The Labour party has suspended a prominent donor for likening Jeremy Corbyn’s team to Nazi stormtroopers.

Michael Foster, a former celebrity agent who has donated more than £400,000 to the party, said the Labour leader and his team had “no respect for others and worse, no respect for the rule of law”.

His comments were published in an article in the Mail on Sunday, titled: “‘Why I despise Jeremy Corbyn and his Nazi stormtroopers’, by Jewish Labour donor Michael Foster.”

The piece appeared on 14 August, a month after the high court ruled against Foster’s attempt to stop Corbyn from being automatically allowed to stand for re-election as leader and two days after the court of appeal ruled that the party could stop new members voting in the leadership contest.

The former Labour parliamentary candidate in Camborne and Redruth wrote: “To me, respect for the rule of law is fundamental to a democracy. Once political parties believe they are above the law it ends with all opposition silenced, whether it is my grandparents in Dachau, or the left in Erdoğan’s Turkey rounded up and held uncharged in prison.

“The courts decided that the rules as they stand allowed it. This decision advantaged Corbyn and his Sturmabteilung (stormtroopers), but on Friday afternoon the appeal court handed down a big decision for British democracy.

“It disallowed the attempt by arriviste followers of Corbyn to flood the Labour electoral college. This caused the mask of reasonableness of the Corbynista leadership to slip even further.

“Suddenly the most holy of holies, the NEC, was labelled a shoddy organisation capable of using a ‘grubby little device’. Cross this lot and you are straight into the firing line.”

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend, Foster said the methodology of the political hard left in Britain was following a well-worn path. “It’s an imitation of all 20th- and 21st-century extreme political parties, where they attempt to infiltrate bona fide parties by taking over an acceptable ideology and then forming a party within a party, such as Momentum,” he said.

“Here I reference the methodology of the national socialists, but could have easily referred to Mao and the red guard or Saddam Hussein and the revolutionary guard.” He added that the stormtroopers were disbanded in 1934 and had nothing directly to do with the Nazi genocide that followed.

He has stressed that he did not use the word “Nazi” in his Mail on Sunday article, but it was included in the headline by staff.

Jeremy Corbyn speaks to supporters in Barnsley on Saturday. Photograph: Mary Turner/Getty Images

Labour confirmed that Foster was suspended on 7 September because he was alleged to have breached the leadership election rule that bans “abuse of any kind by members or supporters”. A spokesperson said on Sunday that the party did not comment on individual cases.

In July, Foster mounted the legal challenge against the decision by Labour’s national executive committee to automatically nominate Corbyn in the forthcoming leadership contest.

The committee voted 18-14 in a secret ballot that Corbyn should not be subject to the rule that forces candidates to show they have the backing of 20% of the party’s MPs and MEPs.

His comments in the Mail on Sunday had been used by Corbyn supporters as evidence of double standards by Labour party officials. On 25 August, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, accused Labour HQ of a “rigged purge” of Corbyn’s supporters following the suspension of Ronnie Draper, the head of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers union, for unidentified posts on social media.

“While Ronnie, a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, has been denied his say in Labour’s election, no action is being taken over the Labour peer Lord Sainsbury, who has given more than £2m to support the Liberal Democrats,” said McDonnell.

“And no action has been taken against Michael Foster, the Labour party member who abused Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters and staff as Nazi stormtroopers in the Daily Mail.”

However, despite his previous comments, McDonnell reacted to the news on Sunday by accusing Labour HQ of operating a system that did not abide by “basic standards of natural justice”.

“What’s happened here is that the Labour party HQ has a list of words that are appropriate and inappropriate and they’re trawling through what people have said over years and as a result of that purging them and suspending them,” he said.



Last October, Foster heckled Corbyn while he was giving a speech to the Labour Friends of Israel organisation during the party’s annual conference in Brighton, shouting: “Say the word Israel, say the word Israel.”

He later told the Times: “I find it difficult to understand how the leader of the British Labour party, when he has spent the conference talking about decency, respect for human values and human rights, kindness and a new way of conducting politics, can appear on a platform in front of 250 or 300 Jewish people … and cannot find in his lexicon of words at that meeting, the word ‘Jew’, ‘Jewish’, ‘the UK Jewish community’ or the word ‘Israel’. That is not leadership.”