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A CORNISH parish councillor was caught on video delivering a Holocaust-denying anti-semitic rant at the far-right Great British Strike in Truro on Saturday.
Peter Lawrence, who represents the British Democrats on Mylor Parish Council, answered “technically no” when asked whether anti-semitism exists.
Asked whether “Hitler was right to kill so many Jews,” he replied: “I — and from what I’ve read and the revisionist historians I have read — cannot find a single order from Adolf Hitler calling for the execution of the Jews.”
Asked whether he believed in the Holocaust, he said it had been “massively overexaggerated.”
Draped in Union Jacks, demonstrators were heard chanting “Reform UK.”
A spokesperson for Cornwall Resists, which organised a counterdemonstration, said: “This is the true face of Reform supporters.
“This is the ugly and dangerous racist hatred that was on display in Truro today.
“No-one in the crowd challenged or disagreed with Lawrence’s anti-semitism. It was truly sickening and it was particularly sickening for the Jewish members of our group.
“This is fascism on our streets. The Great British Strike has tried to co-opt the language of working-class solidarity for a racist far-right agenda.”
As extremist movements grow on the streets and at the ballot box, the emergence of the Together Alliance points to a vital strategy: unity across trade unions, campaigners and communities, says TONY CONWAY
In search of political understanding, MATTHEW HAWKINS welcomes a critique of anti-semitism as codified by the Israeli state
Listening to our own communities and organising within them holds the key to stopping the advance of Reform UK and other far-right initiatives, posits TONY CONWAY
Millions of ordinary English people of all backgrounds consider the cross their own — abandoning it, and its left-wing history that includes the peasants’ revolt, concedes vital ground to the right, argues SIMON BRIGNELL