Labour MP Jake Richards gets police protection after hate campaign

A new Labour MP is receiving police protection at public events after being targeted for personal abuse in a sustained online hate campaign.

Jake Richards said he believes his treatment is similar to the abuse many MPs receive but he has accepted ‘police advice’ for additional security measures.

The 35-year-old barrister was elected in July after narrowly beating the sitting Tory MP in the Rother Valley constituency in South Yorkshire.

Apart from the ‘day to day threats and abuse that many MPs get’, he said anonymous online accounts were effectively ‘stalking family members.’

Mr Richards said these online trolls had published photos of his fiancée - a journalist he deliberately never speaks publicly about – taken from her ‘private’ social media accounts. The couple have a one-year-old daughter.

Pictures of his father have also been posted on Facebook with people ‘slagging him off,’ he said.

The MP said rumours and false allegations about his personal life were being spread on social media and a Facebook group had been ‘set up simply to attack me.’

‘I will not stand for the harassment and stalking of loved ones by trolls on social media,’ he said.

Mr Richards said a group of anonymous ‘activists’ were behind the campaign of abuse and he had passed on some of the worst social media posts to police.

He said he believed that the ‘pattern of behaviour’ by the online trolls could amount to a criminal offence.

‘I have reported it to them [police] and they are looking into it,’ he said.

‘There is absolutely nothing I can do about it,’ he said. ‘I’m not complaining about people having a go at me over winter fuel payments and things like that. I’ve worked for MPs before, I know what goes on.’

One person sends ‘10 or 12 messages a day of ‘vile racist abuse about immigrants’.

Commenting on the extra police protection measures, he said: ‘I didn’t want to do that, but police advised me to have extra security because of the nature of some of the online abuse.’

However, Mr Richards, who played a ‘minor role’ as a pupil barrister in the prosecution of the killer of MP Jo Cox, has promised to continue with his weekly surgeries and regular public meetings.

Earlier this week army veteran Steven Parkins, 49, was jailed for 12 weeks at Bradford Magistrates Court after sending a ‘menacing and aggressive’ video message to the then Tory MP Holly Mumby-Croft. He admitted sending a grossly offensive electronic communication.

South Yorkshire Police have been contacted for comment.