Tag Archives: antoinette sandbach

Antoinette Sandbach MP joins the Liberal Democrats

By The Voice | Thu 31st October 2019 - 10:07 pm

The Liberal Democrats are delighted to announce that Antoinette Sandbach has joined the party.

Antoinette, who is the MP for Eddisbury in Cheshire, will contest her seat as the Liberal Democrat candidate in the coming General Election.

She is the eighth addition to the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party in the last few months.

Liberal Democrat MP Antoinette Sandbach said:

This general election will be the most important in my lifetime. People have a very clear choice, the Conservative party offers years of uncertainty whilst the Liberal Democrats will stop Brexit.

I’m so proud to stand alongside other Liberal Democrat candidates across the country to

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Posted in News | 16 Comments

Tory leadership contest already degenerating into online abuse.

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 20th June 2019 - 11:00 pm

One of the reasons there is a lot of solidarity among women in politics is that we all have to put up with a lot of the same crap.

We have to deal with people thinking that they have the right to say things to us about our appearance, our behaviour and our beliefs than they would ever dare to say to another man.

So when I saw Conservative MP Antoinette Sandbach tweet a horrible message (which she has since deleted) she’d had from a male Tory MP, my first thought was sympathy for her.

https://twitter.com/Sandbach/status/1141797475554136064

At the tail end of the coalition, I actually felt I was going to completely go under at one point with all the abuse I was getting. And the worst was from fellow Lib Dems telling me what a disgrace I was. The pro-coalition people didn’t think I was loyal enough to Nick Clegg. The anti-coalition people thought I was too slavishly loyal to Nick Clegg. And I got it at full pelt from both sides.

A year or so later, I wrote about the experience, and this seems to be a good time to reprise that here:

The internet is a pretty torrid place at the best of times. Some users delight in throwing rage, bile and abuse around the place. If you are a woman the abuse can be particularly graphic, sexualised and incredibly unpleasant.

In a feature for Radio 5 live, 3 politicians, including our former minister Jo Swinson, talk about their experiences of online abuse and how it affected them. Also taking part are my SNP MP Hannah Bardell and Labour’s Diane Abbott, who gets a whole load of racist bile thrown in just for good measure.

This is fairly routine for any woman who commits the “offence” of going on the internet in possession of an opinion. I’ve come in for it myself and it does wear you down. There was a time a couple of years ago where it really started to affect me badly and reduced me to tears on several occasions. The European elections disaster and the independence referendum combined to create what seemed to be a never-ending spiral of abuse. The most hurtful came from commenters on this site, members of the party, some of whom I actually know in real life, who said some pretty unpleasant personal stuff, but they were just part of it. It felt that wherever I turned, there was nastiness.