Police investigating ‘threat’ made against Welsh Labour MP
The police are investigating a “threat” made to a Welsh Labour MP, he has revealed.
Chris Elmore, who represents Ogmore, said he’s been told by a constituent that he “shouldn’t be walking around the streets at night”.
He made the revelation on the ITV Wales podcast, The New Normal with Adrian Masters, and added that abuse and threats of violence should not be accepted as “part of the job.”
South Wales Police has confirmed it received a report of the threat.
Elmore told the podcast: “You know, I had a threat just 10 days ago. The police are now investigating a constituent who… warned me that I shouldn’t be walking around the streets at night and suggested they know where I live. And that’s being investigated.”
He added: “I hate this phrase: ‘It’s part of the job’, it isn’t part of the job. But I fear that increasingly politicians just think it is part of the job, that you have to take it on the chin.
“And I actually think that can’t be ‘the new normal’ – to coin the phrase of this podcast – that that cannot be the new normal, that threats are just accepted if you’re in public life.”
‘Should not have to deal with this’
Liberal Democrat Senedd member, Jane Dodds said: “Chris is absolutely right. It’s not inbuilt; we should not think, ‘yes, this is fine, let’s just expect this as part of the job, let’s expect extra security, etc.’ We should not have to deal with this.
“It is about talking to people about what we’re all trying to do. I was a social worker for twenty seven years and it is certainly part of the public sector framework that people think that it’s OK to abuse people who work in the public sector and who give a public service, and it isn’t. So we just have to keep standing up against that.”
Elmore, he is focussing on the UK Government’s Online Harms Bill when it comes back to parliament in the autumn.
He said online abuse “is huge and it’s growing and it doesn’t discriminate no matter what your background, who you are or where you’re from.
“I think it has a far greater impact, as Jane has mentioned, on women. But you see what’s happening to… black footballers and the abuse they’re facing. And it isn’t going away.”
He said the legislation is “hugely significant [in that] we’re looking to regulate platforms and trying to find ways of dealing with anonymity that really need tackling quite urgently.”
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To threaten or attack our political representatives of any stripe is to undermine our democracy itself.
It discourages both popular participation and the habits of engaging with those with whom we disagree on the basis of rational, informed debate.
We should therefore support our police giving instances such as this a very high resourcing priority.
The right wing do like to make threats.
don’t pin this behavior solely on the right wing
I didn’t. But they do.
Out of interest though, when was the last Left wing terror attack in Britain?
Nobody should have to put up threatening or abusive behaviour. Threatening a politician in any context is unacceptable. Someone is clearly trying to intimidate Chris Elsmore MP, but it hasn’t worked.
Why is Chris Elsmore a Welsh Labour MP, but Jane Dodds is a Liberal Democrat Senedd member. Either all politicians in Wales are Welsh or none are. Nation.Cymru is far better than the English based media outlets, but we’re only human and it seems to me that journalists’ biases here are just as evident as anywhere else.
Why is the word threat in inverted commas,is it because you are not sure Mr Elmore is telling the truth or not?
Apart from the obvious ” nutters” that inhabit all of society, most people resort to threats when they are totally frustrated at the inability and indifference of the person they target to empathize with their particular problem and attempt to deal and solve that problem. Perhaps our politicians and people in public service should look at themselves and realise that it is their own failings that are fuelling these threats.
By the way, I am not condoning the use of threats, that can never be justified in a democratic society. All I am saying is that sometimes the “threatened” are the architects of their own misfortune.
Most morons not most people. I am frustrated periodically in my life yet other than once (with legal action) I don’t think I’ve threatened anyone since I was a child. And I’m a sizeable unit. So I could probably get away with it. I just think it’s dumb to threaten.
‘They were asking for it. They brought it upon themselves’.
You use the same arguments that men who beat their wives/girlfriends use to justify their behaviour. Despicable.