UK politician stabbed to death at public meeting

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Good thing the assailant didn’t have a firearm with high capacity magazines. There may have been a lot of collateral injuries and/or deaths.

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Of course, both Cox and Amess were killed at constituency surgeries, where an MP makes themselves available at specified hours for constituents to meet and discuss issues with them in person. US Representatives AIUI don’t do anything like that- it wouldn’t be practical, as they have many times more constituents- and the constituency surgery is a time when MPs are relatively vulnerable.

There have been other attempts on the lives of MPs at their surgeries- in 2000, a mentally disturbed constituent attacked Lib Dem MP Nigel Jones with a samurai sword and killed his aide Andrew Pennington, while in 2010 Labour MP Stephen Timms was stabbed by a constituent who was an Islamic extremist, but survived. Despite this, it’s not usual for there to be any sort of security at a backbench MP’s surgery.

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Tailor-made to get the Islamophobes raging.

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Recently in Ireland politicians houses have been targeted by protestors. They’ve had vile homophobic abuse shouted at them. Pregnant women have had to run the gauntlet of abuse to get to hospital appointments. This is not acceptable.

The individuals in question range from incompetent due to right wing ideological purity to sociopathic.

The protestors are not on my side. Nobody on the left is siding with the murderer here. Nobody.

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We need to keep politics political, not depoliticise events like this. Look how well that worked after the nmurder of Jo Cox? Their actual policies and what they do and did need to be evaluated without an aura of sainthood.

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Phil Hartman Yes GIF

This is not difficult, except for the folks who truly believe that any criticism is the same as attempting to silence them. But that’s often projection on their part, as they believe that once the opposition gets into power, they’ll do the same sorts of things that they themselves would like to pass.

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Ah, the old “but what if they punish me for my horrible actions, I should punish them more now!!” routine. Classic.

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They fear that the years of promoting oppressive legislation is what is in store for them, once they get into power.

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They are indeed The Baddies.

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Righto!

Baddie GIF by Giphy QA

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Yeah must admit i had to supress my immediate knee-jerk reaction as he is a Tory after all. And then seeing his voting record doesn’t exactly help things.

His politics i dislike, but no one should risk death for politics.

On a more general note, this does not suprise me at all. UK politicians have never exactly had a good reputation at the best of times, but currently they’re not just in the gutter but have broken out the heavy excavator to dig depths as far as possible. I almost fondly recall past UK politicians creatively avoiding answering questions they didn’t want to answer… Today that doesn’t happen because they just lie, doesn’t matter how obvious it is they just flat out lie…

Nationwide i think people have mostly realised that UK politicians lie nonstop in the most brazen fashion. So things like this? People get angry when they’re lied to non-stop*. Violence isn’t a justified reaction, but i can see it becoming more common…

*I’d wager the UK anti-mask / anti-vac uprising being a huge reaction to this, as masks and vaccinations were set by UK politicians, who lie near constantly…

Edit: several typos \ mangled sentences fixed :>

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