RECENT attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership bid by Neil Kinnock are evidence the ex-Labour chief “hasn’t changed” since he opposed black self-organisation in his heyday, a key figure from the time said yesterday.

Speaking at a central London rally for Mr Corbyn’s leadership bid, Labour’s former Black Sections vice chairwoman Martha Osamor said she was “really wound up” by claims the leftwinger would take Labour “back to the 1980s.”

She said the decade marked a milestone in black people’s resistance against racism and oppression, as well as for their struggle for political representation.

At the weekend Mr Kinnock, who lost two general elections, credited the leftwinger’s rise to entryism by “the Trotskyite left and the Telegraph right.”

“We are not choosing the chair of a discussion group who can preside over two years or more of fascinating debate while the Tories play hell with cuts,” he wrote in the Observer.

But Ms Osamor, who was blocked from standing in the 1989 Vauxhall by-election by Labour’s national executive, told the Star: “Kinnock hasn’t changed.

“That’s what he said to us in the ’80s.

“His position was that after all we’d done to build up places like the Broadwater Farm estate, like community centres, Kinnock felt we were bringing the party into disrepute.”

“Within the Labour Party there were people who felt black people were only to be represented by them,” she said.

“[They said] it’s so difficult for people to elect a black person, so difficult to elect a woman.”

Praising Mr Corbyn’s campaign for speaking of “another way, “Ms Osamor said activists had “kept going” in spite often being branded the “loony left.”

She added: “We said to ourselves, if this is lunacy, that’s good for us.”

Speaking exclusively to the Star after Monday night’s hge rally in north London, Ms Osamor said the groundswell of support for Mr Corbyn was “refreshing.”

“The point is, you never give up trying. There was a time when people were leaving Labour, but I said to myself it’s our party, not theirs.”

Ms Osamor’s daughter Kate, who is also backing Mr Corbyn, was elected Labour MP for Edmonton in May’s general election.