Ministers to examine complaints of harassment by UK election candidates

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Sir Keir Starmer’s government will compile evidence of potential harassment directed at candidates during the UK’s election campaign, as the country’s top political violence adviser warned a “significant number” had faced intimidation.

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, will chair a meeting of the government’s defending democracy task force next week to gather evidence from those involved in the election.

She warned of an “an alarming rise in intimidation, harassment and abuse towards candidates, campaigners and volunteers from all parties which simply cannot be tolerated”.

Several candidates during the election including former shadow cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth and Labour’s Jess Phillips complained about intimidation against them and their supporters, while Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was attacked with a milkshake and had rocks thrown at him.

MPs have warned of a rise in political intimidation and violence in the UK in recent years, including the murders of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016 and Conservative MP Sir David Amess in 2021.

John Woodcock — known formally as Lord Walney — is the government’s top adviser on political disruption and violence, and has called for a full investigation into conduct during the campaign.

“It is very clear from MPs returning that there is a great deal more that hasn’t been reported or investigated,” he told the Financial Times.

“My sense is that there were a significant number of MPs who experienced really grim conditions in this campaign as well as candidates who lost.”

He added there was a need to look into whether candidate intimidation was organised across constituencies at a co-ordinated level.  

There were several independent candidates who stood against Labour MPs on platforms that focused on the Gaza conflict. Some Labour candidates said they were accused during the election of being complicit in genocide.

Cooper’s actions on Monday stopped short of the official investigation asked for by Lord Walney.

Lisa Nandy, Britain’s new culture secretary, said on Monday that the recent election in the UK was “the most toxic that I can ever remember being part of”.

But she also admitted that political leaders have done the public a “real disservice” by deploying “extreme language” about opponents.

Nandy vowed the UK government would seek to “reset” the tone of public debate following the shooting at the weekend of former US president Donald Trump, but admitted: “We have collectively as a political class done a real disservice in the leadership we’ve shown.”

She told the BBC’s Today programme: “We went through an era in the UK and on the other side of the Atlantic over the last decade and a half where we’ve seen the rise in more and more extreme language — more heat, less light in our politics.”

Nandy admitted this included past comments by a dozen current cabinet ministers — including herself and foreign secretary David Lammy — about Trump.

In 2018 Lammy said the then-US president was “not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath, he is also a profound threat to the international order”.

The following year Lammy, who was still a backbench MP, called Trump a “serial liar and a cheat” who was also “deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic and . . . no friend of Britain”.

Nandy on Monday said: “All of us will have said things, including me, that when we look back we think we could have expressed that differently.”

She vowed that Starmer’s Labour government would set “a very different tone” in future.

She said the prime minister had been quick to call Trump over the weekend to condemn the shooting at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and to confirm the new UK government’s “firm opposition to any kind of violence in politics”.

A spokesperson for No 10 said: “Security measures for MPs are kept under review to ensure their continued safety, and the police continue to work to ensure that appropriate security measures are taken to protect all elected representatives.”