A report published on a demonstration against the publication of a lawful newspaper read by hundreds of thousands of people (“Protest in Merrywalks against The Light newspaper in Stroud”, SNJ online, 30 September) contained no right of reply from those targeted by the demonstration. If the demonstration had been the other way around, would a comment have been sought from the Community Solidarity Stroud District (CSSD) grouping, I wonder?

So, 283 people “do not want to see The Light paper being distributed where we live". This is a dangerously slippery slope, and has ominous resonances with what unfolded culturally in the 1930s. Indeed, this is precisely the cultural phenomenon – i.e. the rise of intolerant, cancel-culture authoritarianism – that those supporting The Light are deeply concerned about.

CSSD’s anti-Light literature is long on smears and singularly lacking in anything resembling the truth, and seems aimed at mobilising armchair “politically correct” sentiment against the newspaper using self-righteous virtue-signalling.

Jeremy Green says, “It looks like they have identified Stroud as a promising growth area for their ideas”. Who is the sinister-sounding “they” referred to here? The fear-mongering, even paranoid accusation that some nefarious forces are targeting Stroud is absurd. It’s actually more plausible that those establishment interests increasingly concerned about The Light’s burgeoning readershipare “targeting” Stroud with an orchestrated smear campaign against the paper.

Regarding Mr Green’s phrase “members of the minority groups targeted”, this is a wild fantasy of those determined to cancel The Light’s challenging of mainstream narratives. It’s pure fiction that “minority groups” are being “targeted”. But hey, who cares about the truth, when such alarmist rhetoric can be deployed via the local media?

We then read “...We don’t believe it makes sense to debate...”. So there we have it. They don’t want people to read the paper, and they’re not even prepared to debate – for example – the simplistic positivistic “science” underpinning the flaky notion of “climate change” (I write as an environmentalist going back to the 1970s) or the comprehensive capture of our NHS by iatrogenic Big Pharma biomedical interests. We’ll simply smear the newspaper by calling it “reactionary”.

If Mr Green would like to respectfully debate these and any other Light-related issues with me in public, he just needs to give me a call (and for the record, I’m not a “flat earther”).

Richard House

Stroud