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A senior Labour MP fighting anti-Semitism within the party was today facing a reselection battle after being targeted by Jeremy Corbyn supporters for deselection.

Joan Ryan, who chairs Labour Friends Of Israel, has been accused of being hostile to the Labour leader by members of her Enfield North party.

Sources told the Evening Standard that the manoeuvre is a push by the Corbyn-backing Momentum group to replace the MP, who was first elected in 1997, with a Left-winger.

Letters passed to Left-wing blog Skwawkbox last night claim Ms Ryan has brought the party into disrepute by going to the press with concerns about anti-Semitism.

Her party meets on Thursday to vote on a motion of no confidence and call for an open selection process to choose another MP.

It is being seen as the potential start of a formal deselection process, which ultimately involves a “trigger ballot” by members and constituency affiliates.

Ms Ryan is the first Labour politician to be hit with a deselection threat by party members since the resignation of veteran MP Frank Field over Labour’s handling of the anti-Semitism crisis.

She told the Standard: “This is a distraction. Just three years ago I won this seat back [from the Tories] and it took a heck of a lot of hard work.

“It’s a marginal seat and this kind of distraction puts this seat at risk. What the people here need is not this kind of behaviour from a small group of party members.

"We have got a crisis, a huge growth in child poverty, county-lines drug dealing… these are the things that matter and for a small group of our members to undermine the Labour Party is divisive nonsense.”

Enfield North’s constituency Labour Party (CLP) has grown from 300 members to 1,000 since the election of Mr Corbyn as leader. It is understood the motion is being put forward by about 30 members with the support of the CLP secretary.

It comes as Momentum has demanded a new system for selecting parliamentary candidates to create “a new generation of MPs”.

Momentum activist Michael Walker told the Radio 4 Today programme: “One of the inspirations for this move was in the United States where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a primary challenge against a senior Democratic politician in New York.

“The main story there wasn’t about division, the main story there was about an inspiring candidate coming forward with a new argument — that’s been seen by most people as a positive news story. I don’t think it needs to be a disciplinary process. There’s going to be no purge.”