Labour councillor Bernadette Fisher could have said that she retweeted this tasteless Auschwitz photoshop by accident.

She could have said she didn’t look properly before clicking.

She could have said she was hacked.

All three would have been better than the defence she has given to her local paper.

“The point of the tweet is to see the consequences of austerity are grave for people. It’s a pretty extreme message but I think that if you ignore the needs of the poor what are we doing to them? They are trying to make a big thing of it but I am confident of the morality behind my decision to retweet it.

I am not intending to offend, I am intending to make a political point. I feel very strongly about this and I think it’s not good enough that all we are doing is dealing with the deficit. The danger is that you systematically destroy those things that make us so proud.

“I have all kinds of people tweeting back and they are all on the right. Whoever they are, they are doing it for a political reason. They are doing it to have a go at a Labour councillor and that’s what happens when you are doing a tweet and put yourself out there.”

No, Bernadette, they aren’t having a go because you “put yourself out there”, they are having a go because you compared government policy to the Holocaust.

Her critics are on the left too: the former chair of her local Labour party has called for her to resign:

Comparing the Tories to the holocaust is disgusting @BernadetteFis11 whatever your political persuasion. Its time to apologise and resign.

— Ben Green (@BenGreenLabour) June 22, 2015

A UKIP councillor would have gone by now…

UPDATE: And there it is:

I apologise for any offence caused by my previous retweets.

— Bernadette Fisher (@BernadetteFis11) June 22, 2015