Paperchase bowing to pressure from campaigners and committing to no longer advertising in the Daily Mail has upset all the right people. It is a victory for basic decency. Britain’s tabloids are among the most hateful and vicious in the western world. They have long dictated what is deemed politically permissible – rallying behind policies that benefit the country’s rich elite, and either ignoring or demonising ideas, individuals and movements that challenge our unjust status quo. One of their key roles has been to deflect anger at injustice away from the powerful vested interests at the top, to scapegoats instead: immigrants, refugees, public sector workers, benefit claimants, you name it.

This bigotry has attracted the particular ire of activists, who set up the Stop Funding Hate campaign last year. Its premise is straightforward: if leading brands wish to advertise in and thus associate themselves with tabloids that whip up hatred against, say, Muslims or trans people, then they must be held to account. They are, after all, financially sustaining these hate campaigns. Stop Funding Hate had an early triumph when, last September, Specsavers pulled an advert from the Daily Express, a newspaper that has treated us to such headlines as “One in five Britons will be ethnics”, “Muslims tell British: go to hell” and “Britain must ban migrants”.

Now Paperchase has apologised for advertising in the Daily Mail, this hate-filled rag has the chutzpah to accuse the company of having “allowed itself to be bullied into apologising”. For the Daily Mail to accuse anyone of bullying reveals an intriguing lack of self-awareness, to say the least. This paper, whose less than glorious history includes cheerleading for the Nazis and Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts, is one of the most vindictive bullies in Britain. It whips up and legitimises hatred. It denounced judges ruling there should be parliamentary oversight of Brexit as “Enemies of the people”, a term you might expect to be bandied around by a totalitarian regime. When Theresa May announced her fateful snap election, the Daily Mail celebrated an opportunity to “Crush the saboteurs”, demonstrating its utter intolerance of political dissent.

But there is a wider story here. The power of the rightwing press is in a death spiral. It once believed it could dictate election results; during the general election, it did indeed pour unprecedented vitriol on a Labour party it tried to delegitimise as terrorist-loving extremists. And what happened? Forty per cent of the electorate voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s party and deprived the Tories of their majority. And the tabloids’ online influence is not growing enough to make up for falling print sales. The average age of a Daily Mail reader is 58, while a younger generation emerges that is well disposed to Corbynism and increasingly hostile to the sort of bigotry peddled by these rags. Don’t get me wrong: this cabal of hatred still wields huge nefarious influence, far more so than Russian bots on Twitter. Leftwing voices are still woefully excluded from the British press, despite the election result. But the corset is loosening: the stranglehold of the rightwing press over our democracy is weakening – and what’s more, it knows it.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist