Michael Foster (pictured) gave Labour £400,000 at the last Election but he has strongly criticised the party's leader Jeremy Corbyn in an article published below

The battle for the future of the Labour Party intensified last night as a Jewish donor likened Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle to the Nazis.

Michael Foster, who gave Labour £400,000 at the last Election, described the team around the leader as his Sturmabteilung – the full name for the Nazi regime’s SA, or stormtroopers.

Mr Foster said Mr Corbyn’s team was an ‘aggressive, holier-than-thou cadre of committed hard-Left socialists’ who ‘excluded, briefed against, often threatened and intimidated’ opponents.

The Brownshirts were key to the Fuhrer’s rise to power, defending venues where he gave speeches and disrupting opponents’ meetings.

Mr Foster’s remarks, in an article for today’s Mail on Sunday, follow a series of allegations of violent and anti-Semitic incidents in Labour.

They also come after Court of Appeal judges boosted the chances of leadership challenger Owen Smith by ruling on Friday that 130,000 members who recently joined the party – most of whom are thought to back Mr Corbyn – could not vote in the contest.

However, Mr Corbyn is still expected to win the leadership election next month and party donors fear his victory would lead to a damaging split.

Many of his 230 MPs are considering whether to break away from his leadership. Earlier this summer, more than 170 Labour MPs backed a no-confidence motion in their leader.

The threat is being taken so seriously within Mr Corbyn’s team that aides have discussed with Commons Speaker John Bercow’s office whether he could remain as official Leader of the Opposition if the rebels become the second largest group in the House after the Conservative Party.

Sources close to Mr Corbyn insisted the Speaker’s guidance was that rebels would have to register a new party with the Electoral Commission before they could be considered the official Opposition.

A source said: ‘Bercow has said that to form the Opposition, they would have to show themselves to be a party – not just a rival bloc.’

Mr Foster said Corbyn’s (pictured) team was an ‘aggressive, holier-than-thou cadre of committed hard-Left socialists’ who ‘excluded, briefed against, often threatened and intimidated’ opponents

Labour MPs last night predicted party rising star Dan Jarvis would eventually challenge for the leadership – pointing to his ‘war chest’ of donations from backers.

The latest MPs’ register of interests reveals that Mr Jarvis, a former paratrooper, has so far this year received more than £80,000 in donations – with £35,000 in the last month alone. Separately, John Mills, who is Labour’s largest single donor, today warns that a split would hand Theresa May a thumping Commons majority.

‘Most Corbynistas accept that a Corbyn-led party would inevitably be trounced at the next General Election. Experts suggest that Theresa May would be on course to win a majority of at least 100,’ he told The Mail on Sunday.

‘But if Labour fragmented into a socialist party supported by many Labour activists and a social democratic party representing the vast majority of Labour MPs, the left-of-centre vote would split and Mrs May could end up with an even greater majority, say 150.’ A spokesman for Mr Bercow said that the Speaker’s position on the issue had not changed since he told MPs in June that Labour ‘currently’ constituted the official Opposition.

'Why I despise Jeremy Corbyn and his Nazi stormtroopers'

by MICHAEL FOSTER, Labour Party donor and a former parliamentary candidate

Saturday of last week in my home town of Camborne, the Corbyn Circus rolled into town. A crowd of 2,000 disciples came from all over Cornwall to cheer and clap and worship. One after another, Momentum speakers praised ‘Jeremy’ and spoke of the hope he gave them, the socialism he would bring to Britain.

Then the mood got much darker, with each speaker declaiming their personal persecution by unnamed sources and to round it off, all but one named me as the villain who via the courts had tried to rob them of their right to have Jeremy Corbyn as the Leader of the Labour Party.

From where I stood in that evangelical crowd, I saw what we have all witnessed across Britain for a year.

A brand of politics alien to this country, defined and delivered by a divisive, aggressive holier-than-thou cadre of hard-Left socialists with no real policies to speak of, no defined social and economic objectives, just a call for the committed to take this journey with them down the Yellow Brick Road.

Adolf Hitler and his SA troops, known as 'Brown shirts', in Munich, November 9, 1935

In the midst of this, something is rotten. You are either with them, or you are labelled as being against them and so excluded, briefed against, often threatened and intimidated.

If you are like me, a Jewish donor to Labour, you are smeared as a Blairite conspirator, plotting to falsely use the accusation of anti-Semitism to damage the Left.

It matters not whether you are Angela Eagle with a brick through a window, Stella Creasy with a mob outside her constituency office, or Labour general secretary Iain McNicol with a letter threatening court action unless he secured victory for Corbyn at an NEC vote.

Corbyn and his leadership team have no respect for others and worse, no respect for the rule of law.

They clearly have no moral compass, and in Corbyn they have a leader who wants to abolish the House of Lords yet is happy to confer and defend the granting of a peerage on Shami Chakrabarti, whose detailed report into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was anything but independent.

We are asked to accept wave after wave of inappropriate, democratically damaging and wrongful actions by the Corbynistas as the new way by which politics will be conducted.

It is why I, as a lifelong Labour supporter, funder and former parliamentary candidate, last month took Jeremy Corbyn to court to have the law decide whether the leader of the party could self-nominate for leader.

Jeremy Corbyn supporters hold placards ahead of a debate with Owen Smith last week

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 Erdogan’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 Sturm Abteilung (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.

Mr Foster says Corbyn has no respect for others or the rules

Corbyn no longer has a clear path in his bid to destroy the Labour Party as we have known it in Government and in Opposition for the past 70 years.

Rather than start a party of the Left, he wishes to steal for the Left the respectable cloak of the Labour Party brand.

For these schoolboy, idealistic revolutionaries, perpetual opposition is the weak and acceptable substitute for perpetual revolution. Let these people win Corbyn this election and Labour as a political force in this country will be heading for terminal decline.

The Labour Party secretariat – knowing that Corbyn spells disaster for an effective and legitimate Opposition in Britain – have taken a stance against the bullying by men such as Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Unite leader Len McCluskey.

They were rewarded for their bravery by a victory secured with the backing of the High Court. We must reward that by backing Owen Smith against Corbyn and end the civil war bought to Labour’s door by the bullies and arm-twisters of the hard-Left.

Smith now has a real chance of winning this contest. He is supported by the vast majority of his parliamentary colleagues.

The Corbynistas know Smith will win the union affiliate vote because what matters to working union members (ie, not union leaders) is economic competence and no one has ever heard Corbyn speak about the economy in terms of output and productivity.

Corbyn, as with many economically illiterate people of the extreme Left, looks at the economy only as a means to gather revenue to redistribute, not as a way to rid us of poverty, to grow wages and increase employment.

The Labour leader is one of many economically illiterate people of the extreme Left, he says

Smith will most likely win the £25 sign-up vote too; as many right-minded middle class and working class people, are tired of the Corbyn rhetoric that has bought almost nothing in the past ten months for the people Labour is meant to serve.

They have realised that effective opposition to a Conservative Government’s austerity programme will never be made to work by the divisive and blinkered extremes of a Corbyn-led cadre of second-rate minds.

Those who do not share their view of the world are dismissed as neo-liberals or worse as ‘Blairite’ elitists hell-bent on protecting capitalism’s vested interest.

If MPs declare their opposition to Corbyn, bully boy McCluskey threatens to target them with deselection.

Oppose them as a Jewish donor and the riposte from Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s mouthpiece, is that you are part of a Blairite, Right-wing ‘conspiracy’ (the ancient racist rhetoric is that Jews don’t act alone, the malevolent Jew always conspires) to destabilise the democratically and legitimately elected leader.

The Corbynista dream of government is our nightmare.

Britain is not a land of extreme politics. From the Reform Acts of 1832, 1868 and 1884 and even the Attlee Government of 1945, Britain’s people have always rejected extremism.