“I knew Keir Starmer in the early ’90s when I was a trainee barrister and he was a barrister, and people used to ask what he was like at the time because he was becoming a big name.

“I always said: do not trust this guy at all. I’ve seen his public persona and what he’s like in private and they’re very different.”

Damian McCarthy has just been expelled from Labour — one of thousands of leftists to suffer the same fate since Starmer took over the party three years ago this month, promising to largely continue the progressive agenda of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.

But the former shadow Brexit secretary’s lurch to the right since then has alarmed and dismayed the now largely purged left in equal measure.

A new documentary film, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, aims to uncover the “crucial role” Keir and his team played in a “dark and murky story of political deceit and outrageous anti-semitic smears” to bring the left down and reassert the right’s tight grip on Labour.

The film — produced by the award-winning Platform Films and featuring contributions from left-wing veterans including Ken Loach, Jackie Walker and Andrew Murray — is set for its first public showing in Hove, East Sussex, tonight.

The event has been organised by McCarthy. He tells me he believes the timing of his expulsion is no coincidence.

“I honestly think that they knew the allegations against me, which include links to a ‘proscribed’ group which I’ve never contacted in my life, where total and utter bullshit, but recently I have become outspoken about stuff in general and I set up the Corbyn film showing — everybody knows that.

“After doing that, I was expelled straight away. They don’t want that film out there and they don’t want me to be a Labour member. I don’t want to be a Labour member now anyway, to be honest with you.”

The long-time Unite activist represents whistleblowers and those suffering discrimination at work in his day job as a lawyer, which sees him taking on some of the biggest employers in the country.

“It’s a bit scary sometimes, but my life in the Labour Party is the only time I’ve actually had death threats against me,” he stresses.

McCarthy detailed some of the shocking threats made to him by right-wingers in his former CLP, Hove and Portslade in last year’s Al Jazeera documentary series The Labour Files — including comments about publicly beheading himself and his family and other threats too disturbing to print.

He appeared visibly upset in the programme based on the “biggest leak of confidential documents in British political history,” when talking about his stepfather, former trade unionist Howell John.

John died in May 2020 just weeks after receiving a “dossier” of the vile comments sent to his personal email address.

McCarthy tells me: “It’s a real shock for people to understand that in the party there is this combination of viciousness and unbalanced behaviour alongside people trying to combine some sort of nationalism and fake socialism.

“I regard them as fascists, I really do. I think they would be very receptive to a fascist government, and they’re in the Labour Party — what can we do about it?

“We do what we can, which is to build hope for the future.”

His friend Sheila Day, who has also had her party membership “terminated,” tells me that her treatment is very indicative of the class discrimination she experienced in Labour — a party set up to represent the working class in Parliament.

“I loathe class discrimination when I come across it, but that’s what it was — 100 per cent. They looked down on me.”

McCarthy agrees, adding: “There’s a very upper-middle class, toxic, ‘I’m quite privileged’ background to all of this, I think. No wonder they detested Corbyn because he might actually tax them a bit more.”

“There are a few that are not nasty,” Day says, “but the nasty ones have got such a grip on that party.”

“They’re the most awful people I’ve ever come across,” charges a still visibly outraged Becky Massey — purged in 2020.

According to The Labour Files, the left-wing ex-treasurer of Hove and Portslade CLP was kicked out of the party after local MP and key Starmer ally Peter Kyle demanded her alleged “abusive behaviour be dealt with.”

Massey slams the “confected lies,” adding: “I’ve had people that don’t like my point of view — that’s politics, I’m no shrinking violet. But I had no concept of how dirty people would play and what lies they would manufacture. They would stop at nothing to get their way.”

Another contributor to the same programme, Greg Hadfield, tells me of his pride that he was expelled on the same day as Ken Loach last year.

Hadfield, a former member of the neighbouring CLP, Brighton Pavilion, says there is a sense from those now pulling the strings in Labour that the “grownups are back in charge and we’re under new management.

“But we’re not, we’re back to the old ways,” he counters — a reference to the smaller, more centralised and ultimately more controllable party which the mass movement behind Corbynism jeopardised.   

He argues that the lack of any local input into the imposition of Labour council candidates across the city ahead of next month’s English local elections is all about Kyle working with central office to assert his political control over Brighton and Hove ahead of a probable general election next year.

But at a national level, Hadfield warns that there was “nothing like this under [New Labour PM] Tony Blair. This is the systemic undermining of British democracy and the role of what used to be a great political party in fuelling democratic debate.

“We’re left with a moribund, corrupt organisation that is a conspiracy against its own members.”

Labour has declined to comment on individual cases but calls the allegations “offensive, unconvincing and unrealistic.

“The party is a rules-based organisation that properly follows its own rules,” it told Al Jazeera.

Tickets for tonight’s Hove showing of Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, which received its premiere in London in February, are sold out, but more showings are taking place across the country in the coming weeks. The first showing in Scotland is at Glasgow’s GMAC Film centre on April 27.

Visit www.platformfilms.co.uk for more information on the documentary.