Former Labour candidate's antisemitic tweets

A Labour councillor and former parliamentary candidate has retweeted an antisemitic trope on his Twitter feed, and attacked people who pointed out its racist nature.

John Clarke, a Labour councillor in Essex and the party’s candidate for Witham at the 2015 last election, retweeted an image along with a caption which claimed that “the Rothschild family has been creating all the world’s money at interest [sic] for a couple of hundred years. They have used usury alongside modern Israel as an imperial instrument to take over the world and all of it’s [sic] resources, including you and I… and you have a problem with that, you’re an ‘anti-Semite’.”

Mr Clarke retweeted the picture, along with a comment saying “An oversimplified view of the world economy but containing a great deal of truth.”

When another Twitter user said that they were “afraid” to retweet the picture in case they were accused of being antisemitic, Mr Clarke replied “Antisemite smear in constant overuse as those who use it expand their powerbase.”