Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst. After a chaotic evening in Parliament this week, where the Speaker

Lindsay Hall broke the convention to allow a vote because he was fearful of attacks on MPs if he

didn't, we'll look at the wider issue of the safety of our politicians after a raft of recent incidents that threaten our very democracy.

We meet a look at how better we can protect parliamentarians and their staff, as well as tackle the causes of abuse and harassment they face hate crime, and Kim Ledbetter, Labour MP for Batley and Spen,

whose sister Joe Cox was murdered in 2016 while serving as the MP for their same constituency.

So firstly, I guess I wanted to kind of start by asking you both to explain really what,

when we talk about the abuse that MPs face, what is the kind of the nature of it and kind of

the scale of it? I think that

after I speak to MPs off microphone, they tell me about what they face, but we don't often hear

it sometimes on the mic and perhaps for fear of drawing more abuse onto yourselves. But just

explain to us. I'll start with you, Elliot, kind of what you've faced since you've been an MP in

2019 and what you hear from your colleagues about the issues they face?

It can take many forms and I think it does come down to some individual circumstances of each member of Parliament as well.

One of the things that we do know for sure, having sat on the Women and Equality's Committee for the last few years,

is that female colleagues certainly get

it in much higher droves, and it does take a particularly sexist and misogynistic nature,

but also colleagues who might be from black or other ethnic minority backgrounds also face particularly

racist abuse. I'm an openly gay MP. I've faced homophobic abuse. So you do

get people, I suppose, going for what you might call the playground low hanging through. You know,

the stuff that children would shout at each other because it's the easiest thing to sort of try

and cut as deep as possible. So you do get that happen. But it has

...