Robert Peston

And I'm not saying, by the way, that what I mean by that is that Romaine was going to win or should have won or had some monopoly on political stability.

I'm not saying that.

But certainly that referendum campaign

had been one of the most politically charged and noxious at times of any type of politics that we had seen.

As I say, there had been all of this commentary that actually Britain had sort of veered into that and would go back.

Of course, what we know in a succeeding 10 years, it is that it has been the opposite.

And I sometimes reflect and can't quite believe that, you know, in my journalistic

career so far, I've reported on not just the assassination of one MP, but two MPs.

And in the previous decades, the assassinations that had taken place had, as I say, largely been connected, didn't happen very often, with the IRA and the troubles and the armed struggle on the island of Ireland.

This has been something quite different.

And I think that Kim Ledbeater is absolutely correct to say that the political atmosphere and the political culture of Britain today is in a darker, dangerous, more noxious place than it was when her own sister was assassinated.

Yeah, that is quite something to consider.

Something else I would say about Jo Cox in particular and what happened to her and what we've happened since, because it was definitely the start of seeing more political violence in Britain.

shaped, I would say, by the sort of the online political culture that was in place then and has become more sophisticated since the fact that the main arena that our politics now takes place in is online.

We've seen more political violence during that time.

We've seen the threat as well, not just successful, but the threat of political violence

online.

I mean, I just reflect, for example, all those people defending Elon Musk over the course of the last week rarely seem to ever reflect on the fact that as a result of what he has said, there is a member of parliament and former minister who now requires round the clock security protection as a result of some of the conspiracies he spread about her.

Just a small microcosm, an example of what I mean.

But something that I think is particularly dispiriting and disturbing about