Labour shows no signs of disciplining Afzal Khan, who now fails to agree that Livingstone should be expelled

It is a sad fact that the British public have now been exposed to the toxic distortion spread by the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, utilising what is known as Holocaust inversion — the toxic hoax that the Jewish state is now a Nazi one, genocidal and brutal, begotten of those who collaborated with Hitler. Mr Livingstone never shrank from it, even publishing a cartoon of an Israeli prime minister dressed as a Nazi, performing a straight-armed salute, standing on the bodies of the slaughtered.

Afzhal Khan, the Labour candidate in the forthcoming by-election in Manchester Gorton, also has form in this regard. In 2014 he tweeted: “The Israeli Government are acting like Nazi’s [sic] in Gaza.” He had earlier stated that a former Israeli leader had “been committing genocide against the Palestinian people”. The International Definition of Antisemitism, as adopted by the government and accepted by the Labour Party, says that “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is antisemitic.

At the time, Mr Khan’s excuse was that “he was new to Twitter”, as lame an excuse as it is possible to give, and yet the Labour Party failed to discipline him. Unsurprisingly, only yesterday, he failed to agree that Ken Livingstone should be expelled from the party.

The ink on newspaper reports of Ken Livingstone’s comments is hardly dry, but there is no reason why Labour should lose time in facing up to its hypocritical failure to apply the principle of zero-tolerance policy towards antisemitism in the Party. We call on the Party to now formally discipline Afzhal Khan for what the entire British polity now understands is antisemitism: for if they did not understand that it was then, they certainly have no excuse for making that claim now.

After 33 years as the MP for Manchster Gorton, the late Sir Gerald Kaufman left Manchester Gorton as the ninth safest Labour seat in the country. In October 2015, Sir Gerald delivered an antisemitic speech to MPs on the Parliamentary Estate, and just like in the case of Khan, the Labour Party refused to investigate or discipline him.