Sometimes you really can’t make it up. I found out that the Labour party had “administratively suspended” me yesterday on walking through the door after volunteering for a few hours at the Walton Vale community hub. The food co-op provides local people in our ward of Warbreck, north Liverpool, with £15 worth of shopping for their £3.50 membership.

It felt like a punch in the guts. Was this the way a democratic socialist party treated its grassroots members in Labour’s safest seat of Liverpool Walton? I’ve voted Labour my whole life, but like hundreds of thousands of socialists, I finally joined the party when Jeremy Corbyn became leader.

For the first time in decades, a political party was offering a genuine alternative to a status quo that has left so many in poverty, without a steady job or secure housing. We had a leadership that stood on picket lines with NHS and transport workers, a leader whose first visit was to the refugee camp in Calais.