[3] In July 2013, he was suspended from the Liberal Democrats Parliamentary party until September 2013, after questioning the continuing existence of the state of Israel and refusing to apologise for his remarks.
[7] David Ward was born in Lincoln; his father was a plumber, and his mother worked on farms, in a canning factory and then in a care home.
[18][19][20] Ward called the move to pull the funding for the school as being "callous, cruel and quite stupid...and incredibly unfair on the parents and children and One in a Million.
[30] The charity set up by Ward focused mainly on anti-racist interventions and community cohesion events,[30] and he continues to support organisations such as the Sports Campaign Against Racism (SCAR).
[34] He wrote there that he honoured "those who were persecuted and killed during the Holocaust" but also commented: "Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza".
[36][37] In a meeting with Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrats chief whip, Ward was told he would face disciplinary action if he repeated these words.
[38][39] A meeting Ward was to attend with the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel in February 2013 over his use of language did not occur because he had not removed contentious phrasing from his website.
[40] In an interview with Aida Edemariam of The Guardian in February 2013, Ward said: "There is a huge operation out there, a machine almost, which is designed to protect the state of Israel from criticism.
[5][41] The Liberal Democrats' chief whip Alistair Carmichael reminded him of his failure to keep a previous promise to use "proportionate and precise" language when commenting on Israel,[42] writing: "These interventions cause considerable offence rather than addressing questions of political substance about the plight of the Palestinian people and the right of Israel's citizens to live a life free of violence".
[43][44] Jonathan Arkush, vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, described the decision to take away Ward's party whip as "too little, too late" and "an empty gesture" because of the parliamentary recess.
[54] In a response, the Board of Deputies said: "This morning's 'spin' in no way negates the fact that David Ward has deliberately placed himself outside the party’s core beliefs and values.
[55] During the republican marches in January 2015, following the Charlie Hebdo shooting and Porte de Vincennes hostage crisis during which four French Jews were murdered at a kosher supermarket, he tweeted "Je suis #Palestinian" (a play on the Je suis Charlie slogan) and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's presence in Paris "makes [him] feel sick".
[58][59] Not long afterwards at an event, Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist and former Liberal Democrat candidate, said the Paris victims had been "murdered for being Jewish and no other reason" and asked his audience to acknowledge, if such a situation was reversed for Muslims in someone's tweet, "how hurtful such a sentiment at such a time can be".
[62] Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, told a hearing of the Commons Home Affairs Committee's inquiry into antisemitism in October 2016 when asked about Ward's 2013 suspension that after "a disciplinary process has been gone through" and "they have served their time, then it’s appropriate" for the individual to return to active involvement in a "free organisation as they would do otherwise".
[68][69] Ward told BBC News: "I would defy anybody to find one single derogatory comment I've made against a Jew which was not related to something being done in Israel".
[73] Standing for re-election as an independent at the 2021 local elections, Ward lost his seat to Labour despite the Liberal Democrats not fielding a candidate.