The leader of Labour MEPs has defended himself over a pattern of approving tweets that minimised Labour's antisemitism crisis - only to lash out at the campaigner who accused him.

"[You] leap to conclusions on the basis of totally incorrect assumption" MEP Richard Corbett said of the man who tweets as @NudderingNudnik, accusing him of trying "to find fault wherever he can with Jeremy Corbyn in particular and other Labour members from time to time.

"His target is not fighting antisemitism, but discrediting the Labour Party, and doing so not by rational argument, but by deliberate distortion."

Nudnik noted that Mr Corbett had liked tweets including one that attacked a Jewish woman who was interviewed for BBC Panorama's expose of antisemitism, a tweet attacking the Tories by the editor of pro-Corbyn website the Canary and another tweet by Scott Nelson, the Labour activist expelled after he tweeted about companies having "Jewish blood".

"He tried to hush me up," Nudnik replied after Mr Corbett attacked him. "If folk like me didn't keep drawing attention to it, there wouldn't be a problem anymore would there?"

He wrote that Mr Corbett was one of two people, along with journalist Owen Jones, to "respond to measured & evidenced concern about racism by writing a blog piece attacking the victim of said racism (me)."

Mr Corbett, who is also a member of Labour's governing body the National Executive Committee, he was not aware of the backgrounds of some of the people he had interacted with on Twitter and gave his "apologies".