The Labour Party is responsible for the rise of “softcore Holocaust denial”, Dr Deborah Lipstadt has said.

The American academic won a high-profile legal battle against the British historian David Irving in 2000 after he sued her for libel when she declared him a Holocaust denier.

She said that anti-Semitism that has become “embedded” in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, adding that it has become more socially acceptable to "make a crack" at a dinner party about Jews.

As a result of her high-profile legal battle against Irving, she said: “The kind of Holocaust denial that I fought in the courtroom - what I call hardcore Holocaust denial - has been seriously weakened. And people who engage in it are seen as at best loony, at worst hateful anti-Semites, falsifiers of truth and so on.

“But what we see today more of is softcore Holocaust denial. Softcore Holocaust denial is where everything becomes a genocide. Softcore Holocaust denial is where people say ‘I’m so tired of hearing about this, why am I always hearing about the Holocaust, too much about the Holocaust, oh you Jews and the Holocaust, jokes about the Holocaust…’”