Comparing the history of political violence in America and the UK

When the news filtered through to British viewers late on Saturday evening that someone had shot Donald Trump, the initial reaction was shock. It is understood that American politics, even more than our own, has become bitterly polarized over the last 10 or 15 years, but overwhelmingly it has within the lines of some rudimentary norms.

On reflection, however, some thought it was not so surprising after all. There is an external perception that public discourse in the U.S. has a thread of violence, especially gun violence, running through it, something we in Britain we find difficult to imagine. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 is, of course, the “main event,” closely followed by that of Abraham Lincoln; James Garfield and William McKinley also made the ultimate sacrifice for public service.

In a way, we are reminded of this bloody history every time we see a U.S. president, by the cocoon of security in which incumbents are wrapped. Since 1901, the U.S. Secret Service has been charged with protecting presidents and presidential candidates, and federal law prevents the president and vice president from refusing this security. Hundreds of agents provide round-the-clock security. The president is never alone, and he travels in an armored limousine known as “the Beast.”

At first glance, things are very different in Britain. Assassinations of the head of government here are so rare as to be little more than a quiz question. Only one prime minister has met a violent death: Spencer Perceval, an undistinguished aristocratic Tory lawyer who was in office for two-and-a-half years before he was fatally shot in the lobby of the House of Commons.

Still, you do not need to dig deep to find a much darker record. In the last decade, two Members of Parliament have been murdered. Labour MP Jo Cox was killed in the street in 2016 by a white supremacist, and David Amess, a veteran Conservative, was stabbed repeatedly during a constituency meeting in 2021 by an Islamic extremist.

Moreover, from the early 1970s to the signing of the 1998 Belfast Agreement, politicians in the UK, especially in Northern Ireland, lived under the shadow of terrorism. Only four MPs actually lost their lives — as did British statesmen and royal family member Lord Mountbatten — but it could have been much worse. In 1984, the Provisional IRA planted a bomb in the Grand Hotel in Brighton that killed five people and almost killed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and many of her cabinet. So we cannot claim to have had a wholly peaceful tenor to our public affairs.

There is a danger of treating all political violence as the same, without examining motivation. In the UK, terrorism related to Northern Ireland was grim and grinding, but it was intelligible: everyone knew where both sides of the conflict stood. Other killings could be linked directly to a political agenda, however perverted. (Perceval’s assassin, John Bellingham, was unusual in that he was probably mentally ill, blaming the government for the failure of his business.)

That is less universally true in America. It is too soon to know, if we ever will, what drove 20-year-old Thomas Crooks to try to kill Donald Trump. Many have suggested that Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was insane. Charles Guiteau, who shot Garfield, may well have been suffering from neurosyphilis, though ostensibly he was angry not to have been given a government job.

Famously, John Hinckley Jr., who shot at and wounded Reagan, was obsessed with actress Jodie Foster, then only 18. The morning of the attempted assassination he wrote to her promising to “impress” her. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Other killings have been much more straightforward in political or ideological motivation.

Any decent citizen abhors violence and its presence in the political system. But can we ever eradicate it? No major European country can boast a history free of assassination or attempts. Heads of government have actually been killed in Serbia, Israel, Lebanon, Sweden, India, Egypt and South Korea just in the last 50 years.

Of course, political leaders have a responsibility not to use inflammatory rhetoric, although it is plain absurdity for Republicans to claim that this has been the preserve of the left. Equally, protective security is important, and there will have to be scrutiny of the Secret Service in the wake of Trump’s shooting.

Politics matters, and unfortunately, that means it can be a matter of life and death. It is a never-ending discourse about how we order our society, how we relate to each other, and how nations interact with the rest of the world.

The attempted killing of Donald Trump was abhorrent and intolerable, but in context it was not utterly remarkable: four presidents out of 45 have been killed. The response should be shock and condemnation, and the examination of specific operational failings. But violence must not be allowed to derail the political process.

Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the UK House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the UK delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.