We are living in interesting times. I don’t know if it’s social media, the pandemic or just a change in society generally but things which decade ago would have been resolved with a strongly worded letter or telephone call now seems to develop into a full scale exercise in hate.

To explain - last week The Chronicle published an advert from the Reform party. To clarify this was an advert…a commercial transition between The Chronicle and the Reform party, which in no way reflected the views of the staff of the Chronicle and in no way represented an endorsement of Reform or its politics.

Let me make this clear. Advertising has never and will never influence editorial integrity and The Chronicle - and indeed all those newspapers which I edit - are politically unbiased preferring to believe our readers are intelligent enough to make up their minds as to where they cast their vote.

Yet as a result of this advert for so so the called ‘cruel party’ for the first time in my lengthy career I’ve had to face protestors outside the Chronicle office, the building has been egged and I have had to report a death threat to the police!

While I absolutely appreciate people’s right to demonstrate it’s a sad state of affairs that over the past week reporters and sales reps alike have been subjected to vile personal attacks, branded ‘racist scum’ and been accused of taking money from ‘foreign billionaires’.

What makes it even sadder is that a lot of those joining in the ‘shame on you’ and ‘down with the Chronicle’ protest on Tuesday morning were people who over the years have emailed and phoned the paper saying ‘can you help us publicise our event/ group/ society or ‘can you help us in a fight against the local authority’.

There were some on the street on Tuesday whose anger would only be calmed by the total obliteration of the Chronicle as they demanded the immediate closure of the paper and the sacking of its bigoted staff.

I sincerely hope their wishes do not come to pass because over the course of its 150 year history the Chronicle has a proud legacy of supporting the town and its people and promoting Abergavenny far and wide with its stories picked up by national and often international media.

It would be a shame if the town were to join the growing number of ‘news deserts’ and were to be left without its own newspaper with residents relying on unregulated and often toxic social media for their local news and families like the one on our ‘real’ front page this week, left without a champion.

A study carried out in 2016 by King’s College London concluded that towns where the local newspaper had closed showed a “democracy deficit” which resulted in measurably reduced community engagement by local people, a heightened distrust of public institutions and a risk of residents losing their communal voice.

Publisher Oliver Sutton once wrote, ”A local newspaper is the community talking to itself" and if that is indeed the case Abergavenny - or at least part of its populace - has certainly exercised its communal voice over the past week as is its democratic right.