MPs say death threats a daily reality in ‘increasing climate of abuse’

Jess Phillips has received so many death threats she has to remind herself not to be blase. One night she received more than 600 rape threats. In 2019, a man forced his way into her office. The same year a white supremacist sent her a picture of Jo Cox, her friend and fellow Labour MP who was murdered in 2016, accompanied with the message: “I will have you dealt with.”“This is not academic to me; it is something I face every day,” says the MP for Birmingham Yardley. “You learn to cope with it, but it does cause terrible anxiety. For me, I feel guilty about the people who work for me, my kids, my family.”The security and safety of all MPs – and the very real threats they face – has come back into sharp focus this week after it emerged that counter-terrorism police were taking over the investigation into Ann Widdecombe’s death.In recent days parliamentarians have spoken about the impact of threats on their lives. Nigel Farage revealed he is receiving more than 300 threats a month, with Reform UK recording 1,577 threats against their leader since February.The trade minister Chris Bryant said he had received countless death threats, while in the Commons on Monday the longstanding Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin said MPs were “more likely to meet a violent death than a member of His Majesty’s armed forces or a member of the British police forces”.The former victims’ minister Alex Davies-Jones said threats were a weekly occurrence for most MPs she knew. “It changes how you live your life. You’re constantly on alert and always looking out for danger,” she said. “I think it’s definitely got more severe. It feels like increasingly some members of the public feel they can openly harass and be quite aggressive.”Another male MP said they now avoided pubs after being aggressively cornered while having a drink with his wife. “Someone just launched at me over Gaza, saying that I had taken part in a genocide,” they said. “It’s just not a reasonable discussion, it’s just an attack.”The Conservative MP David Amess was murdered by an Islamic State sympathiser in 2021. Photograph: Chris McAndrew/PAThe fear is not hypothetical. In the last decade, two MPs have been murdered – Cox by a far-right extremist in 2016 and the Conservative MP David Amess by an Islamic State sympathiser in 2021.MPs reported 4,064 crimes to the Metropolitan police’s parliamentary liaison team between 2019 and 2025, with the number of alleged offences increasing from 364 in 2019 to 976 in 2025. There were 50 death threats reported in 2025, up from 31 the previous year. Data shows that female MPs and those from minority backgrounds are disproportionately targeted.The threats are also likely to discourage people, particularly women and people of colour, from entering politics in the first place. On Tuesday the Treasury chief secretary, Lucy Rigby, told BBC Breakfast that threats had “made her think twice” about standing for parliament. “There is just this increasing climate of abuse and intimidation, including via social media, and in the very worst cases extreme violence,” she said.It has come as a shock to the prospective prime minister Andy Burnham, who left Westminster to become the mayor of Greater Manchester in 2016, according to multiple MPs. “I think he’s been really shocked by the kind of security we have to have,” said one Labour MP. “I think it’s very different now than when he was last here, and very different from being the mayor of Manchester.”Multiple measures have been taken to try to keep MPs safe, said to be an “obsession” for the speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle. At the start of April, the then security minister, Dan Jarvis, announced that police forces were being offered specialist support from a new national democracy protection unit for MPs. “The volume, breadth and tempo of threats against elected representatives is unprecedented,” he said.Decisions over the security of current MPs and members of the House of Lords are made by the Houses of Parliament’s security team, while a separate, independent royal and VIP executive committee deals with high-profile political candidates.Security is visibly tight in Westminster, with armed police patrolling the parliamentary estate. Since 2015, MPs have a single point of contact at their local police force to provide advice under Operation Bridger, and many have had measures implemented such as panic buttons, bomb-proof letterboxes and toughened glass.Protection for MPs has improved, said Phillips, but the threat to MPs had to be tackled at its source.“Everybody who’s ever attacked me has read a load of untrue stuff online that they had been fed by their algorithm,” she said. “We need to have a very serious conversation about the algorithmic curated content and, actually, we members of parliament need to take responsibility for our own behaviours and our own rhetoric as well.”