The Political Wing of the British People

Not only does Populus give Labour a three-point lead overall, but ComRes gives Labour a nine-point lead in the key marginal seats.

Home and dry, then.

Imagine if the incoming Labour Government, in its first Queen's Speech, really were to lower the voting age to 16, which could easily be sold by raising the minimum age for parliamentary candidates and for jurors to 25 or 30.

Imagine if the incoming Labour Government, in its first Queen's Speech, really were to remove the restriction on voting to British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens, which could easily be sold by permitting only British citizens in Great Britain, and British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland, to be parliamentary candidates.

And imagine if the incoming Labour Government, in its first Queen's Speech, really were to ban all personal donations to political parties above the £3:50 per annum of the trade union political levy, while banning corporate donations outright, neither of which would need to be sold at all to a very strongly supportive electorate.

The first two would permanently prevent a General Election victory by the Conservative Party, even if the second two had somehow failed to put that party out of existence by the middle of the next Parliament. 

At best, it would be confined forever to 80 English farming seats, 40 of which would always be held in each case by a member of the same local landowning family. But it would be lucky to manage even that. Paid for by whom and with what, exactly?

Labour could do this, if it wanted to.

The question would then be, knowing that it was now going to be the Government until the crack of doom, what kind of party it therefore wanted to be.