He woke up and chose violence.
Or at least, that was the effect of it. At 7:14 in the morning, Labour MP Alex Barros-Curtis decided to post a video across his official social media channels about me, Joshua Bonehill-Paine, and about my work running the Crewkerne Gazette. It was an odd time for a moral panic, and an even odder time to attempt a doxxing. Odder still because he was too late: I had publicly identified myself more than a month earlier. The “unmasking” had already happened. The mystery had already gone. What remained, then, was not revelation but character assassination.
And it was done in the now familiar style of the political scold: part sermon, part smear, part social-media blood sport.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
In the video, Barros-Curtis tells viewers that the Gazette’s videos are “harmless fun, a bit of banter” only if one ignores “the class sneering and the Islamophobic overtones”. He then identifies me and says I was “sentenced to two years in prison for inciting racial hatred at a neo Nazi rally”. He goes on to claim that I now use “AI slop” to advocate for Nigel Farage and to stoke fears about immigration, before warning the public to think twice the next time they see a funny video from “an anonymous account”.
It is a nasty little script. Neat, tidy, poisonous — and littered with falsehoods.
Take first the most serious claim: that I was “sentenced to two years in prison for inciting racial hatred at a neo Nazi rally”. That is simply untrue. I was never sentenced for giving a speech at such a rally, and I have never attended one. The two-year sentence was for racially aggravated harassment in the Luciana Berger case. The separate Golders Green case concerned publishing inflammatory material online intended or likely to stir up racial hatred in connection with the planned 4 July 2015 demonstration, for which I received 40 months’ imprisonment. Those are grave enough facts on their own. They do not need to be embellished with a fictional rally speech in order to sound worse.
“People do make mistakes and I think they should be punished. But they should be forgiven and given the opportunity for a second chance. We are human beings”
Then there is the allegation of “Islamophobic overtones”. Here we enter the truly dishonest heart of modern political discourse, where a man need not prove anything so long as he can suggest it with sufficient solemnity. Neither I nor the Crewkerne Gazette produce satirical videos about Islam or Muslims. It is a subject we deliberately avoid. Yet Barros-Curtis chose to present this charge to viewers as though it were grounded, obvious, almost self-evident. He cited no clip, no line, no example, no evidence. He simply attached the label and trusted that, in our degraded public life, the label itself would do the work.
The claim that I use my work to “advocate for Nigel Farage” is equally false and equally revealing. I am a paid-up member of the Conservative Party. One may dislike my politics. One may loathe my satire. One may even think the Crewkerne Gazette vulgar, abrasive or distasteful. That is all perfectly legitimate. But to recast it as some kind of covert propaganda arm for Farage is not criticism. It is fiction deployed for partisan convenience.
And then there is the absurd little flourish about the “anonymous account”. Anonymous? Hardly. I had already publicly identified myself weeks before. So this supposed public service announcement was not exposing a hidden operative at all. It was trying to manufacture the sinister atmosphere of anonymity after the fact, in order to make something public look furtive, and something transparent look deceptive. It was cheap. It was theatrical. It was dishonest.
What makes the whole thing especially contemptible is not only what Barros-Curtis said, but what he left out. He eagerly reached for my past, but omitted any reference to the fact that I spent around six years working in counter-extremism and have repeatedly expressed regret for my past conduct. Now, no politician is obliged to provide his opponent with a balanced biography, still less a sympathetic one. But when a sitting MP sets out to warn the public about a private citizen, and does so by presenting false claims while carefully omitting every piece of subsequent context that complicates the story he wants to tell, he is no longer engaging in fair comment. He is constructing a caricature.
And caricatures, when issued from positions of power, have consequences.
Since the video was published, I have received threats, including one response telling the Crewkerne Gazette: “Fetch me the flamethrower.” Some will pretend this is meaningless online froth, just another bit of internet derangement best ignored. But that is precisely how cowardly public figures launder their own irresponsibility. First they misrepresent a person as dangerous, hateful or sinister. Then they unleash the mob. Then, when threats begin to arrive, they shrug and say they cannot be held accountable for how others reacted.
That will not do.
No serious adult can fail to understand what happens when a Member of Parliament uses the prestige of his office to single out an individual in this way. He is not merely “raising concerns”. He is marking a target. He is telling his followers, and the wider online swarm, that this person is beyond the pale. He is, in effect, licensing hostility while preserving for himself the luxury of plausible deniability.
That is why this goes beyond mere political disagreement. This is not about silencing criticism. I run a satirical outlet. Satire is meant to provoke. It can be rude, irreverent and impolite. I fully expect criticism, and I am not asking to be shielded from it. But false statements of fact are not criticism. Unsupported allegations are not criticism. Deliberately misleading viewers under the cover of official authority is not criticism. It is abuse.
We have therefore written to Alex Barros-Curtis demanding the immediate removal of the video, a published correction, a written apology, an undertaking that the allegations will not be repeated, and disclosure of the material relied upon in making them. We have also required that all drafts, internal communications, notes and publication data be preserved.
What happens next is up to him.
He can act like a grown-up, remedy the situation promptly, remove the video, correct the falsehoods and apologise. Or he can refuse, in which case we are fully prepared to challenge this properly and formally, including by legal means.
That is not melodrama. It is simply the consequence of reckless behaviour.
For years, politicians have grown used to behaving like online activists with better tailoring: posting first, checking later, smearing freely, and assuming that the prestige of office will insulate them from the standards expected of everybody else. They seem to believe that so long as their target is unpopular enough, controversial enough, or simply convenient enough, the normal rules of truth can be suspended.
Perhaps that is the real scandal here. Not that a Labour MP dislikes me. Not that he dislikes the Crewkerne Gazette. Not even that he wanted to attack me publicly. Politics is full of attacks. The scandal is that he appears to have believed he could use falsehood, distortion and innuendo through official channels, help stir up threats of violence against me, and then walk away as though he were the responsible one in the exchange.
The question now is very simple.
Will Alex Barros-Curtis correct the record and remedy the damage he has done?
Or will he confirm, by his silence and inaction, that the smear was the point all along?
