WATCHING Tory MP Anna Soubry being barracked by ugly pro-Brexit supporters outside the Palace of Westminster brought back memories of the Scottish independence referendum: Jim Murphy being verbally assaulted by Sean Clerkin of the Scottish Resistance; that egg; BBC journalists being called traitors, liars, scum. It’s not nice.

Mr Murphy rather relished street confrontations. They made the former Scottish Labour leader’s opponents look deranged and allowed Better Together to claim the demonstrations had been orchestrated by the Yes campaign.

They weren’t but being forced to deny it put the independence movement on the defensive. Similarly, seeing a scrum of burly men confronting a woman MP outside parliament is not a good look for Brexit. The people who turn up to these occasions are so Neanderthal you almost wonder if they aren’t agent provocateurs. Calling a liberal, pro-European MP a Nazi isn’t just offensive;it is politically dyslexic. I presume the demonstrators thought they were just turning the tables as Brexiters, English nationalists and Tommy Robinson supporters are often called Nazis by the Left.

One of the most prominent and voluble anti-fascists is the columnist Owen Jones, who was also among those verbally barracked outside Westminster on Monday by far-right activists. He spends much of his time attacking Tommy Robinson on social media and urging anti-fascists to turn out to verbally challenge the former English Defence League leader when he surfaces on the streets, as in the “Brexit Betrayal” march last month. So Mr Jones’s self-made videos of the far-right loudmouths calling him a “Jew hater” and a “snake” were grist to his media mill.

There have been calls for the police to intervene, not least by the Speaker, John Bercow, who’s called the College Green protests a “form of fascism”. Why should MPs and celebrity columnists have to put up with this anger and intimidation when they cross the street outside Parliament? What about Jo Cox, the Labour MP murdered by a far-right fanatic? Isn’t this an affront to democracy? Shouldn’t there be a law against it, as is being proposed in France following the gilet jaunes protests?

But the police are understandably reluctant to intervene in scenes of verbal barracking and hectoring and for good reason. If you saw what the precincts of Westminster are like nowadays, you’d understand. The Palace already looks like a cross between a military outpost and a maximum security prison.

The entrances are guarded by police carrying machine guns, which still shocks me when I visit. There are so many officers in yellow vests that you’d be forgiven for thinking there already was a gilets jaunes protest. Every inch of the area where Ms Soubry was barracked is under 24-hour surveillance.You may have noticed on the news videos that she was being discreetly watched by police, from a distance, throughout the incidents. Had anyone actually threatened her, or touched her, they would have been carted away and the demonstrators know this. They are careful with their language and know just how far they can go in terms of verbal abuse without being arrested.

But isn’t it wrong to allow them to shout in the face of a woman MP, calling her a “liar”, “Nazi” and “traitor”? Well, it is offensive, nasty, ignorant and demeaning but could the police legitimately arrest people for that? You may remember the former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, a couple of years ago, being jostled and called a “Nazi apologist and an f****** disgrace” outside Parliament, not least by Labour MP John Mann. Should police have arrested him for intimidating behaviour? Should they stop demonstrators who verbally abuse Boris Johnson or Michael Gove in the street? Imagine: Nigel Farage, who was once driven by demonstrators into a pub in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile for safety, processing down the main streets of Britain preceded by a phalanx of police arresting anyone who got within shouting distance of him.

If the police were to erect such cordons around controversial politicians, the first people to complain would be Mr Jones and the Left, and rightly so. They reserve the right to take right-wing politicians to task and disrupt their activities by peaceful means. Being criticised in robust terms by demonstrators is what street politics is largely about in these intemperate times. The age of chivalry is long past and women are as much a target as men. Like online abuse, this is vile and poisons the public realm. But short of creating a police state, it’s not easy to see how to stop it.

Imagine if Mr Murphy had been accompanied around town centres in 2014 by strong-arm police officers stopping people shouting “traitor” and “Yoon” at him. He would have been the first to tell the police where to go. Similarly, if women MPs were given a special underground tunnel at Westminster, to avoid being exposed to angry people in the street, they would probably refuse to use it. MPs have always used street theatre in their own interests and would never allow themselves to be cut off from voters.

The gilets jaunes violence is something else. Burning cars and wrecking shops is intolerable in a civilised society. Some are drawing comparisons between this week’s parliamentary barracking and the riots in the Champs Elysees but we should beware exaggeration. Divisive though the Brexit referendum has been, no one has been building barricades or throwing petrol bombs.

There was a lot of anger on the streets in 2014, not least on referendum night when loyalists besieged George Square. Yet the referendum campaign overall had been “robust but overwhelmingly good-natured”. We always need to keep a sense of proportion. The media thrives on street confrontations, which are invariably given undue prominence on news bulletins. Remember then Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray being hounded into the Subway sandwich bar during the 2011 Scottish parliamentary election campaign. No one talked of arresting the anti-poverty campaigners. Be careful what you wish for.