A Paradise for Zionism? Celtic Park in the 1990s and 2000s

Ian’s father Vivian was the first to attend university, marking a move away from the family trade while keeping their Zionist ties alive. He was Treasurer of the Glasgow University Jewish Society, according to the Jewish Echo on 27 October 1950. The Society’s events were hosted in the JNF rooms of the Glasgow Zionist Centre on Dixon Street, as well as in the family home, according to the Jewish Echo on 17 June 1949.

After graduating, Vivian worked as a doctor in Parkhead, just streets from Celtic Park, where his son Ian would return decades later as a non-executive director. Ian’s brother Derek, born in 1958, would go on to be a sheriff, lawyer, and a prominent Zionist activist in Glasgow, serving on the Scottish programmes committee of the United Jewish Israel Appeal in 2016. 

In 2024, Derek was elected to the council of the Giffnock Newton Mearns Synagogue, which is Zionist and provides the base at 222 Fenwick Road, Giffnock, in Glasgow’s South Side for tens of Glaswegian and Scottish Zionist groups. These include the Glasgow Zionist Organisation, JNF Scotland, the United Jewish Israel appeal, the office of the Israeli Embassy in Scotland, and a base and restaurant run by the genocidal Chabad cult.  

Ian would leave Glasgow to follow a career in business in which he was taken under the wing of several prominent Zionist businessmen including, notably, Stanley Kalms, from a prominent family of supporters of the genocidal ideology of Zionism, who has even supported the Islamophobic Henry Jackson Society. At Kalms’ firm, Dixons, Livingston rose to become, as a UK Government profile breathlessly notes, “Group Finance Director at Dixons Group plc from the age of 32 making him the youngest FTSE 100 CFO by some distance”. After that, he assumed senior leadership roles at BT and, eventually, Celtic.

Livingston’s Zionist Reign at Parkhead 

Like Barnett before him, Ian joined the Celtic Board as an established accountant, and chaired Celtic’s audit committee during his tenure, where he was responsible for selecting and monitoring its ‘independent’ auditors. He routinely chose Barnett, despite his roles as treasurer for a genocidal Zionist group and one of the Celtic Foundation’s leading ‘fundraisers’ — a clear conflict of interest. 

Perhaps helping to fraternalise the links between these two families, during this time, Charles’ cousin Gregory Barnett was appointed Master of Lodge Montefiore, the Masonic lodge in which Ian’s grandfather served for many years. 

Ian’s relationship with fans, however, was less harmonious. In 2010, he clashed with them by publicly backing George Osborne’s austerity measures, a move which likely earnt him a peerage and a ministerial role from David Cameron. He entered the House of Lords as Baron Livingston of Parkhead, an ironic nod to his childhood football club (founded as a charity to feed the poor) and the working-class area where his father had served as a GP for decades. The tipping point came in October 2015 when he voted to cut tax credits for low-income families. Over 10,000 Celtic fans, many of whom would be affected, signed a petition calling for his removal.

At the same time, Ian was cultivating a very public image as a fervent Zionist. The Times of Israel described Livingston as the UK Government’s “most outspoken supporter of Israel”, which he had called “the most amazing state in the world”. He was linked to multiple pro-Israel organisations, including Yavneh College — a school accused of indoctrinating children with Zionist ideology — and the United Jewish Israel Appeal, which has funded Zionist projects for over a century. He was also director of Zionist-funded and affiliated Jewish Care. Several of his family members have been on the Board of Jewish Care Scotland, the Glasgow-based sister organisation.

In late 2015, Ian took to a Celtic supporters’ page to name and shame fans who he said had posted antisemitic abuse about him online. For two more years, he remained on the Board — a Tory peer and outspoken supporter of Zionist causes — before dismissing objections to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine as irrelevant to football. Xenophobia, it seems, could be protested on fan forums, but not by Celtic fans on the terraces. Despite the Club’s soaring finances, Ian resigned from the Board in 2017. In 2022, when discussing the Palestinian flag displays of the Green Brigade, he told the Times of Israel, “It is a small group, but I don’t like it. It makes me uncomfortable, and it shouldn’t be there”.

Nicola Livingston and the Zionist Lobby

But Zionist influence on the Celtic Board didn’t leave with Ian Livingston. It has remained firmly in place through his sister-in-law, Nicola Livingston, who is married to Ian’s brother Derek and sits as Chair of the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council (GJRC). The GJRC is “the oldest body of its kind in Britain” with a long history of anti-Palestinian “civic engagement”. It has met with, and complained to, the Celtic Board about matters relating to Palestine on several occasions.