Culture and Integration

Joshua Bonehill-Paine is not Kemi Badenoch’s first. He is not even her first in Somerset. In January, the sitting Councillor Lillith Osborn of Glastonbury was suspended from the Conservative Party because she was on WhiteDate, a whites-only dating site on which she described her political orientation as “pro-white” and stated that she was seeking a partner interested in “indigenous European spirituality”, Paganism being one of the most significant features common to the Far Right and to the Green-inclined. In Councillor Osborn’s dating pool were members of the frankly neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative, a sewer of street thugs, white genocide conspiracy theorists, and Holocaust deniers, one of whom once called in and coaxed Keir Starmer into endorsing the Great Replacement theory on LBC. Councillor Osborn’s suspension has presumably been lifted, since she is once again listed as a Conservative.

While Luciana Berger is now an important opponent of assisted suicide, time was when she used Bonehill-Paine as an example of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, of which he had never been a member. Those were the days. The most basic of checks would have confirmed that the mural, and the wreath, and the “not understanding English irony”, and the “friends from Hamas and Hezbollah”, and all the rest of those, were complete dross, as everyone who did bother to check did find out. The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases of anti-Semitism in its entire report into the Labour Party, neither of them involved Jeremy Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of that party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.”

Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed until Starmer expelled more Jews than under all previous Leaders put together, for the protected characteristic of anti-Zionism. Having left the Labour Party under Corbyn before returning under Starmer, not even Berger has left again since Andy Burnham has readmitted Diane Abbott. No member of either House of Parliament has done so, conclusively disproving the basis of the latest Bonehill-Painite campaign against Abbott.

Like Burnham but unlike Abbott, Badenoch would conscript the sons of classes other than her own to die for the Ukraine of Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. The Ukraine that in Ternopil has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. The Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom “the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen”. And the Ukraine of Pavlo Lapshyn, who is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and who will be there for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Brigade, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.