I was sad when I quit Labour a year ago. Now, I feel a sense of relief.

What motivates decent people to stay as members of the Labour Party?

It’s a question I’ve been pondering intensely over the past year, which I’ve spent in self-imposed exile. I resigned the moment Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected as leader after the contest with Owen Smith.

When I quit, it was with a very heavy heart.

As far back as the late 1980s, I’d served as Labour General Secretary of the London NUS. By the early 90s, I was chairing Frank Dobson’s constituency party in inner London. On two occasions, I stood as a Labour parliamentary candidate.

If you make that kind of commitment, you assume it’s a relationship that will last for life. And even though I hadn’t been an activist in recent years, it never occurred to me that I’d be forced to rip up my party card. 

Today, as Labour’s 2017 conference looms, I wonder how anyone with a moderate viewpoint can kid themselves the party is even worth rescuing.

One group of centre-ground survivors falls into the category of the bloody minded. Like me, they remember the battles of the 1980s and their attitude might best be summed up as follows: we beat the bastards once and we can beat them again.

They detest Corbyn and what he represents, but they’re damned if he will rob them of the party they love or lead Labour any further up a blind alley.

These stalwarts get full marks for commitment and stamina, but don’t score highly for political analysis.

Labour is now more profoundly and completely lost than it was at any point in the 1980s. The mass membership supports Corbyn and he has seized control of much of the party machine. (Remember, Tony Benn never even managed to get elected as Deputy Leader 35 years ago. The Trotskyists controlled particular councils and constituencies and trade union branches, but they had no ideological hegemony over the wider movement.)

This group of tough-talking centrists believes it can win back the Labour Party, but is in complete denial about quite how bad things really are.

There’s a second group of moderates which is still in the party too. Its members don’t have the same level of ideological commitment as the first, but they’re broadly centre ground and were very suspicious of Corbyn – mainly because they believed he could never win an election.

The result of the June 2017 poll has completely bamboozled them.

When they saw that Labour achieved 40%, they were delighted. They felt embarrassed they had been ‘proved wrong’ about the Labour Leader and now have a sense of renewed optimism. Perhaps they had misjudged the public mood? Maybe the veteran socialist can triumph after all? 

The most important thing now, in the eyes of this group, is unity.

‘I may not like Corbyn,’ they say to themselves, ‘but I’d better shut up, as I predicted a catastrophic defeat in the election and it never happened. And the most important thing now, surely, is to get rid of this terrible Tory government.’

It sounds superficially reasonable, but it’s based on a completely insupportable assumption: that a government led by Corbyn and McDonnell would be a positive thing for the UK. Naively, this group believes that a Labour government – any Labour government – must automatically be better than a Tory one.

I can only state categorically that I no longer believe this to be true.

Looking at the tragedy of the British political scene today, I see a right-wing government which is divisive, ideologically blinkered and utterly incompetent, facing a left-wing mirror image. The existence of the former is, of course, a prerequisite for the strength of the latter.

Never in modern history has there simultaneously been a government so ill-equipped for the challenges it faces and an opposition so ill-prepared to assume its mantle.

If the likes of Theresa May, Boris Johnson and David Davis give you the heebie-jeebies, I present Corbyn, McDonnell, Thornberry and Abbott. But, of course, we’re not even scratching the surface here. The true agenda of the Corbynite left isn’t revealed in published manifestos or in public statements of those who aspire to hold the highest offices of state.

We see the real face of Corbyn’s Britain in the absurd and provocative sectarianism of more junior ministers such as Richard Burgon and Chris Williamson.

We see it in the pronouncements of backbencher Laura Pidcock, who decrees it unacceptable for people to be friendly with Tories.

We see it in the ideological war of attrition fought by Jezuit cheerleaders such as Aaron Bastani, Matt Zarb-Cousins and Peter Stevanovic, as well as the vitriolic and comical alt-news outlets such as The Canary and Skwawkbox.

We see it in the relentless denunciations and attacks on moderate Labour politicians such as Jess Phillips, Sadiq Khan and Mike Gapes.

We see it in the filthy anti-semitic and conspiracy-laden forums online, populated by fans of the Dear Leader.

Corbynism is a dangerous cult of personality, glued together by people who are cynical, extreme and fundamentalist.  Absolutely no good will come of it, either for the Labour Party or the wider UK.

Momentum will not rest until it has effectively taken this once great party of Attlee, Wilson and Blair and turned it into a Syriza or a Podemos. Except it’s a Syriza without the swagger, good looks or intellectual coherence of its Greek inspiration. It’s a Poundland Podemos that doesn’t have the courage to stand on its own two feet and survives by parasitically feeding off the Labour brand and garnering votes from long-standing party supporters.

The UK is approaching a period of great peril.

There is a ruling party which is reeling from an electoral meltdown and a challenge of Brexit negotiations it simply cannot meet. The Tories might end up sacking May and replacing her with somebody competent, which would cook Jez’s political goose once and for all. But we can’t pretend that’s the only potential outcome.

Brexit may well hit a brick wall. The Tories could descend into civil war. And the absence of any sensible alternative might conceivably lead to a Corbyn government. It’s not something I would ever have predicted in the past, but politics has become mighty difficult to read in an age of economic turmoil, sickening populism and precarious international relations.

The need for a new centre-left party has never been more striking or desperate. If the public were given this option, Corbyn’s poll ratings would rapidly decline. Think, for instance, how the SDP forced Labour back into the mainstream in 1980s.

The only reason for objecting to this strategy is the nature of the first-past-the-post political system and the belief that any Labour government – however ideological, extreme and incompetent – is better than the Tories.

After a year outside the party, I feel a great sense of relief that I’m no longer trapped into this sense of tribal loyalty. The country, after all, deserves so much better than choice currently on offer.