By Phil Supplements
PENRITH newspaper, The Slumberland & Westmorland Imperilled, this week broke out the violins for Penrith & Solway Labour MP Markus Campbell-Savours after he was rightly cleared of a false allegation that he failed to register payments.
“Penrith MP cleared of rules breach,” said the paper’s prominent page 1 splash – beneath a strapline which read: Complaint was “politically motivated”.
Much prominence was given to Saint Markus turning on the, er, wicked Parliamentary Standards Commission, for going public with the complaint before giving him time to respond.
It had led to a series of online slurs.
On its inside pages, the weekly newspaper continued to tummy tickle.
On page six, it ran an uncharacteristically opinionated “comment” which bemoaned social media’s “judge and jury” who had made unfair judgements about Saint Markus online.
The paper thundered: “I am not alone in believing that one of its (the internet’s) most damaging aspects has been in providing a platform for casual cruelty and insult.”
However, the newspaper’s sudden alarm for the online abuse of MPs does not seem to extend to its, er, Facebook account.
Insults about an MP on the Herald’s Facebook page include: “Fascist…intellectual pygmy…pathetic…horrible man with ideas of grandeur, who does he think he is?…Coward…Boris bootlicker.”
However, this “casual cruelty and insult” was directed by the paper’s Facebook followers towards Conservative Penrith & Solway candidate, Mark Jenkinson.
Many of these comments were posted on the Herald’s Facebook page in the run-up to last year’s General Election, which Mr Jenkinson lost to Mr Campbell-Savours.
To this day they continue to escape the concerns of the otherwise hugely sympathetic independent newspaper.
thecumbriachronic.co.uk 
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