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The Labour Party Agrees with the Recommendations

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The Labour Party Agrees with the Recommendations Labour Party response to the Report Intimidation of Parliamentary Candidates Committee on Standards in Public Life Recommendations for All Those in Public Life 1. Nobody in public life should engage in intimidatory behaviour, nor condone or tolerate it. All those in public life have a responsibility to challenge and report it wherever it occurs. 2. Those in public life should seek to uphold high standards of conduct, adhering to the Seven Principles of Public Life, and help prevent a decline in public trust in political institutions through their own conduct. 3. Those in public life must set and protect a tone in public discourse which is not dehumanising or derogatory, and which recognises the rights of others to participate in public life. 4. Those in public life have a responsibility not to use language which engenders hatred or hostility towards individuals because of their personal characteristics. The Labour Party agrees with the recommendations. The Labour Party welcomed this review by the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Intimidation, including death threats, criminal damage, sexism, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism has no place in our democracy or our party. We condemn any action that undermines the integrity of our electoral process and our wider democratic values. We look forward to working with other parties to address this important cross-party issue. In the 2017 General Election, Labour fought a positive campaign based on policies to transform Britain for the many not the few. We insist that all Labour MPs and candidates run positive campaigns based on our policies and the Conservative Party’s record, rather than peddling personal attacks on individuals. As stated in our original submission, during the General Election, the Conservatives ran a nasty campaign, propagating personal attacks, smears and untruths, particularly aimed at one of the most prominent women MPs, Diane Abbott, whilst in 2016, Zac Goldsmith MP ran an extremely divisive and racially discriminatory campaign against Sadiq Khan. It was described by Sayeeda Warsi, the former Conservative Party Co-Chairperson, as “appalling”. We have previously recognised that candidates are often targeted because of their gender, sexuality and or ethnicity. This represents a wider context of discrimination that targets individuals on the basis of their different identities. We have particular concerns about the scale of abuse experienced by women MPs. We are also concerned about the resurgence of far-right and racist parties across Europe and the worrying emergence of an organised far-right presence on the streets of British cities. The exponential growth of social media has caused the level of abuse to rise in recent years. Social media platforms have created unprecedented levels of transparency in political discourse and reduced the perceived barrier between the electorate and politicians. As Leader of the Oppositon Jeremy Corbyn has used public platforms, including social media, speeches and articles, and his role as party leader, to publicly call for a ‘kinder, gentler’ politics and repeatedly condemned personal abuse of politicians and political activists. The Labour Party believes it is incumbent on all those in leadership roles to provide that same example. Page 1 | 14th November 2018 Labour Party response to the Report Intimidation of Parliamentary Candidates Committee on Standards in Public Life 5. Those in public life should not engage in highly personalised attacks, nor portray policy disagreements or questions of professional competence as breaches of ethical standards. The Labour Party agrees with the recommendation. To frame political disagreements in terms of individuals’ professional competence or suitability for office – whether elected or appointed -- is a form of bullying and abuse as well as exposing the persons responsible for such attacks to liability for defamation. The Labour Party deplores such behaviour and will not tolerate it among its own elected representatives. Recommendations for Government 6. The Government should consult on the introduction of a new offence in electoral law of intimidating Parliamentary candidates and party campaigners. The Labour Party is committed to ensuring that there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect Parliamentary candidates and party campaigners from intimidation. However, we do not support the creation of a new specific offence in either the general criminal law or electoral law. Harassment and intimidation are already criminal offences, which is why the police have made it very clear that they do not support a new offence. Various legal commentators have criticised the Government’s proposals arguing that new legislation to specifically protect MPs is not necessary. It remains unclear why political figures should have special treatment in the law to protect them. The Labour and Conservative parties both made precisely this point in their original written responses in 2017 to the Committee’s call for evidence. The Government’s response to the Committee’s Report, and its more detailed proposals as set out in the recent Cabinet Office consultation paper Protecting the Debate: Intimidation, Influence and Information, indicate that no new offence is proposed under the general law, but that a conviction for a prescribed offence of violence or intimidation committed in the context of an election will be treated as a “corrupt practice” for the purpose of imposing penalties such as disqualification from seeking elective office. We agree that electoral law should deal with the consequences of this kind of serious misconduct. However, it is widely accepted that comprehensive reform of electoral law is needed. Grafting new provisions onto the existing outdated inadequate and inconsistent body of law on electoral misconduct would simply compound the problems associated with the law as its stands. The very fact that the Government proposes to treat intimidation as a form of “corrupt practice” underlines the artificial and archaic nature of the terminology used in current electoral law. It is a matter of concern that the Government has still not responded to the Law Commission’s 2016 Joint Interim Report which calls for the introduction of a single legal framework for UK elections. The Law Commission also recommended that all electoral offences – including “undue influence” - should be reviewed, redrafted and set out in a single set of provisions applying to all elections. Labour supports this proposal as simpler and more modern provisions would secure greater compliance among campaigners, the public, the police, and prosecution services. Appropriate electoral sanctions for violent, threatening and intimidatory conduct in the course of election activity should be addressed as part of these reforms. Page 2 | 14th November 2018 Labour Party response to the Report Intimidation of Parliamentary Candidates Committee on Standards in Public Life More importantly, laws to combat abuse are redundant if police cannot enforce them. After reporting crimes to the police, many candidates found investigations were cut short due to limited resources. This Government has cut over 20,000 police officers and cuts have consequences. Police forces are over-stretched and this leads to pressure to downgrade crimes, or not fully investigate them. 7. Government should bring forward legislation to shift the liability of illegal content online towards social media companies. The Labour Party supports the recommendation. The notice and takedown system allows social media companies to shift the onus of initiating action onto the victim, and thus avoid monitoring for illegal and intimidating content (see also our response to Recommendation 20). Even when defamatory, intimidating and threatening content is flagged to online platforms they are often slow to take it down. Responsibility for hosting content that is threatening or illegal should lie with the platform as well as the uploader. Within those inherent limits to the notice and takedown approach, the German model of statutory time-limits on takedown seems to be working. The EU has been very slow to act on all of this, just last week a Copyright Directive was voted down by MEPs following a strong lobby by the big tech companies. We need strong domestic law to regulate the internet giants. We have not come to a final settled decision on whether the internet companies should be seen as publishers rather than platforms, but whatever the position on that issue, there is an undoubted need for legislation that places greater responsibility on them than at present. Such legislation should also underpin recommendations 20 to 27 so that back-up powers are available insofar as companies cannot be persuaded to take sufficiently effective voluntary steps. 8. The Government should bring forward legislation to remove the requirement for candidates standing as local councillors to have their home addresses published on the ballot paper. Returning Officers should not disclose the home addresses of those attending an election count. The Labour Party supports the recommendation. The law is currently failing to protect candidates from becoming vulnerable to abusive activity. Many talented individual are deterred from standing for office because the requirement to disclose their home address poses a risk to their safety. The Labour Party welcomes the Government’s plan to bring forward secondary legislation to remove the requirement for candidates standing as local councillors to have their
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