Why I'm leaving Labour

All of my natural allegiances have been to Labour, and never had I contemplated leaving the party - not even in the gloomy years, when we were fighting Iraq and the battles over civil liberties. The centre leftin British politics is in retreat, and the demise of the Labour Party has the grim inevitability of a Shakespearean tragedy. Instead of seeking a new radicalism appropriate to the challenges of the age, New Labour sought to ambush the Tories on the management of market capital and to outflank them on law and order: a fool's errand. Frankly, I was surprised that he announced he was a Remainer, because I know that his natural sympathies have lain with a small cadre within Labour - an old-fashioned cadre that holds that any form of trade bloc among relatively wealthy nations is an abhorrence. Labour was uniquely qualified to confront the deliberate falsehoods trumpeted about the NHS - the absurd claims of massive financial dividends to offset the loss of doctors and nurses already packing their bags - and it failed.