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Good Morning. My dog doesn’t love fireworks. His extra-large collie ears can’t help. His reaction to the whizz of the rockets shows that he too ‘remembers the fifth of November’. It’s almost four hundred years since Guy Fawkes’s ‘gunpowder, treason and plot’. Fawkes and his companions allegedly attempted to build an underground tunnel, before leasing a cellar beneath the House of Lords to blow up Parliament. A search-party caught Fawkes red-handed, standing guard over a stockpile of explosives. As we approach an election and exercise the privileges and prerogatives of democracy, it has become apparent that there are other ways to undermine Parliament than by mining underneath it. One of them, all too prevalent, is intimidation. Democracy depends on the freedom to express firm views and campaign vigorously, without the smear or fear of hatred. Women politicians, in particular, are targeted with visceral abuse, including death threats not only to themselves but even against vulnerable family members. MPs and candidates from ethnic and religious minorities have experienced similar attacks. Explaining why she isn’t standing for re-election, Heidi Allen highlighted ‘the nastiness and intimidation that has become commonplace’. Harriet Harman wrote that since the murder of Jo Cox such threats cannot be regarded as empty. She warned that ‘Women leaving Parliament are a wake-up call.’ When public discourse is poisoned with violence, democracy itself is violated. Two thousand years ago, the rabbis discussed the nature of public debate. They distinguished between arguments ‘for the sake of heaven’, which remain focussed on the issues, and their opposite, disputes motivated by jealousy and power. Feuds fuelled by envy dry up, they noted, whereas honest arguments about genuine concerns keep on going forever. My first reaction was that it should be the other way round: it’s petty quarrels which are never-ending, while disagreements based on honest concerns eventually reach constructive resolutions. But the rabbis were making a deeper point. In a healthy society, there will always be differences of opinion. But such a society knows how to argue them, attacking the issues, not their proponents. In a follow-up discussion, the rabbis ask whose views generally win out. ‘Those of the group who listen best to the other side’, they conclude. To heal our society, we need to listen to, not threaten, one another. This applies not just to politicians, but to us all. If in our debates there are fewer voices from women and the different communities which make up Britain’s vibrant diversity, we will all be the poorer.