The Thamesmead Grump

JOSHUA BONEHILL-PAINE

Persecuted British Hero

"In Yeovil, we shall ignite the fire 

and then watch as it spreads across 
these lands 

in full and awesome glory" 

(J Bonehill-Paine 2016)

Following my report in the 19th August edition of my blog, my poor old chum Joshua Bonehill-Paine has been sentenced to two years in prison following an online campaign of racist abuse of MP Luciana Berger. He is already in prison after being sentenced to three years and four months for inciting racial hatred by promoting an anti-Semitic demonstration in Golders Green last year.

This is something of a departure from his usual tactic which was to publish fake inflammatory stories in his news blog and then just rely on the stupidity of others to spread it about on social media. This new strategy of taking direct action has landed him in jail.

I first reported the activities of Joshua Bonehill-Paine back in October 2013. I didn't mention him by name then, just the fake news site he ran. I was mostly critical of the people who copied articles from this site and published them on social media as if they were true.

This particular story was about the supposed kidnapping of a child from a shopping centre in Croydon by an Asian grooming gang. Despite the obvious fact that no such incident could have happened without it being reported extensively in the news, many people still fell for it and shared it, along with an assortment of racist comments.

I didn't mention him again till March 2014 when he had found himself in trouble with the law after posting a story about how a pub in Leicester had banned armed forces personnel in case it offended immigrants. Once again, the story was too absurd to be true yet once again, hundreds of people read the story and believed it. This resulted in the pub and it's staff receiving death threats from idiots too stupid to check the facts before reacting. His profound apology for the trouble he had caused didn't last long however.

In April 2014, I mentioned him again along with a similar Facebook story (don't know the author of this one) but closer to home where a mother was wanting information following the kidnapping of her child in Thamesmead. Shared by 1500 people was this one.

Since then, he has provided me with plenty of subject matter and I had to admit that since his eventual arrest and imprisonment, I have had a lot less to write about. The last time I had a lot to say about him was in August 2014, after that, most of it was repeating what I had already reported with a desperate appeal for people to please check whether a story is a hoax before sharing or commenting on it.

At some point, my fellow local blogger Hugh Neal picked up on the story and reported him on his much more widely read blog "Arthur Pewty's Maggot Sandwich". Unlike my not so well read blog, his efforts came to the attention of Bonehead himself who then sent Arthur Pewty a threatening email. I'm a bit peeved about this. I had been being extremely rude about him for some time but he didn't threaten me, even when I expressly asked him to. (That's Bonehill-Paine, not Arthur Pewty).

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that the people of Yeovil are going to have to wait even longer to elect him as their MP. The current incumbent, Marcus Fysh can breath a little easier today.

Godspeed, John Glenn! 

18 July 1921 - 8 December 2016

Nothing else to say really