LABOUR rightwingers Tristram Hunt and and Chuka Umunna could lead a new SDP-style breakaway, John Prescott hinted yesterday.

The pair have set up a new platform called Labour for the Common Good (LCG), believed to be a petulant response to Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to pole position in the Labour leadership contest.

But BBC presenter Ritula Shah suggested it was a “party within the party” and Mr Prescott said that Mr Hunt and Mr Umunna’s outfit  “sounds like a Gang of Two to me” — a reference to the Gang of Four Labour MPs who founded the Social Democratic Party in 1981.

LCG, which some Labour rightwingers are calling “the Resistance,” “has more than a whiff of panic about it,” said the former deputy PM.

Mr Prescott, who is backing Andy Burnham for the leadership, blasted the SDP’s right-wing split for keeping Labour “out of power for 16 more years.”

He wrote in his Sunday Mirror column: “Those times were bitter, divisive and damaging to Labour. And I fear history is repeating itself.”

Mr Umunna and Mr Hunt could not be reached for comment last night, but former SDP candidate and Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee dismissed the prospects of a new split this weekend — and chastised the pair for factionalising.

Appearing alongside Mr Corbyn on Radio 4’s Any Questions, she said: “There’s absolutely not going be a split. Anyone who thought about it would be out of their mind.

“Our electoral system destroys people who split away.

“We have a monstrous and corrupt electoral system that doesn’t let people express their true feelings.

“The result of that is that you have to have these large baggy coalitions.”

Any Questions chair Ritula Shah then asked: “But how do you explain Yvette Cooper talking about a split, and people like Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt working to set up this new party within the party Labour for the Common Good?”

Ms Toynbee, whose SDP candidacy in the 1983 election saw Labour-held Lewisham West lost to the Tories, said: “It’ll be a terrible mistake and I hope they don’t do it.”

Labour for the Common Good is set to hold its first meeting on September 8, four days before the new Labour leader is announced.