What was Kemi Badenoch thinking defending a convicted neo-Nazi?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
This is a Global Production.

**Lewis** (0:04)
Kemi Badenoch, forging to defend this morning her party's decision to allow a former neo-Nazi who was jailed for subjecting a prominent labour politician to anti-Semitic abuse to stand as a councillor.

**Emily Maitlis** (0:16)
Kemi's argument, which is that rehabilitation is a really important part of public political life, would be a really strong one to make if it wasn't that his transgressions go on and on and on.

**Lewis** (0:38)
The signal that it sends that basically maybe this isn't so bad, maybe that stalking and harassment wasn't so bad, and maybe that anti-Semitism wasn't so bad. That's what you've got to balance.

**Emily Maitlis** (0:47)
Now you've got an actual convicted neo-Nazi who wants to stand under the party name. What the fuck's going on?

**Kemi Badenoch** (0:56)
This is a man who was talking about how in his late teens and early 20s he was radicalized. He became a racist and an anti-Semite. But I'm not giving him a national platform. He is standing to be a councillor in Somerset. You are giving him a platform there. It is a local platform, looking at parking, sorting out bins. That's what councillors do.
It's not a national platform.

**Emily Maitlis** (1:19)
That is Kemi Badenoch on the BBC trying to defend why she is allowing a former neo-Nazi who was convicted and imprisoned to stand as a Conservative councillor and minimising his role by saying, it's just about parking and bins.

**Lewis** (1:36)
Today's question is a simple one. Why is Kemi Badenoch allowing a former neo-Nazi to stand for election for her party? Welcome to The News Agents.
The News Agents. It's Lewis.

**Emily Maitlis** (1:53)
It's Maitlis.

**Lewis** (1:54)
And Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party. This is never a sentence you really want to find yourself, or find yourself being described as if you're the leader of a political party, forging to defend this morning her party's decision to allow a former neo-Nazi who was jailed for subjecting a prominent Labour politician to anti-Semitic abuse to stand as a councillor. This is a man called Joshua Bonehill-Paine, standing for election in Somerset for the Conservative Party.
This is a man who in his early 20s, he decided to, among other things, target the then Labour MP, now Baroness Luciana Berger, in a campaign of anti-Semitic abuse. This is about 10 years ago. Luciana Berger has been speaking this morning about her experience, saying that she's still living today with the profound and deep impact of those events. That wasn't the only thing that this particular gentleman has been guilty of. He was also jailed in 2015 for more than three years after posting anti-Semitic material online before a planned neo-Nazi rally. Some of the messages which were posted in his blog about Miss Berger included calling her a rodent and an evil money grabber. He also said that there were too many Jewish labor MPs, and was also the founder and leader of the National British Resistance Group, a far-right organization. This is a man that Kemi Badenoch is allowing to stand for the Conservative Party for local government.

**Emily Maitlis** (3:27)
Yeah, we could go on. In fact, let's go on. He'd been previously imprisoned for producing an advert featuring an image of Auschwitz that promised his words an absolute gasp. This was at a rally in Golders Green, North London.
He had targeted not only Luciana Berger, but also John Mann, the independent advisor on anti-Semitism, also a labor MP between 2001 and 2019
I do think that Kemi's argument, which is that rehabilitation is a really important part of public political life, would be a really strong one to make if it wasn't that his transgressions go on and on and on, and that they are so deeply personal to people who are still around today and still calling out his actions today. Kemi Badenoch essentially has argued that he's now seen the error of his ways, he's been to prison, he's come out, Damascene conversion, and is starting to work in sort of educating others about the dangers of anti-Semitism, which sounds great, you know. And naturally, I would want to be on the side of the belief that prison works and rehabilitation is great, and you can change and transform, except that you've got people who are still in our public life, like Luciana Berger, like John Mann, like John Mann's office staff, who were all terrified as well, saying, this man is creepy and scary and intimidating. And it wasn't so long ago that the Tories were calling out Angela Rayner, do you remember that? When she called a Tory scum, right? Not a particularly nice word. She was forced to apologize. She had to backtrack, but she called the Conservative Party as a whole scum. And Kemi Badenoch said that was absolutely, or I think at the time it was Johnson's, it was absolutely unpalatable, it was an awful thing to hear a senior labor minister or potential minister using that word. Now you've got an actual convicted neo-Nazi who wants to stand under the party name. What the fuck is going on?