Can anything be learnt from Sir David Amess’s tragic death?

We cannot always stop terrible things from happening but, at the very least, we can try to ensure that some good comes out of them eventually. Sir David Amess was stabbed to death on Friday and since then, the question has been: how can we change things for the better? Can something – anything – be learnt from this tragedy?

Because we still have little information on the motivation for the killing, our collective attention has turned to the coarseness of our political discourse and the venom constantly being spewed on social media. “We have more in common than that which divides us” was the rallying call after the murder of Jo Cox, but nothing changed in the end. Can we do better this time?

I wish I could say yes, but in my heart of hearts I cannot bring myself to be optimistic about this. I believe people are sincere when they are calling for more kindness and compassion to be brought into the political sphere; I just believe in entropy even more.

There are journalists in certain sections of the media currently tripping over themselves to call for a gentler and more respectful political culture, but will they stay true to their word when the next juicy scandal comes along? Can we really have faith in papers who have printed headlines like “CRUSH THE SABOTEURS”, “ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE”, “BLOOD ON HIS HANDS”, “PUTIN’S PUPPET” and “Labour MUST kill vampire Jezza” to rein it in for good?

More generally, politics has always been caustic and adversarial, and often insincere; I cannot think of a time in British history when it wasn’t. It is easy to look at recent incidents like Angela Rayner calling the government “scum” and Tory MP James Gray joking about bombing Anneliese Dodds’s office and find them distasteful, but are they outliers?

Then-health minister Aneurin Bevan famously called the Conservatives “lower than vermin” 73 years ago; it is unlikely I will be around to see it, but I would bet handsomely on some politician or other making as inflammatory a remark 73 years from now.

As for the internet – well, where to start? Of course social media is bilious, and of course it can bring out the worst in us, but how many times have we had this conversation now? It pains me to be cynical about this, but it feels worth wondering if the issue with Twitter isn’t that a lot of the people on it had never spent this much time online before.

I went through my old blogs from 15 years ago recently, for an unrelated project, and was taken aback by the amount of abuse I used to receive in the comments. I would write about guitar music – in response, people would tell me to kill myself.

The internet was never that nice a place to begin with; it is simply that there are now more of us on it than ever before, and we are all stuck in the same spaces together. The basic dynamics are the same as they always were: it is easier for people to be meaner and pettier online, because typing on a screen will always be different from talking in front of someone’s face. No amount of hand-wringing on politeness and civility will change that; sometimes the urge to dunk on an idiotic stranger surpasses all – and none of us are immune.

It is also unclear that banning anonymity online would be a net positive. Facebook has comprehensively shown that people do not need to hide behind aliases to turn a website into a sewer, and the safety currently offered to whistleblowers, activists, LGBT+ youths and countless others would be lost forever.

In short: there are no easy solutions to any of this. The amount of abuse MPs receive is horrific and the wider political discourse is often vile and disheartening. Living online means opening yourself up to a daily shower of bad faith and aggression, and the general public is sick to the back teeth of Westminster.

Something needs to happen but I have no idea what; all I know is that none of the ideas floated so far will do anything, apart from perhaps making ourselves feel a bit better for a few weeks. Maybe that is better than nothing, at least for now, but we shouldn’t be kidding ourselves either. Hopefully some good can come out of this tragic event, but we need to be trying harder than we are to find what that can be.