Conservatives offer Jewish groups meeting after Bonehill-Paine candidate row
The Conservatives have offered Jewish groups a meeting after backing Joshua Bonehill-Paine, jailed for anti-Semitic abuse, for a Somerset council seat.
The Conservatives have offered Jewish groups a meeting with Joshua Bonehill-Paine after criticism over their decision to field the former neo-Nazi activist for Crewkerne (South) on Somerset Council. Bonehill-Paine was jailed for three years and four months in December 2015 after being found guilty at Southwark Crown Court of inciting racial hatred, with the court hearing that he had posted “vile, anti-Semitic material” online before a planned neo-Nazi rally in London.
He returned to prison in December 2016, when he received an additional two-year sentence for the racially aggravated harassment of Luciana Berger. The sentencing remarks, made by Mr Justice Spencer, described the offence as serious, and the Campaign Against Antisemitism said the two-year term was the maximum the judge could impose for that offence.
The selection has drawn a sharp reaction from Jewish voices and groups. Luciana Berger has blasted the Conservatives’ decision on X and urged the party to drop him, while the Jewish Labour Movement called the choice “truly appalling”. The row has put the party’s candidate vetting under scrutiny because Bonehill-Paine’s record includes prison terms for anti-Semitic abuse and harassment of a Jewish MP.
Kemi Badenoch has defended the decision, saying the Conservatives “believe in second chances”. Bonehill-Paine has also said he has changed after prison. He has previously described himself as a “nationalist, fascist”, and he is the creator of the Crewkerne Gazette, a detail that has added to scrutiny of his political profile in Somerset.
Bonehill-Paine is due to stand in the 2027 Somerset Council elections in Crewkerne (South), a contest that now carries a wider test for the Conservatives: what standard of accountability applies when a party decides a candidate with extremist history is fit to run for office. The offer of talks to Jewish groups may ease some immediate anger, but it does not resolve the central question of how the party weighed rehabilitation against the gravity of Bonehill-Paine’s past.
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