Every organisation of more than two or three people will have its share of cranks, oddballs and members with an underdeveloped understanding of personal hygiene. Organisations with memberships in the tens or hundreds of thousands will be guaranteed to have them in abundance. However, if your election winning, highly localised party is comprised of only a few dozen members, all of whom acknowledge you as the unquestioned leader, you would be expected to know who the Hitler fan boys are before putting them up as candidates. Even more so when the entire right-wing media and political establishment long ago painted a target on your back.

The current Aspire councillor for Lansbury ward is Abul Monsur. I offer a political characterisation of Aspire here and it is fair to say that Monsur’s publicly expressed views do not sit comfortably with any party of the left. Some of them seem to be straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

“Usury is the tool of the devil (Zionist) that is currently running the world”, and that “the main reason the Jews conspired to kill Jesus was that he was against usury”.

He refers to the Holocaust as the “Holohoax” and argued “ADOLF (sic) Hitler must have agreed with Islam that Usury is bad?”

This is not some poorly expressed defence of the Palestinian right to resistance ripped out of context. Nor is it some fifteen year old in his bedroom dividing his time between AI porn, Andrew Tate videos and Call of Duty. It is a grown man representing a part of the city that was bombed by Hitler.

You would expect that Lutfur Rahman would want to be shot of him as quickly as possible. You might even think that other Aspire councillors would be saying the man needs to be made a pariah. You might even think that Rahman’s allies on the left might point out that having a man like this sitting in the council with you while commemorations are being planned for the 90^th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street is a little awkward.

You would be wrong.

The Weekly Worker, which each week tells us more than we probably need to know about the outfit, reports that what remains of Your Party is planning to set up “a local government network” which will include Aspire. Corbyn endorsed the party in the May elections. So too did the SWP via Stand Up to Racism. They have remained silent on the issue of the man’s fitness to be a councillor for an area in which his intellectual predecessors were beaten off the streets by Jews, immigrants and the left.

There are two strands of thought about why Rahman hasn’t expelled Monsur. It may be that he hopes the appallingly flimsy apology and the passage of time might make the issue go away. Alternatively, he may try to call a snap election during the summer holidays.

To its credit, Labour raised the issue at the first meeting of the new council. Their problem is that the party is so associated with years of false accusations of antisemitism against the left and the Palestine movement that they have lost credibility when an irrefutable case of antisemitism comes to light.

The local Green Party has urged local residents to write to their councillors demanding that Aspire expel Monsur and persuade him to do the honourable thing and resign. There is also a petition they can sign. The electoral arithmetic is such that they are almost certain to win a by-election with a more clearly anti-fascist candidate.

An unexpected aspect of all this, unexpected to me anyway, was how many people in the online left were willing to come to Monsur’s defence. Friends who know more about these things were less surprised. However, his views are utterly indefensible and taint the whole left by association.