Keir Today, Gone Tomorrow

 If there was a General Election tomorrow, how would it turn out?

Well, as Starmer tries to out- Tory the Tories on spending cuts and out-xenophobe Reform on migration, the bad news for Keith is, he's toast and so is the entire "New" Nu-Labour project.

Three national polls in a row put the far right, Trumpite party of chancers and self-enrichers of Reform in the lead, the latest a full 6% ahead of the government.

With the SNP resurgent in Scotland, the result via Electoral Calculus would produce a parliament of:

REFORM - 305 seats

LABOUR - 142

TORIES - 93

LIB DEMS - 59

SNP - 23

GREENS - 4

IND SOC - 4

PLAID CYMRU- 2

OTHERS - 18

(figures use the latest polls for UK from "Find Out Now" and for Scotland from "Survation".

So not quite an outright majority, but with some rebel Tories and ULSTER!!!men (and they are ULSTERMEN!!!!) there'd be little doubt we would be staring a Farage Premiership in the face...

So let's take a minute to grasp what that would mean:

- no more free NHS treatment, you'll need to pay insurance instead;

- huge cuts in taxes for big business and the wealthiest, cuts in services and benefits for everyone else;

- racism run amok in our schools, communities, public services, and immigration service

- men convicted of assaulting their female partners accepted to be MPs

- an end to most types of employment protection, so it would be much, much easier for your employer to fire you at will;

- tax cuts for private schools, spending cuts for state schools;

- scraping of investment in green technology and energy and spending more on subsidising private nuclear energy companies;

- scrap the BBC(yes, you'll miss it when it is gone) for more TV like GB News ;

- cuddling up to Trump, and Putin

- government by the rich for the rich...

Starmer and co, of course, cling to the analysis of 30 years ago, when Bliar won a landslide victory on a minority vote and then watched it wither away over 3 subsequent elections. With even fewer voters supporting him last year than poor old Jeremy Corbyn got in his much-excoriated and widely misrepresented 2019 result, Starmer is facing oblivion... even although Reform has even less support than he got!

Believe it or not, there is every prospect, thanks to our ludicrous first-past-the-post voting system, that Nigel Farage can become PM with just 29% of the vote: a calumny, an utterly bizarre situation that can and must be remedied via electoral reform and proportional representation (PR) so that broadly speaking, parties' shares of the vote should equal their seats in parliament.

I've only ever heard three arguments against PR:

1. Our current system produces "STRONG GOVERNMENTS".

Erm... ???WTF?? WTF ACTUAL F???!!!

2. Our current system means people know who their MP is.

Well, actually, the vast majority haven't a clue who these increasingly faceless, marginal individuals are. I do follow politics and was previously very involved in political activity - I recall lots of MPs resigning their posts under Boris Johnson and realising I'd never heard of the vast majority of them; this has only increased since; who had ever heard of Andrew Gwynne before his career crashed to a close last weekend over his tasteless Whatsapp messages?

3. Our current system may not be that democratic, but it at least KEEPS OUT THE EXTREMISTS...

Well, we all have our views of what is extreme. The Con-Lib Dem coalition remains one of the most hard right governments we've ever had, but either way, with the polls suggesting Reform could just about win outright with barely a quarter of the vote, that little lie falls by the wayside.

At the Nuremberg trials, Hermann Goring noted that Hitler had come to power legally after an election in which the Nazis polled 43% of the vote and got 43% of the seats. To become dictator, Adolf had to bully and bribe the German Nationalists, the liberal democrats and the Catholic Zentrum parties to vote for him, as well as arresting all the many Communist MPs so they couldn't vote against the Austrian Corporal.

Hermann however, pointed out that, had Germany at the time used the British first-past-the -post system, none of this unseemly cajoling and threatening would have been necessary; indeed, the Nazis would have come to power two years earlier than they did because

"Had the democratic election system of England or the United States of America existed in Germany, then the National Socialist German Workers Party would, at the end of 1931 already, have legally possessed all seats in the Reichstag, without exception.."

Starmer is finished before he has even begun. If he wants any sort of lasting legacy, anything worthwhile or even vaguely distinctive to be remembered for, the least he could do is save us from the fascists and give us PR NOW!