Met police arrest two Green Party candidates over alleged posts
The Metropolitan Police arrested two green party election candidates on Thursday morning over alleged antisemitic social media posts. Saiqa Ali, who was standing for Streatham St Leonard’s ward, and Sabine Mairey, who was standing in Clapham Town, remained in police custody after the arrests.
Metropolitan Police arrest
The force said police arrested two women, aged 57 and 54, on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred online under section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986. In its statement, the Met said: “The arrests follow an investigation launched after concerns were reported to police on Tuesday 21 April about antisemitic material that had been posted online.”
Screenshot images linked to the pair showed the posts police were examining. One screenshot indicated that Ali had posted an image of an armed man wearing a headband of the banned Islamist group Hamas along with the slogan, “Resistance is freedom”. Another screenshot indicated that Mairey had shared a post saying, “Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge.”
Saiqa Ali and Sabine Mairey
Ali issued an apology earlier this month for any offence or distress caused to anyone by her social media posts. Lambeth Labour accused her of sharing antisemitic posts that repeat harmful tropes about Jewish people. Her name was removed from the Lambeth Greens’ website, and there was no mention of Mairey on the party’s site.
The arrests hit two candidates in Lambeth, where the council is a longtime Labour stronghold and one of the Green Party’s top targets in London. The party currently has four councillors there, and a recent MRP poll based on a survey of 2,022 Londoners conducted by JL Partners suggested it could take as much as 34% of the vote and emerge as the second-biggest political force in inner London.
Lambeth council race
For voters in Streatham St Leonard’s and Clapham Town, the immediate change is that both Green candidates are now tied to a police investigation rather than to the final stretch of the council contest. Any further steps will come through the criminal process and through the party’s own handling of the two candidacies.
