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Unite boss Len McCluskey has warned anti-Semites lurking in Labour ranks: “Get out of my party, we don’t want you.”

The chief of Britain’s biggest union hit out amid repeated claims Jeremy Corbyn has failed to tackle abuse in Labour.

He said former London Mayor Ken Livingstone should have been booted out for “stupidity” over alleged anti-Semitic remarks.

And Mr McCluskey, a key ally of the party leader, warned Mr Corbyn’s critics to be “less feral, less hysterical”.

Blasting moderate Labour MPs, he said: “Many of the right-wing Labour MPs continually criticise.”

They should be “less feral, less hysterical and more constructive, and that way we will have a better chance of having a ore united party in order to gain power,” he told ITV’s Peston on Sunday.

(Image: Getty Images Europe)

It is a departure for the union boss who previously said that reports of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party were being whipped up by backbench MPs ‘to attack and undermine Jeremy Corbyn’ in a deeply unhelpful intervention to the Labour leader.

Writing for the New Statesman he singled out five “Corbyn-hater” MPs whom he accused of “working overtime” to present Labour as a “morass” of antisemitism.

It was particularly unhelpful coming out a day after Corbyn's crunch meeting with the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council.

Mr McCluskey was asked today by ITV's Robert Peston whether Mr Livingstone, who is suspended from the Labour Party due to his claim that Hitler supported Zionism in the 1930s, should be kicked out.

He replied: "If there was a rule in the party against stupidity, then he and lots of other people should have been excluded, because it was bizarre, and I said it at the time, what he came out with.

"I'm not interested in the historical references, but the reality is there is a process so I'm not the judge and jury in that sense.

(Image: Getty Images Europe)

"The process has to come through, it needs to be done very quickly now and I think under the new leadership of the Labour Party we'll get to the bottom of this issue of anti-Semitism.

"But I reject the idea that my party - a party that I have been in for 47 years - is a toxic Labour Party that is anti-Semitic and misogynistic - that's just nonsense."

Mr McCluskey also denied that there is a "glass ceiling" in Unite, which has a median gender pay gap of 29.6%.

He said: "My union has got 72% male, and we draw our officers from our membership so there is a proportion of our officers within our union who are male and it distorts the figures.

"There is absolutely not a glass ceiling at the top of my union."