A director of Celtic Football Club has received antisemitic abuse from the club’s fans after voting in favour of a government bill to cut tax credits.

Lord Livingston, a Conservative member of the House of Lords, was made the subject of a petition calling for him to leave his position as non-executive director at the club after voting against delaying the £4.4bn worth of cuts.

But a month after the now-10,000-strong petition started, the former Minister for Trade has revealed on a Celtic fan website that he has been the target of antisemitic slurs from supporters.

He said he had received a message from someone under the name Michael Higgins who had said: “Get this Ashkenazi c*** out of OUR club and take that other fake jew p**** [Celtic’s Israeli midfielder Nir] Biton with him. This is typical of their sort, infiltrating and destroying every country and establishment from within”.

Another person writing as ‘Ross Grant’ had told him: “He’s a Jew what do you expect”.

The abuse emerged after the club’s chairman, Ian Bankier, said earlier this week that “messages posted [to Lord Livingston], in quite a few cases are criminally racist and in all cases the vocabulary chosen is base and highly abusive.”

This led fans on the Affiliation of Registered Celtic Supporters Clubs’ website to condemn Mr Bankier for “his unprofessional behaviour” and call for him “to give serious consideration to his position as chairman of Celtic”.

Commenting below this article, Lord Livingston wrote: “I hope you don’t mind me posting this. As the person about whom a number of abusive comments were made, I thought you may be interested in a couple of the racist ones so you can perhaps see why the Chairman was upset about them,” before giving details of the abuse.

He added that he did not think Celtic supporters in general were antisemitic.

“I have always believed Celtic fans are the best in the world and a few racist postings of social media will not change that as I know the overwhelming [majority] of fans, whichever party the[y] vote for, would condemn them equally,” he wrote.