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I have been a supporter and campaigner for the Labour Party nearly all of my adult life. There have been a few occasional lapses; despite admiring and liking Michael Foot, I campaigned for

the SDP in 1983. I confess that much — but I was right.

I rejoined Labour when Neil Kinnock made clear that the party was going to get rid of the self-indulgent pseudointellectuals of the militant tendency. We lost in 1987, but we were not

humiliated and disgraced.

Along with many other Labour supporters, I cried and could not bring myself to believe what had happened in 1992. Sitting with a lonely bottle of red wine at 4am, my friends had all gone to

bed in despair leaving me, desperately hoping there would be a sudden surge from the further fringes and Neil would become Prime Minister. The sight of him and Charles Clarke getting into

the Jaguar after the count in Ebbw Vale for that long and sad journey to London had me in tears.

I danced in delight on the bright new morning when things could only get better in 1997. Yes, there were errors in the 1997-2010 Labour Government; Iraq, obviously, and Gordon Brown created

a hostage to fortune with successive revenue expenditure commitments. These, it turned out, could not survive the banking collapse, when the anticipated tax incomes from financial services

dissolved into the mist and miasma they had always been.

But Brown and Alistair Darling saved the world’s financial system from outright collapse. That government demonstrated that Labour could shift the balance towards ordinary people, while

retaining financial credibility.

What a long time ago that seems, now. Once again, we have a Labour Party promising the Earth but ducking the question of how it would be paid for. The answer, for those who still don’t get

it, is that it will be ordinary people, paying higher taxes for decades to come, to repay all that borrowing.

The claims that it would be “The Rich” are fatuous and risible. It’s populist tripe and it has a nasty taste to it. The assurance that “you haven’t got what you deserve because of the

‘others’; they will be made to pay and you will get everything free,” has some deeply unsettling echoes.

Those echoes tie in with the surge in anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Documented, repeated, often public and undeniable — but denials there have been, aplenty. And the stronger and more

convincing the charges have been, the more emphatic the tribal denials.

The submission to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission investigation by the Jewish Labour Movement — which has been affiliated to the Labour Party for a century — of documented cases

of discrimination and abuse directed towards Jewish people is sickening.

The submission contained details of vile slurs — Jews being “a virus”; calls for “annihilation of every Jew on the planet”; denunciations of “vile Zionist scumbags”. One high-profile

activist was expelled from the party for allegedly claiming that, “the Jews were the chief financiers of the slave trade”.

The economic utopianism I could grudgingly live with. The demagogic attempts to blame “the Other” (bankers, capitalists, billionaires, American corporations, Russians) have me shifting

uncomfortably, because they remind me of the 1930s. But when they are tied to overt anti-Semitism then it is clear that the party has become something rotten.

Like someone who finally sees sense through bloodied and bruised eyes, that they are on the receiving end of abuse, so I finally realise that I cannot support the Labour Party in this

election.

I suspect it may be impossible in the future, because the nature of the membership has changed. The influx of the ultra-Left, organised under the Momentum banner, means that the destructive

forces are now in the majority.

This is not to say there are no decent people in the Labour Party. There are, but they are in an increasingly isolated minority.

However many decent people there are, whatever the latest bandwagon is, none of it is worth the anti-Semitism.

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