Labour offers to readmit member following 'antisemitic' remarks

The Sunday Times reported that Labour’s National Executive Committee, the governing body in which Momentum-backed politicians have become influential, voted by 12 to 10 to issue a warning but not expel Mr Sivier.

He was also instructed to attend a workshop on antisemitism run by the Jewish Labour Movement, but he said he would not attend on the grounds that he was not guilty.

“I’m not accepting my readmission under the terms offered to me,” Mr Sivier said.

A Labour source told the JC that Mr Sivier's readmission was "a necessary condition" of his continued membership and that, as he had refused the training, he would not be readmitted to the party.

Mr Sivier told the JC that he was not a Holocaust denier. He said his comment on the numbers killed referred to another post in which the SWP had queried the total who were murdered: “I have always used the ‘high’ figure of six million Jews who were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. I know some have suggested there were fewer deaths, and I know some have suggested it is antisemitic to suggest that there were fewer deaths, but my reasoning is much simpler than that; it seems to me that, even if there is doubt about the number of deaths, it would be disrespectful of the dead not to use the highest possible figure.”

A separate leaked investigation showed Labour MP Louise Ellman has been repeatedly subjected to “obsessive interrogations” on Israel during meetings in her Liverpool Riverside constituency.

The report concluded that a “significant proportion of each meeting is given over to intense questioning on Israel from the floor” and that the Israel-Palestine conflict is used “as a platform to attack” Ms Ellman, who is Jewish.

Other individuals readmitted to the Labour Party this week include the 76-year-old Alan Fogg, who played a leading role in the Trotskyist group Militant’s takeover of Liverpool council in the 1980s, and Janine Booth, who stood for socialist parties against Labour in 2001 and 2006.

This article was edited after Mr Sivier contacted the JC to say that he was not a Holocaust denier.

Mr Sivier says that his comment “I don’t know” had been made in reference to whether an SWP leaflet put the number of Holocaust victims at ‘millions’ or ‘thousands’; he says that he does not dispute that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. He also says that he did not defend Ken Livingstone’s comments made after his suspension from the Labour Party in 2017, and that any comments he defended were not antisemitic. We have amended the article to reflect Mr Sivier’s account of his position.