Now that the MEP votes are safely cast, I feel able to announce my decision to leave the Labour Party.

It has not been easy. A Labour Party member for 43 years, I thought I would stay in what was until recently my political and spiritual home until the day I died. For 27 of those 43 years I was an elected representative - eight years as a London Borough councillor and later I spent almost two decades in the European Parliament.

Sadly, as I stand down as a London MEP and retire from elected politics, I feel I can no longer remain in the Party which nurtured me and gave me unrivalled opportunities.

Labour’s stance on Brexit is just one symptom of what has become the Party’s real problem. The Labour Party, my Party, which once stood for social democracy, produced reforming governments and legislated for the many not the few, has been comprehensively hijacked not only by the hard left but also by fellow travellers who appear to support the views of the Communist Party. The takeover appears irreversible for the foreseeable future. The National Executive Committee has fallen and I believe there are people working in the Leader of the Opposition’s office who have strong Communist Party links.

I do not make these accusations of Communist influence lightly. There is evidence from the Communists themselves that they are in agreement with Corbyn’s policies. In a letter to the Guardian on 4 January Nick Wright, Communist Party of Great Britain head of communications, wrote, “Communists want a People’s Brexit. Unconstrained by EU treaties, single market rules and directives, a left-led Labour government could develop a worker-led industrial strategy… and take the transport, energy and postal service profiteers back into public ownership.”

This to me sounds suspiciously like Corbyn’s programme. No concessions are made to economic reality and everything will be marvellous once Britain is out of the “neo-liberal EU”. Corbyn has, in addition, regularly contributed to the Morning Star, the Communist Party newspaper.

Since the end of the Second World War until the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, Communists and their sympathisers (fellow travellers) failed to make appreciable inroads into British politics. It has, however, been a different matter in the trade unions, who are still major Labour Party funders and important players in policy making. During the early 1980s I worked for one of the civil service unions which has now been merged into a much larger organisation. Despite the overwhelming majority of my union members being moderate in their opinions, the national executive committee and other key positions were run by Communists and fellow travellers. They achieved this by appearing reasonable while organising behind the scenes by, for example, holding caucuses prior to meetings.

The results of these Communist labours were not always obvious, but they did give rise to support for strange causes such as Cuba Solidarity together with a policy of either appointing Communist Party members as paid officials or trying to get them to support the Communist line once they had taken up post. For me, what I perceived to the most difficult aspect was the Communists’ complete denial of parliamentary democracy. To me, they seemed to not believe in democratic elections for either parliament or government. The preferred route, as far as I could tell, was revolution.

The Communist Party and its fellow travellers hated, and probably still hate, the Labour Party. In the early 1980s, the period when Thatcherism was beginning to take off, the union’s quasi-Communist establishment would talk about how the previous Labour government had cut public services in almost the same breath as Thatcher’s plans to abolish secondary picketing. It was very much a plague on both your houses even though the Labour house was much nearer to their own point of view than the Conservatives. This kind of attitude, I believe, informed Jeremy Corbyn’s serial rebellions against previous Labour governments.

Between 1997 and 2010, Corbyn voted against the Labour whip, essentially voting against the Labour government, 428 times. When Labour was in government he was consistently the most rebellious MP. Corbyn shared a platform with leaders of the IRA while the troubles were raging in Northern Ireland. He has over the years shown a strong hostility to the West and the United States. He is anti-NATO and has been sympathetic to Hezbollah and Hamas.

The anti-semitism currently infecting the Labour Party, I believe, derives from the Labour Leadership’s animosity towards Israel primarily because the country is an ally of the United States. Although the state of Israel and the Jewish people are two completely different things, Corbyn and his allies appear to see fit to view them as virtually one and the same. Shamefully, the Labour Leadership have done nothing like enough to purge the Labour Party of the racism shown towards its Jewish members.

The main reason I am leaving Labour is, of course, the Party’s disastrous stance on Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn is, at best, perceived as sitting on the fence over membership of the European Union. For most of his life, Corbyn has been a committed Eurosceptic, and there is no real evidence to show that he has changed his mind. Many in the Shadow Cabinet and the majority of the ruling National Executive Committee agree with the Leader. Labour now has an impossible policy designed to appeal to both remainers and leavers. One of my personal guiding political convictions is that Britain’s place is at the heart of Europe, leading and reforming the EU from within. Now I am no longer a Labour representative I cannot in all conscience support a Party whose leadership is so out of kilter with my own fundamental principles.

I do not for the time being intend to join another political party. I will watch and possibly wait to see if Labour can cast off the hard left and the fellow travellers and regain its standing as a democratic, outward looking party. It gives me no pleasure to see a once great organisation succumb to an anti-democratic and potentially totalitarian ideology.