Wiltshire town hall staff put local reporter face on punchbag

A local reporter in Wiltshire has discovered what passes for “workplace wellbeing” inside a UK town hall: a freestanding punchbag with his face taped to it and the instruction “punch me” written underneath.

According to The Guardian, Joe McCann of the Melksham News was tipped off by a contact that a printout of his face had been attached to a punchbag inside the Melksham town hall building. McCann—who has covered local government for a decade—raised the matter publicly at a full council meeting on Monday, telling councillors he had a photograph of the bag and asking for the council’s response.

The mayor, Saffi Rabey, responded on the record: “This is not acceptable and you have every right to be furious… I am lost for words.” The council says the punchbag was installed by staff rather than elected councillors. A spokesperson offered the kind of statement that makes citizens nostalgic for direct answers: because it is a “personnel matter” it would be “inappropriate to comment further,” though an investigation is “under way.”

McCann told the Guardian he initially wondered if it was a joke, before concluding that a public authority cannot reasonably normalize violent imagery aimed at a journalist who reports on it. He stressed that the Melksham News does not run an anti-council agenda and described its approach as “like the BBC”—fair and impartial coverage of local decisions, including “faux pas” that have landed badly with residents.

The council’s internal culture seems to have reached a bureaucratic endpoint: if scrutiny is uncomfortable, the problem must be the person doing the scrutinizing. The punchbag is not merely juvenile; it is a small, physical artifact of institutional resentment toward accountability.

McCann also framed the incident as part of a broader deterioration in how reporters are treated, pointing to the United States as a cautionary tale and warning against importing that hostility into British civic life. If that sounds dramatic for a piece of office kit, intimidation rarely arrives as a formal policy memo. It arrives as “banter,” as “stress relief,” as a “personnel matter,” and then—once the norm is set—everyone wonders why fewer people want to ask questions.

Tax-funded institutions are meant to tolerate criticism as the price of wielding power. When they instead train themselves—literally—to swing at the messenger, they may be confessing more than they intend.