worse. And so I think we need to have a big conversation about this in the Labor Party as well. What are we going to do? Like I say, it's all very well to say, we need more women in parliament, more black women, more trans women. If you're not going to give them support and security and resources and strength and solidarity, not only is that empty words, you're actually putting them in danger. You're putting them in harm's way, really deeply troubling. And I think people like Jack Straw, I think people like Alistair Campbell, I think they should apologize because they've made this a problem. They've helped make it a problem. I mean, I also want to quickly say that not every person who is totemic of this sort of, you know, that person from the latter is picked out and held up and demonised. They're not always a black woman or a woman of colour. The perfect example of this is Owen Jones. The way in which he seized upon by figures ranging from, you know, centre left all the way to the far right, as emblematic of everything that's wrong in politics, everything that's wrong in Britain, the way in which people share photos of him as an objective ridicule. It's not really about criticising his politics and, you know, knowing Owen, he would absolutely relish the chance to, you know, wrap it on and on and on about what he thinks the right progressive tax policy would be like or, you know, the particular history of, you know, militant in the 1980s. He would love that. It's actually about, you know, taking a gay man, saying that he's whiny, he's not masculine, he's effeminate, you know, he's toxic, he's poisonous and, you know, is that sort of, you know, it's, I mean, if you want to talk about Orwellian, it really is that five minutes hate. So holding him up as a totem to be, you know, spat it out and denigrated. And that has real life consequences. It had real life consequences from him. You know, he'd been assaulted before, but, you know, last year on his birthday, he was beaten up. And speaking personally, I feel it's just a matter of time before the same thing happens to me, because I don't think it happens as often, but my image is used in a similar way. I've experienced when I was on a train back late at night from Southampton, after doing question time, a guy got on the carriage, started yelling at me and was on the seat next to me, so I like sort of climbed around him, moved to a different carriage. And I think the only thing that stopped him from hitting me was the fact that I was a woman on her own. I think had I been a man, you know, had it been Owen in that position, something much nastier would have happened. But we shouldn't live in a country where, if you're on the left and you're vocal, a physical assault, if not worse, feels like an inevitability. And I think what happened with Joe Cox, it got generally subsumed into a discourse about civility and politeness. And then it became, if you were, you know, leftist, you know, making fun of, you know, Dan Hodges on Twitter that you were just as bad as Thomas Mayer. And we didn't talk about the specific reasons why it was a Labour MP who became a target of that kind of violence. It's, and I think it's entirely irresponsible of, you know, the relevant authorities to deny specific protection to Dawn Butler after what happened to Joe Cox. What standard is it going to have to meet? You only get to take action when it's too late and then everyone can, you know, mourn and say how sorry they are. But the damage is done. Can I quickly reply? I know we're carrying on a bit later than we normally would like. You're going super quick, Aaron. Yeah, I mean, you know, I had, what I had said was once misrepresented by, you know, Red Roab and the far right, you know, I had people around far-right organisations come to my home and so on making threats online and all sorts. The same weekend, you had people like Tom Watson, you had Neil Griffith, the Shadow Defence Secretary, saying I should be thrown out of the Labour Party. Right? Giving that stuff legitimacy, you know, and they didn't care if what was being said was accurate or had, you know, was the words being misrepresented was there a broader context? They didn't care. And again, I have to go back to this. On the left, we have a critique, we have a framework to understand these things. It was only 10 years ago that these people said that, you know, people shouldn't be stopping Nick Griffith and some of these people, shouldn't be stopping Nick Griffith appearing on BBC Question Time. Or that, you know, we shouldn't have demonstrations to stop the EDL marching through Whitechapel. Again, the question has to be asked, are those people real allies in the fight against the far-right? Or in this instance, actually, less than the fight, self-protection against the far-right? It's a big concern. And I think many, well, not many, because there's not many of them, but I think, you know, some of the people I'm talking about, senior people in the Labour Party, don't take it particularly seriously. I think if Owen Jones or Ash or I got, you know, beaten up, well, Owen has been beaten up, I don't think they, I'm sure some of them, some people in the Labour Party would rejoice about it, which does tell you something deeply troubling is going on in terms of how they relate to the left.