If elections were held today…

…Britain would get her first Marxist government ever.

Now Churchill suggested “that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Agreed. But those who lack Churchill’s perspicacity may need further persuasion, and today’s polls provide it with room to spare: Labour is nine points ahead. Projected over a general election, such results will have Corbyn forming a government.

That means that the respondents looked at Labour’s proposed policies and quite liked what they saw. They didn’t see what ought to be instantly obvious even to an averagely bright child: if delivered, Labour’s promises would drop Britain into an abyss for generations and possibly for ever.

Only two groups would contest this gloomy forecast: fools and knaves.

The second category includes the parliamentary Labour party and its activists, who openly want to destroy Britain as she now is and remake her in Venezuela’s image. These people are simply evil, and it’s impossible to describe them accurately without invoking this old-fashioned concept.

The first category seems to include the bulk of the electorate, afflicted as it is by a pandemic of mass idiocy. The contagion of this deadly disease has been spread consciously and systematically by half a century of comprehensive non-education backed up by the like-minded mass media, which is to say by the mass media.

Reason, in the name of which modernity was inaugurated, has been replaced by Pavlovian reflexes. Rather than trying to think proposed policies through, people react by instinct. Never mind the ideas, feel the slogans activating the mechanisms of irrational response.

They hear those admirers of Trotsky, Maduro and other murderers promise “a better, fairer Britain for the many, not the few” and salivate on cue.

Then of course who wouldn’t? I myself quite like the idea and certainly prefer it to its opposite, a worse, less fair Britain for the chosen few. But, unlike those respondents, I don’t stop there.

I actually look at Labour’s ideas and realise they won’t deliver a better Britain. They’ll deliver an impoverished, isolated, disarmed, tyrannised country inundated with an influx of aliens, shunned by all its traditional allies and bossed by communist apparatchiks, the only few who’d be better off.

The economic tsunami unleashed by Labour won’t just have dire economic consequences. For, as any decent political scientist will tell you, secure private property is the bedrock of liberty. A deficit in one produces a diminution of the other.

Yet property under Labour will be at the mercy of ghouls driven by hatred and envy. Such animus is directed at anyone who has had the temerity to use his mind, hard work and – God forbid – enterprise to acquire a modicum of independence from the state’s tender mercies.

For example, one of many, Labour promises to nationalise all utility companies, forcing their owners to sell at 20p to the pound. Yet the word ‘nationalisation’ doesn’t produce an automatic negative reaction in our thoroughly brainwashed population. So let me replace it with its full synonyms: plunder, robbery, theft – take your pick.

For these companies are publicly owned by their shareholders. Clearly, Corbyn and his gang regard anyone who owns securities as their enemies to be squashed. But if asked how they feel about pensioners, they’d probably claim undying love.

However, most great pension funds are heavily invested in utilities, meaning that pensioners will feel not just the pinch but strangulation.

At the same time, taxes will instantly go up, both on individuals and those businesses that keep individuals in work and, typically, pension funds. How do our dumbed-down voters think companies will respond to a government enacting confiscatory policies?

The answer is, they don’t think. If they did, they’d know that major employers, both foreign and domestic, will follow Dyson and flee as fast as their legs will carry them, closely followed by Jews, rich people and many of those Corbyn regards as rich.

The outflow of capital is already estimated at a trillion pounds, which will turn the country with Europe’s best employment record into one with the worst unemployment (although some EU members will contest this honour).

Actually, that process has already started: the mere threat of a Marxist government has already driven many companies – and the jobs they provided – out of Britain. Imagine the exodus triggered by the actual sight of Corbyn moving his bust of Trotsky into 10 Downing Street.

Not only will the existing new companies leave, but few new businesses will be started. Who will risk money knowing that any gains will be insecure?

Public debt will spin out of control, turning from Tory-exorbitant into Labour-suicidal. Just as tax rates go up, tax revenue will come down because the tax base will be shrinking faster than you can say expropriation.

Draconian laws will be required to keep the population in check. I’m sure that the export of capital will be stopped by despotic laws, and even private individuals won’t be allowed to take more than a few hundred pounds out of the country – and eventually out of the bank.

And of course inflation will spin out of control, as it always does in the face of runaway state spending. Just look at Venezuela, Corbyn’s role model.

Those who think that a Venezuela can’t happen in Britain should look at the history of every country acting as a guinea pig for Marxist experiments. What would happen if communists conquered the Sahara desert? asked an old joke. The answer is, at first nothing – then a severe shortage of sand.

Those who intend to vote Labour explain their decision by the inadequacy of the Tory government. It’s inept, led by nonentities, muddled, indecisive, refusing to abide by the popular vote on Brexit and so on.

All perfectly true and then some, every word of it. But elections aren’t a search for absolute good. They are a relativist exercise in preventing the greater evil.

Voting against a party only makes sense if a realistic hope exists that the other party will do better or at least won’t do much worse. Anyone who feels that such a scenario describes today’s Labour is either an evil saboteur or a blithering idiot.

And I’m optimistic enough to believe that most British voters aren’t evil saboteurs.