CONTRARY to recent accusations, the Abergavenny Chronicle (sister paper of the Beacon) has no political leanings to the right or left.

We’re not here to make the news; we just report it.

However, one of a newspaper’s functions is to simply hold a mirror up to the community it serves. And the reflection in Nevill Street in Abergavenny last Tuesday was pretty ugly.

We knew the protest over the fact that we had allowed the Reform Party to advertise in our paper was coming.

It had been announced on social media the previous Friday.

In our Nevill Street bunker, we began the day, not as many would have you believe, highlighting choice passages of Mein Kampf and devising Machiavellian ways to control the populace and influence their vote, but finishing off this week’s paper.

Cometh the hour, and cometh the protesters, and just after 11am., a crowd began to gather outside.

What did they want and what would they do? We wondered idly as we looked for 120 word posts to fill up the arts and entertainment section.

As the crowd grew, a chant was taken up, the voices were not of a male voice choir standard, so the exact words were indecipherable, but by and large, the sentiment was along the lines of how the Chronicle was full of fascists who needed to be punished.

Not the type to sit in silence in our ivory tower as Rome burns, we were keen to start a dialogue with our critics.

Staff members from both the editorial and advertising departments ventured outside for a chat, only to be met with cries of, “Shame on you!” And, “Right-wing scum!”

After they had run out of rant, things calmed down somewhat. Nothing much of note happened, and discussions were had, but no real resolution was reached.

Placards were placed on windowsills and asked to be removed.

Only to be told, in snarling belligerence, “You move them!”

Eggs were also thrown, but thankfully, no drums were beaten.

The crowd eventually ran out of steam and left for celebratory coffee and cake or wherever protestors go when their day’s toil is over.

As for us, we returned like pit ponies to our desks to see what slots in this paper still needed to be filled.

On reflection, the protest appeared not so much political but representative of a nasty and divisive element that has infiltrated so much of public life in the UK.

Replace the placards with pitchforks, the slogans of shame on you with burn the witch, and you soon realise it's not political, it’s a lynch mob.

Nietzsche wrote, "Whoever battles monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." Nowhere does this ring truer than when coming face to face with a mob that appears to embody the very thing it professes to hate.

Why reason when you can rant?

The oldest political trick in the book is divide and conquer, and in the current climate, people are being played daily.

If it was a political protest, why weren’t they campaigning outside the Senedd about the way things are and the way things could be?

Or gathering outside the county council’s office, asking them to fix what needs fixing?

Instead, they chose a soft target to vent their rage.

A newspaper that carried an advertisement.

There were no distinct political ideologies coming face-to-face in Nevill Street that Tuesday Morning.

There was just a mob mentality, and the drive to censor, control, and condemn.

It’s that primitive.

And that obscene.

A social media pile that took to the streets.

It wasn’t political at all, but it was petty. And to all of us, it felt pretty personal.