WHAT’S the point of having elections if you can’t decide the winner in advance?

That sums up the attitude of the New Labour sect that has set in train a purge of party members to save them from the consequences of their own irresponsibility.

New Labour retains its organisational grip on the party apparatus while its political hold is shattered by a tidal wave of enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn.

Mass backing for Corbyn for saying what he thinks and not being as bent as a corkscrew is as much a comment on Labour’s hierarchy as it is on him.

Nit-pickers may contend that Labour’s top brass doesn’t want to lay down the law over who wins. Its overriding priority is to ensure that Corbyn loses.

Any other candidate — all linked to Lord Sainsbury’s Progress party within a party — would do.

The huge upsurge of applications to join Labour or register as affiliates to vote in the leadership election has swollen the electorate to over 600,000.

Such is their contempt for the working class, especially young people, that New Labour grandees see this exciting process as stemming from infiltration by Greens and ultra-left parties.

With due respect to the quality of such organisations, adding up their total membership, including the entire alphabet spaghetti of far-left grouplets, would barely tip the 5 per cent mark of that electorate.

Labour’s bureaucracy peddles the infiltration line in a bid to discredit the mass membership policy that it pushed through last year.

Tony Blair welcomed the new scheme, gushing that he ought to have introduced something similar when he led the party.

Former Cabinet minister David Owen, who stabbed Labour in the back in 1983 by setting up the SDP, which merged to form the Liberal Democrats, handed over a £7,500 cheque.

He praised Labour as “brave and bold” for sidelining the unions from arrangements to elect party leaders, which our paper, for a similar reason, called “a shabby manoeuvre.”

All affiliated unions bar bakers’ union BFAWU backed it, although general union GMB cautioned that £3 was too cheap a price for a leadership vote.

Support for change at the March 2014 special conference was overwhelming — 86 per cent to 14 per cent — but that was before Corbyn’s hat in the ring turned the world upside down.

Now the faults of the system are all too apparent, bleat MPs whose preferred candidates have aroused such white-hot fervour that they address meetings of dozens while Corbyn attracts thousands.

Judge their commitment to democracy by their varied calls to suspend the election, induce a boycott by the Progress 3, engineer an “anyone but Corbyn” strategy, spread vile allegations of anti-semitism — anything but actually debate political differences with the Islington North MP.

Far easier to chunter on about extremism, lack of credibility, unelectability or, as Yvette Cooper did yesterday, raise the spectre of Labour splitting.

She denied planning to walk herself — so tell us who these potential splitters are.

No-one should have imagined that those who believe they control the Labour Party by right would accept electoral defeat with equanimity.

They will use every dirty trick in the book, including rigging the ballot.

But they should understand that the hundreds of thousands of party members backing Corbyn will react badly to a squalid purge that skews the result.

Unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud such as those directed at Unite official Stevie Deans in Falkirk two years ago could bring unintended consequences for the discredited elite.