STAND up to Donald Trump’s gangster politics or he will not stop with Venezuela, Sir Keir Starmer has been warned.

Politicians and peace activists were joined at an emergency online meeting by writers and union leaders to condemn the US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

They hit back at the Prime Minister’s weak response to the attacks, accusing him of “craven obedience to whatever Trump wants to do” and giving a “green light” to US imperialism.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn MP said: “[Sir Keir] knows, everybody knows, that it is completely illegal to go into a country for regime change.

“That was illegal in Iraq, it’s illegal in Venezuela.”

He called on Britons to join demonstrations in solidarity with Venezuelans.

Labour MP Richard Burgon said: “[To] our own Prime Minister, who gave Trump a green light yesterday with weak and pathetic statements: ‘You must stand up to Trump [and] oppose his gangster politics, because he will not stop unless that happens’.”

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) general secretary Sophie Bolt said: “These illegal actions follow months of extrajudicial killings of over 100 people alongside this huge military build-up on Venezuela’s coast, including nuclear-capable B-52 long-range bombers that have been making flights from the US to the Venezuelan coast.

“This deadly kind of military hardware is now being used to effectively threaten war on the people of Venezuela if they do not submit to the US. The entire population is being held to ransom.”

Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA) general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust said: “We have to pressure our leaders, because their silence is not neutral, it’s approval.”

Writer and activist Tariq Ali said: “We are in the very early stage of this appalling gangster takeover of a country. This is unsupportable. So, we do what we always do, friends and comrades, we carry on fighting.”

Stop the War convener Lindsey German said: “This is a development which is important for us to see, and it’s a development we can see coming out of the national defence strategy, coming out from Trump’s restatement of the Monroe Doctrine, and the idea that they want to have regime change, obviously in Venezuela, but also clearly in Cuba as well as in other parts of the world.”