Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolest.

This week, we're looking at the ways our democracy is under attack from a continued abuse and intimidation of our politicians,

and how it can be tackled, not just by police and regulators, but society itself,

and how we can prevent good people

from being forced out of politics, or risk and escalation in the violence towards those we elect,

which have seen two MPs murdered in the past decade, and credible threats against dozens more.

Joining me to discuss all of that ahead of May's elections is a fantastic panel, including

Electoral Commission Chief Executive, VJ Ranga

Jarreden, Hannah Phillips, respectful politics policy manager at the Joe Cox Foundation

charity, and the Labour MP John Slinger, vice chair of a new all-party parliamentary group

on defending democracy.

So starting with you, Vijay, can you just talk to us about kind of the scale of the problem

of abuse and intimidation in our politics that you guys see?

So we do research after every election and publish a post-Po poll report, which tries to look at actually what the experiences have been of voters, of campaigners, of parties and, of course, of candidates.

About half of the respondents from the candidates said that they had a real problem

with harassment, intimidation or abuse during the general election.

This was last year.

Before we've been elected, this is as candidates.

Yeah. So we're really interested in all candidates really, including a local council level,

because these things filtered between all the different candidates.

About one in ten

had a really serious problem of abuse, so things which were actually going to make them change their

...