Mark Adderley, husband of Loose Women star Nadia Sawalha, has been elected to the Crystal Palace & Upper Norwood ward of Croydon Council despite being suspended by the Green Party over comments criticised by the communities secretary as “antisemitic”.
Adderley was suspended by the party last month following a series of controversial remarks comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and blaming Mossad for perpetrating “false flag” terror attacks against Jews.
However, as the deadline for candidate registrations had already passed, he remained listed on the ballot as a Green candidate and the local branch of the party continued to campaign for him, saying he was “very much still our candidate”.
As a result, he is also listed as a new Green councillor on the council’s website, recording the election result.
Adderley received the third-most votes in Crystal Palace & Upper Norwood ward (1,784), behind Claire Elizabeth Bonham of the Lib Dems (2,146) and another Green, Natalie Louise Vesty (1,833).
His suspension came after Communities Secretary Steve Reed raised concerns publicly about comments made by Adderley in videos posted to his YouTube channel, in which he often appears alongside his wife.
One such video posted in March featured Adderley comparing Hitler’s expansion of Germany “to what Netanyahu is doing in the Middle East”, calling Israel “the biggest threat to the sovereignty of every nation on this planet because they are ‘the chosen people’”.
In the same video, which has since been deleted, Adderley speculated that the American political figure Charlie Kirk was not shot by the murder suspect but rather “taken out”, claiming: “it's the deep state, Mossad intelligence, CIA”.
And, in a video shared two days after Bondi Beach terror attack in December targeting a Chanukah event in Sydney, Adderley said that Netanyahu was the “only person who has made the lives of Jewish people infinitely more dangerous”.
On April 24, reacting to his suspension from the party, Adderley said he was “truly, deeply, viscerally disgusted” by the decision, and that it was an attempt “to recreate the Corbyn antisemitism psychodrama of some years ago”.
He said that he “genuinely thought the Green Party was supposed to be different”, and that “we must be unafraid to say what establishment politics has disallowed: that Zionism is racism, that opposing a fascistic, apartheid state is not racism, it is not antisemitic, it is not conflating all Jewish People with the Netanyahu Regime - and that standing with the oppressed should NEVER be something to suspend someone for”.
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