Labour donor Michael Foster has been suspended from the party for likening Corbyn backers to stormtroopers
Labour has suspended one of its most prominent individual donors over an article which likened backers of Jeremy Corbyn to Nazi stormtroopers.
Michael Foster made the comparison in the Mail on Sunday last month, after losing out in a legal challenge on Corbyn's eligibility for the party's leadership contest.
And Foster revealed his suspension in an interview with BBC Radio this weekend, which means that he will now be barred from voting in the contest.
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Foster, a former celebrity agent who has donated more than £400,000 to the party, said Labour was using "badly drawn, widely written rules to purge from the party people that do not toe the hard left line".
The article which earned him the suspension said that Corbyn and his team “had no respect for others and worse, no respect for the rule of law.”
Reflecting on the decision to allow Corbyn to stand in the constest, Foster wrote: “The courts have decided that the rules as they stand allowed it. This decision advantaged Corbyn and his Sturm Abteiling (stormtroopers)”.
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However, Foster maintained this weekend that he was making reference to "the methodology of National Socialists".
Foster said he "could easily have referred to Mao and the Red Guard or Saddam Hussein and the Revolutionary Guard".
He added: "That will go down the road all the way to ensuring… that all non-hard left Labour MPs are simply deselected."