Killings of three British politicians in a decade shine light on febrile political mood

By Issy Ronald, CNN

(CNN) — For the third time in a little over a decade, British lawmakers stood up one-by-one in Parliament on Monday, paid tribute to a slain politician, and echoed each other’s fears about the rising tide of violence in politics.

“Politics is a calling for those of us here, but it should not be a dangerous one,” the country’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said, as she sought to reassure Members of Parliament (MPs) of their security. “We must always be vigilant and respond to changing threats.”

The killing of former MP Ann Widdecombe last week, coming after the murders of sitting MPs Jo Cox and David Amess in 2016 and 2021, respectively, has reinforced that the last decade has been one of the most dangerous periods for UK politicians in the country’s history.

Not since “The Troubles,” the name used to describe the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, have so many politicians been killed in a short period of time. During that time, four MPs were killed by Irish republican militants between 1979 and 1990.

Unlike then, however, there has been no active conflict within the country’s borders during this spate of violence. Police launched an investigation after Widdecombe, a former Conservative MP who then served as the immigration spokesperson for the right-wing populist Reform UK party, was found dead at her home last week having sustained “serious injuries.”

Police initially said there was no information to suggest her killing was politically motivated, before later announcing that counter-terrorism police were leading the investigation. A 28-year-old White, British man who has not been named was arrested, first on suspicion of murder, then on suspicion of “commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.”

On Tuesday, the force said Widdecombe had been killed in a “targeted attack.” They have not given any indication of the motive, but said one “line of enquiry” was whether the suspect was targeting Reform UK figures.

The murders of Cox and Amess were propelled by very different motives from each other. Cox, a member of the center-left Labour Party, was killed by a man who had extreme right-wing views and an extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia. Meanwhile, a “fanatical Islamist” inspired by Islamic State was found guilty of murdering Amess, who represented the center-right Conservatives. So instead of a unifying ideology driving this uptick in violence, as during the 1980s, these instances seem more disparate.

Alan Renwick, a politics professor at University College London and director of the college’s Constitution Unit, cautions against “making links between the very extreme actions of a small number of individuals and wider trends in society.”

Yet he acknowledges that the threat level faced by politicians has risen in recent years, raising alarm bells about the impact on British democracy

“At the same time, it is clear that MPs and others in public life are now facing numerous threats almost routinely,” he told CNN. “This is a change from the past, and it seriously impairs democracy.”

The annual number of crimes against MPs reported to the police hit almost 1,000 in 2025, almost doubling since 2022, the Times revealed in March. And that number marks a ten-fold increase from the 151 crimes reported by MPs in 2017, according to a parliamentary report.

That huge increase came after Cox’s murder which happened just days before the UK voted to leave the European Union, following a toxic campaign that upended British politics and kickstarted an era of political instability, whose aftershocks are still being felt.

On Tuesday, her widower, Brendan Cox, said he feels “much less optimistic” about the state of political discourse than he did then.

“In the aftermath of Jo’s murder, I think there was a real sense of shock, of horror across the political spectrum and the whole country did come together for a moment to say this is not how we want to conduct our politics,” he told Sky News. “But I think in the years that followed we have gone future into our tribes.”

For him, “the Wild West culture we have online” is a prime driver of this violence, amplifying and legitimizing it.

“Until we do something about that information environment which is legitimising violence as a political tool I think we’ll keep coming back to this situation,” he said. “My frustration is not with the public but with an ecosystem where the regulators and politics enable social media to consistently promote the most extreme content, often content which is violent.”

The role of social media in fomenting a more violent political discourse comes up time and time again – referenced in parliamentary reports and by countless MPs.

“We should recognize … that the situation has gotten much, much worse with the rise of online activity,” said Diane Abbott, who, as the first Black woman ever elected to parliament, has been subjected to much more abuse than many of her colleagues.

At the same time, crime rates against individuals and households in the UK have generally decreased over the last decade.

Rising political violence is not unique to the UK, though the number of murdered lawmakers is unusual compared to other European countries, where attacks targeting politicians are rare. Elsewhere in Europe, verbal attacks, harassment, threats and intimidation against politicians has increased substantially too, a rise the European Parliament attributes to “increased political polarization.”

In Britain, these rising threats have caused one in three MPs who participated in a parliamentary survey to consider not standing for re-election, and affected their relationship with their constituents.

When Mahmood, the first Muslim woman to serve as home secretary (interior minister), was first elected to parliament in 2010, she used to run drop-in sessions where constituents could simply turn up and share their issues with her.

Such sessions, known as constituency surgeries, are common in British politics, forming a crucial link between the public and their elected representatives. But they are also where both Cox and Amess were murdered. That has fundamentally changed their nature, especially for the country’s most prominent politicians.

Such informal, open sessions for her are “no longer possible, and I have had to change that in the last few years,” Mahmood said in Parliament on Monday.

“I still offer advice surgeries, but on terms that are very different from when I first became an MP. That is a huge change, and it is entirely as a result of what happened to Jo Cox and Sir David Amess. It is a tragedy because it does change the way we relate to our constituents.”

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