Livingstone Says Labour Should Reinstate Him

Ken Livingstone has said a Labour inquiry should reinstate him because he first made his inflammatory Hitler claims 30 years ago.

The former London mayor, who was suspended yesterday for bringing the party into disrepute, claimed this history was unknown to MPs because "they don't teach it in Israeli schools".

Mr Livingstone, who caused a storm of protest after claiming in a radio interview that Hitler had been a "Zionist" and wanted to send Jews to live in Israel, also cited a controversial academic book he plans to wield in his defence.

He has been denounced by members of his party as "appalling" and a "Nazi apologist," while members of the shadow cabinet have called for Jeremy Corbyn to expel him.

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But in an interview with Sky News today he repeated his claims that early supporters of a Jewish homeland had "worked closely" with Nazi Germany.

He said: "I suspect most of the pro-Israel Labour MPs have no idea about the history, they certainly don’t teach about 1930s Zionist policy in Israeli schools … almost everyone in the Jewish community grows up in complete ignorance of this."

Asked why Labour MPs would go to Israeli schools he said: "Over here, they don’t teach it in schools either."

Mr Livingstone was unrepentant, saying he had caused no offence.

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He said: "How can the truth be an offence - if I had lied that would be offensive."

Other historians have described his claims as "ludicrous," while Labour MP Wes Streeting, the vice chairman of the all-party parliamentary group against anti-Semitism, said Mr Livingstone's latest remarks should lead to his "urgent" expulsion from the party.

He told Sky News: "Ken has clearly learnt nothing from the past 24 hours or two defeats in successive London elections.

"He seems hellbent on causing trouble and his suspension should become a permanent expulsion as a matter of urgency."

Jeremy Corbyn has insisted there is not a "crisis" within Labour - but he cancelled a planned trip to Cardiff on Friday ahead of next week's Assembly election and declined to comment to Sky News about the anti-Semitism row.

Mr Livingstone said his defence would rest on a book by controversial American Marxist historian Lenni Brenner - who he met in the 1980s when he was leader of the Greater London Council - alleging collusion between the Nazis and early campaigners for a Jewish homeland.

"I'll just produce the evidence and I mean it's hard for somebody to decide to suspend me from the party here when all this was there 30 years ago in the public domain and nobody raised a peep," he said.

He said: "He came to Britain to publicise his book and we did a public meeting together.

"The shocking thing about his book was that he revealed that not only Hitler had wanted to move all of Germany's Jews to Israel, but that the Zionist leadership continued a dialogue privately with Hitler from '33 when he became Chancellor from 1940-41," he said.

"They were working quite closely. Lenni's book shows a shared common belief between the Nazis and the Zionists in preserving their race from interracial marriage and things like that.

"They wanted to preserve their ethnic purity and that's why they had a working relationship. This caused quite a stir at the time but everyone's forgotten it."

Asked if he was claiming there was an equivalence, he said: "Political leaders need to suck up to nasty people all the time, I mean David Cameron has to suck up to the Saudi royal family all the time, as Blair did. They are an abhorrent regime."

When Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson was asked if Mr Livingstone's comments were anti-Semitic, he said: "I personally think that Ken Livingstone was straying into that territory.

"But they were certainly offensive and provocative. To link Hitler and Zionism in the way he did must have been done to create offence."

He said the party's National Executive would investigate.

But he said: "No one is in any doubt that Ken Livingstone's behaviour yesterday has let down the Labour Party, let down those thousands of candidates who are standing in an election next Thursday and caused deep offence, in particular to the Jewish community in Britain but also to people out there who expect the Labour Party to adhere to higher standards."