Makerfield: a tale of two social-media histories

So another Green Party candidate has stood down to spend more time with his anti-Semitism allegations.

Yesterday, a mere nine hours after being announced as the Greens’ man in the Makerfield by-election, Chris Kennedy withdrew, citing ‘personal and family reasons’. Shortly after, The Times revealed Kennedy had shared social-media posts suggesting the firebombing of Jewish-run ambulances in Golders Green was a ‘false flag’ – staged, presumably, by those sneaky Zionists.

We used to call Jeremy Corbyn the world’s unluckiest anti-racist – mocking the remarkable consistency with which the disgraced former Labour leader, and supposed lifelong opponent of bigotry, would end up absent-mindedly praising an anti-Semitic mural, or being photographed in front of a Hezbollah flag at a protest.

Truly, the Greens have taken up Corbyn’s hapless mantle. Barely a day goes by without the world’s unluckiest anti-racist party – which draws its pungent sense of moral superiority from its supposed opposition to ‘racist’ right-wingers – being forced to appear shocked and surprised when presented with its own candidates’ ugly missives about Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism.

Kennedy reportedly shared a video on Instagram which described the arrests of two men in connection with the arson attack on the Hatzola ambulances in north London in March as ‘total bullshit to keep the false flag flying’. He also shared a similar post by a Jew-bashing ethnonationalist named Hugh Anthony, who I gather is a Poundland Nick Fuentes. The Horseshoe Theory lives.

Here we go again. This comes after record-breaking local elections for the Greens, in which they racked up more seats and more anti-Semitism scandals than ever before. Two of their candidates were arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred. Almost 20 others were found to have aired their own fetid bigotries online, including a would-be councillor who called Jews ‘cockroaches’. Who have they got vetting these people? The IRGC? The ghost of Heinrich Himmler? Candace Owens?

Kennedy ‘apologises for the offence caused’, the Greens assure us. You would have thought he had thoughtlessly said ‘coloured people’ instead of ‘people of colour’, rather than wondered out loud if an anti-Semitic attack had been staged for political reasons. Kennedy, a nurse and children’s safeguarding specialist, is not some crypto-Islamist, either. His careless Insta-fingers are an alarming indication of how marinated your average ‘progressive’ now is in online Jew-baiting conspiracism.

And to think the Greens continue to fancy themselves as doughty defenders of multicultural Britain – standing athwart populism, yelling ‘stop’. In a statement following Kennedy’s resignation, but before the social-media posts were made public, the party said it was ‘redoubling our efforts on campaigning to expose the risk of Reform, a party who seeks to divide our communities’. Apparently, railing against mass and illegal migration – a sorry mess opposed by most Brits, including half of ethnic-minority Brits – makes Reform ‘divisive’. Meanwhile, the Greens’ giddy embrace of Israelophobia has turned its candidates lists into a putrid melange of Hamas apologists, Islamic sectarians, leftish useful idiots and even some unabashed anti-Semites.

The defenestration of Kennedy comes after a drip-fed cancellation campaign against Reform’s candidate, local plumber Robert Kenyon. Supposed anti-fascist groups and their media handlers have been trawling through Kenyon’s old – and recently deleted – social-media accounts, desperate to patch together a rap sheet. So far, we’ve learned that he called illegal migration an ‘invasion’, dabbled in vaccine scepticism and praised one Donald Trump. You can agree or disagree with his opinions, or the way he chose to express them, but none of this amounts to the rantings of a dangerous extremist.

You can almost smell the desperation of the offence archaeologists at this point. Yesterday, Hope Not Hate accused Kenyon of ‘calling for violence’. The truth? He said – clearly in jest – that those who broke lockdown rules during Covid should be waterboarded by the police, which HNH soberly reminds us is ‘a method of torture which is prohibited by international human-rights law’. He also said Richard Branson should be hanged for taking furlough money. I can’t claim to know Kenyon’s mind, but I’d be amazed if he meant this literally. This is just taking testy, risqué, jokey online comments as if they were dead-serious statements of principle. You hear worse in most pubs most nights.

Easily the most headline-grabbing accusation hurled at Kenyon is that he was once Facebook ‘friends’ with a full-blown fascist. Gary Raikes, leader of far-right micro-party the New British Union, appears to be an Oswald Mosley cosplayer, complete with the tragic little uniform. Those old enough to still be on Facebook will have collected some colourful characters over the years, but few as unsavoury as Raikes. Nevertheless, Reform insists Kenyon never interacted with the man and does not endorse him. Reform leader Nigel Farage has since suggested Raikes was one of ‘hundreds’ of people who flocked to Kenyon’s Facebook page when he first stood for parliament in 2024. Until the Hope Not Haters uncover a picture of Kenyon in his own fashy bib and tucker, this remains guilt by tenuous online association.

Candidacy means scrutiny. The decision to hastily delete some of Kenyon’s accounts and posts has clearly backfired. But this tale of two candidates and their social-media histories tells us something about our strange political time – in which progressives tone-police working-class people when they dare to pipe up about immigration, while those same progressives unthinkingly share anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; in which we’re told the populists are sinister and divisive, while proudly ‘anti-racist’ parties become magnets for Jew haters.

In Makerfield, the warped morality of the cancel-happy left is plain for all to see.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.