A mayoral candidate today said she was being subjected to online abuse and avoided campaigning alone at night because of safety fears.
Siobhan Benita, the Liberal Democrat contender, has been called a “traitor” because of her Remainer stance and has suffered racist attacks.
One person emailed her office to warn her not to come to their door “as I would not be responsible for my actions”. They added: “I would not even vote for Siobhan Benita as it’s not a British name.” Another said: “Fetch the guillotine.”But Ms Benita said that she refused to be cowed by “far-Right” abuse and attacks from Brexiteers. “You can’t let this rhetoric and really cowardly threats stop you,” she said.
“If we go down that route, we are not going to get good people coming into politics. You can’t let it put you off.”
Ms Benita is the latest prominent figure to reveal concerns about doorstep canvassing. Last week Luciana Berger, the former Labour MP who is standing as the Lib-Dem parliamentary candidate in Finchley and Golders Green, revealed that she refuses to campaign alone at night. She said the abuse of MPs was at unprecedented levels.
Ms Benita, who is supporting the Lib-Dem bid to win “five to 15” parliamentary seats in London, said: “I would never go out on my own at night. I’m lucky I’m always with a group of people.” She said that her staff sheltered her from some of the abusive correspondence. Replies to her social media posts have told her to “f*** off & take the rest of your filth with you”.
“It just becomes very personal,” Ms Benita said. “You get abuse about the way you look and things you are wearing. It doesn’t bother me.
“As your Twitter account becomes more active you don’t look at every single response, but I’m getting abuse from the far Right and Brexiteers. ‘Traitor’ is quite a common thing. I’m also getting abuse from Labour and the hard Left. A lot of it is around austerity and that ‘you can’t trust the Lib Dems’.”
Ms Benita, pictured at the Lib-Dem conference in September, added: “We did a demonstration in Parliament Square on what was supposed to be Brexit Day on October 31, to celebrate the fact we had not left. We got lots of people telling us not to do it because of the pro-Brexit supporters in Parliament Square.
“My view was: absolutely not. You cannot silence our voices on this by running scared from the far Right. If you do that, only we lose and we cannot let that happen.”
