Press Bullies Threaten Labour Activist

Along with all the recent left-of-centre entrants to the new media world, the likes of Skwawkbox, The Canary, Novara Media and Evolve Politics, have come online campaigners whose memes and Retweets are increasingly popular. And one of the best known in the latter category is the woman who Tweets as Rachael Swindon. She has become so well known that the Press Establishment has decided to rough her up.

Who f***ing says I can't send my hacks to monster f***ing leftists, c***?!?

Not, you understand, that this involves any kind of physical assault: rather, our free and fearless press does its work in a far more insidious way, using the megaphone of the print media to whip up the mob. In this case, those doing the roughing up are the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre and his obedient hackery at the Daily Mail, on whose behalf hack Neil Sears turned up at Rachael Swindon’s house yesterday.

How Sears found the address is mildly eyebrow-raising: it isn’t in the phone book and she, along with her husband, have only very recently moved in. Not, of course, that there is any suggestion that the Mail, or anyone on its behalf, has been indulging in any kind of illegal information gathering, you understand. Sears, like the people in The Prisoner, wanted information. And in the same style, he wasn’t going to get it.

But it matters little what she and her husband tell the Mail: the resultant hatchet job will be so laden with nudges and winks as to tell the readers what to think. There may also be liberal use of quote marks to disguise invented quotes, or even downright lies. After all, it will already have been decided by the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker that she cannot afford to sue the SOBs. The Mail has serious past form for this.

Rachael Swindon's Twitter avatar

Just how good the paper is at making things up can be seen from Sears’ latest article, “Hooded gang storms celebrity party near Grenfell Tower chanting 'Tory scum' and forces guests to observe minute's silence for the victims”. This is a support piece for the deeply unpleasant Ben Goldsmith, who claimed that an alleged incident at the Maxilla club last week was the work of “Labour activists” and “Corbyn supporters”.

Goldsmith was talking out of the back of his neck - hence the deployment of quote marks throughout the Mail’s article. Sears is, let us not drive this one around the houses for too long, another of the Mail’s shock troops. His appearance unannounced yesterday, followed by his persistent doorstepping, merely underscores this.

If Rachael Swindon, along with her family, friends and supporters, is still in any doubt as to the ability of the Mail to talk well, but lie badly, and then defend their abusive behaviour for years afterwards, they might usefully look at what happened to Juliet Shaw, about whom the paper concocted a flagrantly libellous article and then tried to bully and bluster their way out of it. She has since become a supporter of campaigning group Hacked Off.

There are many other examples of the Mail’s sheer spitefulness - one new media example is their pursuit of the Wikipedia editor who suggested the paper was no longer a reliable source for citations (which it is not). That included doorstepping the editor’s mother.

The Daily Mail has effectively declared war on the freedom of speech enjoyed by Rachael Swindon and those like her. This desperation to silence dissent would have found favour behind the Iron Curtain. As would the bullying and rank hypocrisy. No change there, then.