After Blair I drifted back into the Labour Party but when Ed Milliband dropped his opposition to the disastrous and bloody, illegal war in Iraq, I left again.
Jeremy Corbyn brought me back into the party. I have never been a fan of Jeremy, although I used to know his brother Piers. But what a refreshing change Jeremy was for Labour. When he almost won the 2017 election, despite starting way behind in the opinion polls, I probably became a Corbynista: a believer.
But now it looks like I am leaving again. The decision to expel good, honest people like Ken Loach (a prominent member of one of the four proscribed groups) is unforgivable.
Calling Ken and others like him antisemitic, is just a wicked slur: so contemptible that it is not even libellous since no reasonable person would ever believe it.
This is not the end of the Labour Party. But it is the beginning of the end.
The party is being eviscerated by the decline of the trade unions and the co-operative movement. Once every town had its Workers Educational Association, its co-op health and burial insurance seller, its building society and its co-op retailer. Not any more. These basic building blocks of the Labour movement (the organs that made it work) have shrivelled or disappeared.
Labour could still thrive but it needs to start breaking the rules and acting like it's part of the opposition rather than part of the establishment. People who hate the Tories want to drain the Westminster swamp, they don't want to populate it with nicer animals.
