BRITAIN’s communists have attacked Sir Keir Starmer’s “shameful surrender” to the anti-socialist, anti-Corbyn storyline on Labour’s handling of anti-semitism allegations.

In an online meeting of the Communist Party of Britain’s political committee on Wednesday evening, Morning Star editor Ben Chacko condemned the new Labour leadership’s decision to pay an estimated £500,000 in legal costs and damages to seven former Labour Party employees.

They had sued following Labour’s claim, during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, that they had an “axe to grind” with claims that the party was suppressing investigations into anti-semitism and that such complaints had risen under Mr Corbyn’s leadership, as expressed in a BBC Panorama documentary.

“That programme was a crude hatchet job which concealed the close relations between its interviewees and bodies, such as Labour Friends of Israel and the Israeli embassy, that had a record of public hostility to Mr Corbyn,” Mr Chacko charged.

“We now know that a clique of Labour Party staff members were engaged in a co-ordinated effort to undermine Corbyn’s leadership, stitch up his allies and sabotage Labour’s general election campaign, while failing to deal with allegations of anti-semitism fairly and properly.

“Against its own legal advice, the new Labour leadership has now used members’ money to reward enemies of the labour movement for a job well done,” Mr Chacko said.

He welcomed Mr Corbyn’s efforts to set the record straight and called upon the labour movement to ensure that Labour’s new leader is not allowed to suppress the leaked report which exposed the extent of internal sabotage of his predecessor’s leadership.

“The attempt to trash the reputation of the Corbyn project is a slander on the whole of the left and should be resisted by socialists in and outside the Labour Party,” Mr Chacko said.