Labour ditches Scottish candidate over ‘pro-Russian’ posts

It’s a day ending in ‘y’ which means that a political party somewhere is having candidate drama. This time it’s Sir Keir Starmer’s lefty Labour lot, who have had to drop their Aberdeenshire North and Moray East candidate over controversial social media posts about Russia and antisemitism. Oh dear…

Andy Brown shared contentious posts about the 2018 Salisbury poisonings, in which the nerve agent Novichok was used in an attempt to take the lives of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The links shared by the ex-Labour candidate raised doubts about Putin’s involvement in the attack and suggested that the life-threatening nerve agent did not come from Russia. Another post shared by Brown suggested that crucial information about the poisonings was hidden by then-prime minister Theresa May. And the former Labour candidate was also found to have shared a post dismissing allegations of antisemitism again the Labour party, in which a historian is quoted suggesting Jewish voters in the UK were instead frustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s pro-Palestine sentiments.