Zoe Grunewald

speaker

273 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Zoe Grunewald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Pod Save the UK · Wildfires, World Cup Football and Women’s Aid w/ Farah Nazeer · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

It is now just seen as part and parcel of being an MP.

Obviously, all MPs are susceptible to this, but particularly, as we know, there's higher rates if you're a woman, if you're black minority ethnic, if you're disabled, if you're gay.

transgender, you know, all of those factors with being a minority make it much more likely for you to be attacked or abused online.

In March, it's worth saying the security minister, Dan Jarvis, did announce security measures and he said there was an unprecedented volume of threats against elected representatives.

He told MPs that women and ethnic minority representatives report the highest volumes of abuse, including overtly sexualised and racially charged threats, which has a chilling effect on who feels able to stand for public office.

I think...

The difficulty for MPs is, because it is seen as such a regular part of your job now, it's really hard to distinguish between what is just somebody online, behind a screen, on their keyboard, just trying to be abusive, just...

getting their anger out on you, almost radicalised by how horrible people are to each other online, thinking that that is just an acceptable way to talk to an elected official.

And those who are really seriously a security threat to you.

And I think there is a real concern with the volume of abuse that politicians get.

How do we actually accurately distinguish between those that are real and need to be taken seriously and those that do not?

Yeah, I mean, you totally have a chilling effect on underrepresented minorities coming into politics, but also on sort of the type of people who want to enter politics or journalism or whatever it is, high profile industry, which is that, you know, you have to be OK with receiving a certain amount of harassment and abuse, which, you know, as you and I have established, it's difficult.

You kind of get used to it over time and you learn to take yourself off certain platforms where it's more prolific.

But if that is just a environment that we have become comfortable with, if we just say that is part of being a lawmaker or a public figure, what sort of people are we going to attract into those jobs?

I mean, you've spoken about how this is an attention economy as well, Coco.

We know that because we live in the era of algorithms, the more sensational a clip is, for example, the wider it gets publicized, the more that that particular outlet will be seen.

So often there is a prioritization of people with more or clips with more extreme views.

And we see that in our politicians now.

We see that constant grappling for attention amongst the more extreme ends of our political space, you know, particularly on the right, particularly on X.

We are seeing in real time the radicalization of our MPs, of our commentators on sites like X, because they're constantly trying to say the more outrageous thing to get more noticed.

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