WHAT Ken Livingstone said about Hitler and the Jews was tactless and offensive. It is infuriating that he made his remarks in defence of Naz Shah, who had made a sincere and dignified apology for something she posted on Facebook in 2014, before she became an MP. Without Livingstone's intervention, that would have been the end of the matter. He has all the diplomatic skills of a drunk who blunders into a mosque and asks the way to the bar.

There is some dispute about whether or not what he said was anti-Semitic, with some Jewish people arguing that it was not.

As John Gilmore suggests (HAS, April 8), there is some historical justification for Livingstone's claim that Hitler once supported Zionism, but this is questionable. Hitler never supported the idea of Jewish homeland, or self-determination for the Jewish people; he just wanted to get rid of the Jews in Germany.

It is true that there have been attempts to discredit critics of Israel's oppression of the Palestinians through false accusations of anti-Semitism, and to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party because of his support for Palestinian rights, but it would be wrong to dismiss the genuine outrage at Livingstone's remarks on this basis.

He views may not be anti-Semitic in the straightforward sense of expressing hatred, hostility or prejudice against Jews, but he showed crass insensitivity to the Jewish experience of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. His arrogance in refusing to apologise for the enormous hurt he has caused merely compounds the offence.

Mr Corbyn is right to refer the matter back to Labour's National Executive Committee, who found Ken Livingston guilty of bringing the party into disrepute.

Pete Winstanley, Durham