Joshua Bonehill-Paine was jailed over neo-Nazi activism, but has been selected to stand in a new Somerset Council seat in 2027.

Joshua Bonehill-Paine has been selected to stand as a candidate for a seat in next year's Somerset Council election A former Labour MP has said the Conservatives should not allow a former neo-Nazi who was jailed for antisemitic abuse against her to stand as a local election candidate. Joshua Bonehill-Paine was convicted of racially harassing Luciana Berger, who is Jewish, in 2016, while serving time in jail for sharing antisemitic posts. The Conservatives have picked him as a councillor candidate in Somerset and party leader Kemi Badenoch has defended the decision, saying she believed he had been rehabilitated and wanted to give him a second chance. But Baroness Berger told the BBC Bonehill-Paine engaged in a "sustained campaign" against her that should rule him out of standing for public office. Baroness Berger said Bonehill-Paine's harassment "affected my life in lots of different ways because of the volume of the material that he was disseminating and putting out, the extremity of it in terms of just frankly how shocking and awful it was". The Labour peer added: "I think that we need to have a bar when it comes to standing for public office. Bonehill-Paine spent three years in prison after he was jailed in 2015 for posting antisemitic material ahead of a planned neo-Nazi rally.