Livingstone has f lirted with anti-semitism for 30 years

KEN Livingstone has repeatedly been accused of flirting with anti-semitism over the years.

In 2014 he claimed wealth had turned British Jews into Conservative voters.

Mr Livingstone said: ‘If we were talking 50 years ago, the Roman Catholic community, the Irish community in Britain, the Jewish community was solidly Labour. The Irish Catholic community is still pretty solidly Labour because it is not terribly rich. As the Jewish community got richer, it moved over to voting for Mrs Thatcher as they did in Finchley.’

In March 2012 Mr Livingstone, campaigning to get his job back as London Mayor, said ‘rich Jews’ would never vote for him. He was accused of anti-semitism for the comment, as well as using the word Zionist as an insult and confusing the label Israeli with Jew.

Mr Livingstone blamed his defeat in the 2008 mayoral election partly on the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who he said collaborated with the Evening Standard newspaper to ‘get rid’ of him.

In 2006, when he was London Mayor, he was accused by the Tories of making an anti-semitic remark when he allegedly told two Jewish billionaire businessmen they should ‘go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs’ if they did not like his policies.

In February 2005 he was criticised for accusing a Jewish reporter – the Evening Standard’s Oliver Finegold – of behaving ‘like a concentration camp guard’.

When the reporter tried to ask Mr Livingstone a question, he asked him if he was a ‘German war criminal’. When the reporter told him he was Jewish he responded, ‘you are just like a concentration camp guard’ who was ‘just doing it ’cause you’re paid to’.

The case went to the High Court in 2006 and a judge said the remarks were ‘unnecessarily offensive’ and ‘indefensible’. But he was cleared of bringing the office of mayor into disrepute.

In 2004 Mr Livingstone invited the controversial cleric Yusuf AlQaradawi to the capital. The cleric has been accused of describing the Holocaust as ‘punishment for corruption’. Mr Livingstone claimed engaging with Al-Qaradawi would help improve relations between the West and Muslims. When Al-Qaradawi arrived at City Hall the pair embraced like old friends.

In July 1982 the Labour Herald newspaper co-edited by Mr Livingstone printed a cartoon headlined: The Final Solution. It depicted Menachem Begin, then Israeli prime minister, as a bloodthirsty Nazi officer trampling in jackboots over a pile of Arab corpses.

So outraged was the Jewish community at the image, which recalled anti-semitic Hitler-era German cartoons, that its leaders reported the paper to the Attorney General.

The same year the Labour Herald published a feature advancing the false anti-semitic conspiracy theory that ‘Zionist’ Jews collaborated with Nazis during the Second World War. ‘Basically, your Zionist argues with the Nazis that Jews cannot be assimilated into Gentile society,’ it read. ‘From this, he says that Jews need a land of their own, not just any land, either, but only the land of Palestine.’