Kemi Badenoch has defended the Conservative party’s decision to allow a former neo-Nazi to stand as a councillor, although she indicated he might not be allowed to become a candidate for parliament.
The Tory leader said Joshua Bonehill-Paine had been rehabilitated and now worked to tackle racism and antisemitism.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today:
double quotation markI’m not giving him a national platform, he is standing to be a councillor in Somerset… it is a local platform looking at parking, sorting out bins. I have much higher thresholds for what it takes to be a Conservative MP.
She added:
double quotation markI am extremely worried about antisemitism and what I feel is that if we can’t have the people who have previously been radicalised, who understand what went wrong and are part of the fight against antisemitism now, if we’re saying: ‘No, no, no, you’re untouchable,’ then how can we pretend that we believe in rehabilitation?
I’m someone who’s quite sceptical about rehabilitation and I see this man as somebody who has been rehabilitated.