Luciana Berger, the Jewish former Labour MP who was subjected to a campaign of abuse by a former neo-Nazi has condemned Badenoch’s decision to now allow him to stand as a Conservative candidate.

Joshua Bonehill-Paine was sentenced to three years and four months in prison in 2015 for harassing Berger.

He also has a conviction for assaulting a police officer and burglary of a police station and for malicious communications over an anti-Islam hoax that led to death threats against the owners of a pub in Leicester.

In a post on X yesterday, Berger said Badenoch had got the decision “very, very wrong”.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4 this morning, Berger, who is now a Labour peer, argued that “there is a big difference between going back into society and teaching others possibly about what you did and why it was wrong to making the leap to standing for public office”.

Berger pointed out that Bonehill-Paine had engaged “in a sustained campaign not just against me, but many others”.

The Labour peer said: “I think that we need to have a bar when it comes to standing for public office and I strongly believe that today this individual falls very very short of that.”

Badenoch said she had listened to what Berger said and understood her position.

However, she said she had looked at Bonehill-Paine’s case “very carefully”, and defended her decision, stating that he had served his sentence and is “actively working on anti-radicalisation” now.

Badenoch also argued that it was fine for Bonehill-Paine to stand as a councillor in Somerset, but that there is a higher threshold for people to stand as Conservative parliamentary candidates.

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

The post Luciana Berger condemns Kemi Badenoch’s decision to allow former neo-Nazi to stand as Tory candidate appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

Kemi Badenoch has defended her party selecting a former neo-Nazi as a local election candidate, saying “the Conservative Party believes in second chances”. 

Joshua Bonehill-Paine has been selected as a Conservative candidate in the Somerset local elections next year despite having been jailed in 2015 for racially aggravated harassment.

Badenoch said that “I think people can look at me and know that I’m not a person who would be recruiting neo-Nazis”. She added that Bonehill-Paine had “shown contrition for his crimes”.

Bonehill-Paine was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for racially aggravated harassment of Jewish former Labour MP Luciana Berger.

He wrote a series of posts in support of his jailed former neo-Nazi friend, Garron Helm.

Helm was jailed for writing a tweet in which he attacked Berger for being Jewish, said Hitler was right, and doctored a picture of her to show a yellow Star of David on her forehead.

The blogs about Berger included one with a headline which read “Racist Anti-White Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger Exposed”.

There was an image in the article of Berger’s face superimposed on the body of a rat. In another article, Bonehill-Paine asked “Is the Labour Party a Jewish party?”, which featured the same image of Berger’s face attached to the body of a rat.

He founded far-right group the National British Resistance, and continues to run the ‘Crewkerne Gazette’ X account, which posts “AI slop”. 

Badenoch has defended Bonehill-Paine being given a “second chance”, stating that he has now been certified by the Home Office to train police officers on antisemitism and on countering extremism.

“This is not just someone that we’ve picked up who’s a convicted criminal; this is somebody who is actively working to help communities, especially Jewish communities, and this is what I want to see,” Badenoch said.

She added: “I want second chances for good people, for people who’ve learned their lessons, for people who are showing that they know what they did was wrong”. 

In a post on X, Nigel Farage reacted to Bonehill-Paine’s selection stating: “Is this part of the “new generation” of Conservative candidates @KemiBadenoch is promising?”.

Farage’s comment backfired when Bonehill-Paine pointed out that he was cleared to stand as a Reform candidate in November 2025, before deciding he would join the Tories instead.

Posting under his pseudonym ‘Crewkerne Man’ on X, Bonehill-Paine wrote: “Last year before I made the excellent decision to rejoin the Conservatives because@KemiBadenoch is great, I foolishly applied to become a Reform councillor and even passed vetting and security. 

“Last year Reform were more than happy to have me, I didn’t want them though.”

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

The post Kemi Badenoch defends selection of former neo-Nazi as Tory candidate appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.