SIX years, this September. Six years in which my spare time, much of my income, and most of my nerves were stolen by the Labour Party. Six years of highs and mostly lows, in which the depths of human nature became too familiar.

In a media and business career lasting 30 years I have never met deceitful, vindictive and nasty people such as I have in the Labour Party. Not in the cut-throat world of marine ­finance, political journalism or taking humanitarian aid through the most dangerous parts of the Middle East. Not even in the bear pit atmosphere of the Today Programme or Channel 4 News or News at Ten – all of which I worked on.

Media people, I found aren’t generally kind and caring; it’s a ­competitive and bitchy game, and there was ­always a degree of backstabbing and sneering, about the Scottish guy ­getting all the shifts, or the staffer who didn’t deserve promotion. But nothing I heard or saw there prepared me for the relentless lies, smears and sabotage I saw and experienced in six years of Labour membership as a party officer and as a council candidate.

The National: Tony Blair

Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair

It started right away at an ­Edinburgh CLP meeting where ­campaigning ideas were invited. I ­offered a couple of projects I’d already helped start and waited for a call. But it never came. I was deliberately kept off the campaign by Blairite branch officials. I reached out to the left, and spent a week writing a newsletter for a prominent left-wing MSP. The leaflet was abruptly dropped with no reason given.

A few weeks later I turned up for a door-knocking event and there were sheaves of my leaflet being ­handed out. The MSP and staff did not make eye contact and I never got an ­explanation.

I campaigned for all factions, “on the boards”, phones, stalls and ­media interviews, and was very good at it; my strong business and media CV should have qualified me for at least a volunteer post in the party or for an elected MP or MSP. Instead, out of seven applications I didn’t get one interview.

When I stood for selection in ­council elections, the MSP ­candidate for whom I had been the top campaigner, repaid my help by ­inviting another member into standing against me. Even after I was selected, the Scottish leader refused, twice, to endorse my campaign.

Then we saw the campaign to topple Jeremy Corbyn, who had inspired me to join in the first place, and the attacks on me too intensified – remember, these weren’t from the SNP or the Tories; I was denounced to the press as a Marxist “entryist” by the very people I’d been campaigning to get elected to the Scottish Parliament. Lawyers. Bankers. NHS consultants.

Still, I stuck in there, becoming my party’s branch secretary and ­attracting new members – not all of them left-wingers. But the smears and sabotage continued; after I stepped aside to concentrate on campaigns, I was refused access to the local membership data so that I could, er, campaign. I was shoved aside as vice chair by a member who had refused to campaign for Labour in the Euro elections.

And still I was just about the only one turning out in the rain to leaflet commuters or shoppers.

THIS country has suffered a coup d’etat against Her Majesty’s Opposition. The falsehoods and smears circulated against the Corbyn leadership by party staff and Blairite MPs were shamefully shared without proper scrutiny by most mainstream media outlets. The BBC’s political editor was found by the corporation’s own watchdog to have breached its guidelines when interviewing Corbyn. The Forde report into leaked allegations of Labour staff working against him has been kicked into the long grass, while the stand-out most successful progressive party leader in recent times, Corbyn, was systematically destroyed as a credible and active politician.

Right-wing Labour MSPs toppled the Scottish party leader Richard Leonard, a decent and courageous socialist, with a barrage of smears and negative press briefings.

Last week, a left-wing Edinburgh councillor, Gordon Munro, was forced out after he defied the vicious cuts proposed by the Labour ­coalition group and abstained from the ­austerity budget vote. Munro said the stress had led to him taking ­medication to cope.

The National: Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer speaks to the media during a visit to the PSNI headquarters in Belfast

David Evans, Keir Starmer’s (above) stooge wheeled in as general secretary, has decreed that no criticisms of the new party leadership can be tolerated. Imagine if Corbyn’s team had issued such an edict!

NOW the purge of left-wing groups launched by the Starmer-Evans pact has finally prompted my resignation. I feel I was tricked into wasting my time and energy on helping this sorry mess of a party to cling on to a few seats here and there, with little progress on social justice being made on behalf of those who desperately need it.

With no realistic chance of moving against Starmer at party conference (even the election of branch reps on the Conference Arrangements Committee was sneaked out in an email disguised to look like a Covid message, thus rigging the ballot) there seems little point in wasting my subscriptions and energy on what is now little more than a political lobby group.

Keir Hardie’s valiant Labour dream is dead. In contrast, Starmer is a political and moral windbag with nothing to offer Britain. The time has come for a real change in left politics. For it to wrench itself free from the dead hand of reformist moderate liberals who pretend they want social justice but take the knee only to Murdoch and the brokers of the City’s Square Mile. After all, it only takes a moment for 300,000 members to show that they are The Many.

Bruce Whitehead is a journalist. He was Labour candidate for Almond ward in the 2017 Edinburgh council elections. Before joining the Labour Party, he was a broadcast news journalist for ITN, CNN and the Today Programme