LAST week, opinion polls suggested that Labour would win 48 per cent of the vote and finish with 424 seats in the Commons in a general election. The Tories, on 21 per cent, would get 121 seats; the Lib Dems, on 10 per cent, 33 seats; the SNP, on 5 per cent, 49 seats and the Greens, on 7 per cent, just one seat.

This is even higher than the 40 per cent actually won in 2017 with Jeremy Corbyn’s radical manifesto.

Labour’s lead is the result when, in a first-past-the-post (FPTP) election regime, the Tories have become terminally unpopular. On this score, under proportional representation (PR), Labour should have 100 fewer seats; the Tories a handful more; the Lib Dems more than double and the Greens 44 new seats.

Not even the most obsessive Keir Starmer fanboy, not even Wes Streeting MP, can credibly claim that Labour’s lead arises from much popular enthusiasm for either the Labour leader or Labour’s paucity of policies.

In the personal popularity stakes Rishi Sunak is just four points behind Starmer at 30 per cent, and ahead on a measure of economic confidence.

The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, last week said that every element of Labour’s 2019 manifesto had been abandoned. Not surprisingly a third of respondents — including one in three 2019 Tory voters — can’t choose between Labour and Tory. So, there is no clear red water between Labour’s leader and the richest man in Parliament.

The convergence between Tory policies under Sunak and Labour under Starmer has become a media talking point. David Goodhart, on last Sunday’s BBC Radio 4 Point of View, made the compelling point that on almost all important political issues consensus reigns in the political class.

And on the alternative consensus among the British people — including majorities even among Tory voters — that mail, rail, energy and utilities should be publicly owned, Labour is conspicuously silent — except for a hazy suggestion that rail franchises might be rescinded.

On the question of NHS spending, Goodhart remarked that the shadow health secretary was even more radically “reformist” than the Tories. In political double speak “reforming the NHS” signifies a willingness and intent to further privatise, and on Streeting’s cue, the idea of a two-tier NHS emerges in Scotland — the very place where Thatcher pioneered the poll tax.

But even the dimmest Starmerite understands that to win office Labour must differentiate itself in the electoral marketplace. The impact of the present wave of strikes will have convinced the Labour leadership that a concession on trade union and employment rights would help recover support in working-class communities.

A rather undeveloped notion that the Lords might be reformed has gained some traction. The suggestion is that 80 per cent of a much-reduced second chamber might be elected, and that its composition might reflect our nations and regions. A final decision on the mode of election — large constituencies on the FPTP model or some form of proportional representation — is delayed at least until an election.

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Labour’s 2022 conference produced a new and substantial majority in favour of proportional representation.

Constituency opinion is in favour of a more democratic voting system. But Labour MPs and the Labour leadership are firmly opposed, while the long-standing trade union resistance to PR has been eroded, with both Unite and Unison more willing to reflect membership opinion rather than the disputed convention that FPTP offers the best chance of a Labour majority in government.

Even before the conference, Starmer ruled out support for PR as an election pledge: “There are a lot of people in the Labour Party who are pro-PR but it’s not a priority, and we go into the next election under the same system that we’ve got, FPTP, and I’m not doing any deals going into the election or coming out of the election,” he said.

This was challenged by Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham: “Under our antiquated political system, the Conservative Party has been in power for more than two-thirds of the last century without ever winning a majority share of the popular vote.

“My message to all progressive people is simple: let’s not let the next hundred years be like the last. It is time for like-minded people to reach out across party divides and agree a wide-ranging programme of political reform.”

Apart from the SNP — that benefits enormously FPTP elections to Westminster — every minority party has a big interest in proportional voting and would agree with Burnham.

The conventional argument against PR is that it doesn’t allow for decisive government and that governments elected under it are inevitably unstable coalitions.

Given that not very much separates the two main parties, and that on the principal economic questions the Lib Dems are no less reactionary, this argument isn’t very convincing. And events of the last few years show that both the main parties are themselves coalitions — and unstable ones at that.

In the case of the Tories, a long civil war has trashed its credibility as a party of consistent values, while the cosy convention that Labour is a broad church has not survived the defenestration of Corbyn, Starmer’s mendacious manoeuvrings over Brexit, or his current offensive against the left.

A subset of Labour support for FPTP — even on the principled left wing — rests on the essentially pessimistic belief that this is the only possibility of winning a majority in the Commons. To which is added the delusion that the institutional right wing of the party would play fair.

Against this must be set the idea that there exists a progressive majority to be won in British politics and that a radical, even transforming manifesto, can win a decisive following that can be translated into a parliamentary majority.

The problem is that a strategy for incremental advance — let alone socialism and working-class political power — if dependent on winning a FPTP election — first depends on the organisational and political defeat of the Labour right inside the party, and the selection of left-wing candidates able to form a parliamentary majority, first in the Parliamentary Labour Party and then in the Commons.

If there is anyone who thinks this is a reasonable strategy, I would like the telephone number of their dealer in mind-altering substances.

The key takeaway from the Corbyn period is that political structures — even those as ossified and resistant to change as the Labour Party’s — are affected by profound movements of public opinion and especially prone to being influenced by mass mobilisations against war, austerity, runaway price rises and pay freezes.

Of course, a strategy for socialism that hinges on winning such a factional battle is the intellectual property of Trotskyite sects that are only marginally less deluded than the Fourth International that thinks alien beings will deliver socialism to planet earth.

The Labour right wing — capitalism’s second eleven — fears popular mass movements like Satan fears the “blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 12:11).

Long experience shows us that any substantial move to the left in Labour results in a right-wing breakaway or an anti-Labour coalition. Starmer’s innovation is that rather than forming a split to deny a left-led Labour Party an election win, he has carried out a purge of almost unprecedented ferocity within Labour.

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The 1848 Communist Manifesto presented the problem — so far unresolved in British conditions — of the relationship between the battle within capitalism and the battle to abolish it, thus: “The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”

A democratic republic is seen as the best circumstances to fight for that future, and 1848 was the year of revolutions in Europe in which the battle for a representative democracy brought forth both revolutionary movements and a violent counter-revolution. In Britain it was the high point of support for the republic.

On the basis of more than half a century of accumulated wisdom — including the 1848 events, the defeat of the Paris Commune and the failed 1905 Russian revolution — Lenin reached two conclusions.

First, that “democracy is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organised, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state,” and second, that “whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.”

This gives us socialist scriptural support for proportional representation as a key feature of the democratic state. The present political system is widely seen as hopelessly compromised, while the parliamentary expression of electoral opinion, as shaped by FPTP, is both unrepresentative and corrupt.

If we present our political project as overcoming the obstacles to working-class state power rather than the more prosaic objective of winning a parliamentary majority, it is clear that even a crisis of the magnitude we presently endure will not inevitably lead to system change.

Short of the cataclysmic conditions which produce a decisive clash with the capitalist state, mainstream media, corporate and ideological forces committed to the defence of private property, we are in the business of fighting for the attainment of the immediate aims, and enforcing the momentary interests, of the working class.

Winning a system of proportional representation would be a democratic gain which would limit the strategic advantage our ruling class (and its Labour lieutenants) enjoys, and would allow for a more open and systematic challenge to ruling-class and class-collaborationist policies.

Any socialist and internationalist strategy must be grounded in the present-day battle to stop global warming. There is no other question in which the battle for system change is so intimately tied up with the achievement of our immediate aims, or in which the achievement of our immediate aims can be guaranteed except by system change.

Full democracy is only possible when class power is no longer vested in private property, but rather is exercised by citizens who are truly equal in a system of common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.