Ben Bradley got himself in more trouble when he tweeted that Jeremy Corbyn was “selling British secrets to communists”. The Tweet itself was in response to another user and accused Corbyn of being a spy for Czechoslovakia following claims by the UK media that they had definitive evidence that Mr Corbyn was a spy. However, the ‘evidence’ is flaky at best.
In response, Jeremy Corbyn threatened legal action if Bradley didn’t remove the accusations, subsequently the tweet has since been removed.
The voice of Conservative youth
Since his election win last year, Ben Bradley has been in the news for making frankly abhorrent remarks and his ‘apology’ could be considered a “sorry I got caught” rather than any actual remorse over the words.
He is currently the youth spokesperson for the Conservatives and was appointed the party’s vice-chair in January. Upon being made vice-chair, it was uncovered that in a blog post in 2011, he called those who were unemployed “wasters” and that they should have vasectomies to stop breeding. Furthermore, he suggested public sector workers should find alternative work if they didn’t like the pay and encouraged police brutality during the London riots, which began when Mark Duggan was killed because of police brutality.
Whilst Bradley doesn’t exactly have a clean record of being vocal about his beliefs, and his apology is only about the language and claiming that he was ‘young’ despite them only being in 2011.
The unsubstantiated claim by him will be picked up by those whose ideals are Fascist, believed and spread around further as propaganda. Couple with the article that made the initial claims, there will be a large number of people who believe this kind of slur, politicians like Bradley have a duty to the public to discourage slurs such as these not encourage them further. But I guess he who would happily advocate for forced sterilisation of a group of people, is happy to spread propaganda about the opposition to discredit them.