The leader of Britain’s Communist Party has condemned alleged Trotskyist ‘entryism’ into Labour.
Robert Griffiths, the party’s general secretary, denounced the tactic as dishonest and predicted it would backfire.
His comments came after the leader of the Socialist Party, the successor to Militant, Peter Taaffe said he expected to become a Labour member if Jeremy Corbyn keeps his job.
Mr Taaffe was expelled from the party in 1983 as part of then leader Neil Kinnock’s battle against hard-left elements.
Earlier this week Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson warned that so-called ‘entryists’ were targeting the party.
His claims were dismissed as conspiracy theories by the Corbyn camp, prompting Mr Watson to send his own leader a dossier detailing the allegations.
The Communist party released a press release saying it condemned ‘dishonest tactics by sectarian entryist groups’.
Mr Griffith said: “Only Labour’s right-wing benefit from this manufactured media storm about entryism into the Labour Party.
“With hundreds of thousands of progressive voters flooding to support the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn neither the media nor Tom Watson’s fertile imagination cannot conjure a real threat from a handful of obscure sectarians.
“Deciding Labour’s leadership and policy is the exclusive privilege of its members, registered supporters and trade union supporters. Membership of the Communist Party is incompatible with membership of the Labour Party by decision of both party leaderships.”
Earlier, Mr Taffe had told the BBC: “Of course [I want to come back], yes.”
He said that he wanted his entire party to be “part of the process of the regeneration of the Labour movement as a whole and particularly of the Labour party” under Mr Corbyn.
But he also appeared to question Mr Watson’s position, saying:“In the aftermath of these events the Labour party has to be reconfigured because we would prefer a form of organisation less top-down, less bureaucratic, less in the Stalinist mould of Tom Watson with his dossiers and so on which are antiquated methods of the past.”
The Labour deputy leader has said that older members of the pro-Corbyn Momentum group are manipulating younger recruits.
Mr Taaffe compared the treatment of Momentum to Labour’s attitude towards Militant.
He said: “They’re being defeated politically now and they’re using the same arguments they used against us of a party within a party against Momentum, against any left opposition that develops.”
“All the methods of the right, it’s a bit like what Karl Marx said: sometimes the revolution needs the whip of the counter-revolution,” he added.
“And we’ve had that in the form of the attempted coup which was defeated and supported by Tom Watson, let us remember, and that means Jeremy Corbyn will have a thumping mandate to carry through really what should be a socialist programme.”
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