UK politics still maintains the friendly tone of door-to-door campaigning. This is how candidates for deputies or councilors run in their respective constituencies. However, the day Samantha Townsend (Durham, 36 years old) heard a voter tell her to her face that people like her “should be dragged down the street and someone shoot them,” her blood ran cold. her.
Left-wing, combative, wanting to leave a mark in Durham, a city in the northeast of England where she serves as a councillor, she remembers a moment in her brief political career – between 2017 and 2019 – in which she was about to throw in the towel. They were the most tense years of the Brexit debate. The murder of MP Jo Cox at the hands of a far-right obsessed with the xenophobic and nationalist message of the campaign to remove the United Kingdom from the EU was still in the memory of many.
This Thursday, the councilor was shocked by the assassination attempt suffered the day before by the Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico. What happened takes her far away, yes, but she revives the same fear that she has suffered for years: “The world is full of reasonable people. But few people take into account that there are also many isolated people, with some type of mental illness, who are easy targets for all those conspiracy theories that circulate on the networks,” she warns Morning Express.
Townsend is a happy and expressive woman, with a large nature, which makes her an easy target for the hurtful insults that proliferate in the anonymity of social networks. “Many local politicians shy away from this type of communication, but I like to be active on the internet. If they don’t give you face, they don’t value your work. There are voters who still think that their councilor is someone who may no longer be in politics,” she explains. “But between 2017 and 2019, accounts on Twitter (today X) with false identities began to proliferate. They insulted me because of my size, made sexual jokes in bad taste, and made threats,” she says.
—And it was not possible to identify or denounce the authors?
“By writing all this under an anonymous identity, the police told me there was not much I could do. The worst was when the character, whom I had already more or less placed in a far-right group, began to flood the city with electoral posters of a false candidate and threatening signs that only I could understand. I went when my friends conspired so that I wouldn’t go alone on the street. I was very scared there,” she says.
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Townsend relied on other politicians who had also suffered harassment, on his friends and on his own convictions to get ahead. But he is clear that, although Brexit may have seemingly faded into the UK’s political debate, the hate is still there. In a recent Facebook account, visited by a group of just 1,500 people, several fans accuse the councilor of charging nearly 6,000 euros for each immigrant who arrives in the region.
“I am very involved in helping immigrants. This area of England is increasingly depopulated, and the idea of people coming to work and create a community seems great to me. Not everyone thinks the same,” she admits.
Townsend has two autistic boys, ages 12 and 10, and an eight-year-old girl. One day when she was taking the little girl to her ballet classes, she perceived firsthand the inexplicable resentment that some of her neighbors were accumulating. “A drunk man, at the door of the bar, started attacking me because of the way he helped immigrants. I told him that as a councilor I could not change immigration policies. He looked at my daughter and said, ‘we can always shoot them.’
That is why he has a strong message for all those politicians who unconsciously flirt with extremes. Nothing is free. “Today the Conservative Party, after these years of Brexit, is closer to the extreme right than it has ever been,” he says. “Many of them could very well belong to UKIP [el Partido Independiente del Reino Unido, fundado por el populista Nigel Farage]”.
Townsend calls on the British political class to be aware of the seriousness of certain ideas that today circulate easily in public debate.
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