Surely not?

“We stand on the brink of insanity,” writes Stephen Glover. “How can we British even consider plunging in?”

An unassailable assessment, that, and a damn good question. I suspect Mr Glover meant for it be rhetorical, but I’ll still try to answer.

In fact, he, apparently unwittingly, answers it himself several times throughout his article. Two of his unwitting answers are interrogatory, one is affirmative, and they instantly add up to the solution of Mr Glover’s conundrum.

“How is it possible,” he asks, “…that millions of decent people intend to cast their vote for a Marxist prime minister…?” And, “How can millions of sensible people be contemplating voting for a misguided Labour leader who… is fomenting class war?”

And further, “I suppose there are traditional Labour voters who don’t bother with the political fine print. And younger voters for whom IRA terrorism, and Labour’s last wrecking of the economy in the Seventies, are not even a distant memory.”

It’s mandatory for a writer working in a one-man-one-vote democracy never to fail to compliment the country’s people for being ‘decent’ and ‘sensible’. This, though he knows perfectly well that millions are neither, and millions more are one thing or the other but not both.

I realise this observation rankles, but then truth often does. The life-or-death decision to hand Britain over to the most evil regime in her history, indeed in post-1945 Western Europe, is in the hands of the people who may be stupid enough not to realise the catastrophic consequences of voting for Corbyn’s Labour, or else wicked enough not to care.

Moreover, many “traditional Labour voters” cast their ballot in a kneejerk way, without bothering their ignorant heads with “the political fine print” – which is to say not having a clue what they are voting for.

Add to that millions of “younger voters” who, as Mr Glover correctly observes, know nothing of what happened before their time, and even not much of what has happened during.

In other words, millions of those who’ll decide your future and mine are either stupid or ignorant or wicked or irresponsible or all four. Now, what would you call a system that allows such people to decide your future and mine?

Most would call it democracy. I call it an abject, dismal failure.

I don’t know if Mr Glover realises this – and I’m sure he wouldn’t own up to it even if he did – but he’s issuing a ringing denunciation of one-man-one-vote democracy.

Anyone who is neither an ideologue nor a mentally embryonic youngster will have misgivings about a system that can elevate to power the likes of Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Putin, Lukashenko and Macîas Nguema (who gratefully murdered a third of the population of Equatorial Guinea that had voted him in). Or one that can put on the threshold of 10 and 11 Downing St. evil Marxist yahoos like Corbyn and McDonnell.

Mr Glover is dismayed and he rightly comments that the situation is dire even if the tragedy doesn’t occur. The very fact that millions of Britons are going to vote for Marxists is tragic in itself.

Of course, no system of government is perfect. We had bad kings and bad prime ministers in the past, when democracy was variously selective or even barely existent. Yet never in history did Britain ever have a manifestly evil government that hates everything the country stands for and is doctrinally committed to annihilating it all.

No system can function without safeguards protecting it from catastrophic failure. Given the demonstrably cretinous level of our education to which Mr Glover alludes, one such safeguard has to be raising the voting age to perhaps 30, by which time people may have filled in with life’s experience the gaping holes in their education.

I realise that no system can be devised that would completely disfranchise the stupid and the wicked, although limiting the franchise to those with a triple-digit IQ wouldn’t be a bad idea.

But at least it ought to be possible to limit the number of the irresponsible, those who vote without bothering to check their party’s record and those for whom something that happened in their fathers’ generation, never mind earlier, simply doesn’t exist.

“This really is a moment of destiny as we hover on the brink of insanity,” concludes Mr Glover. “Despite everything, I can’t believe we British are mad enough to plunge in.”

Can’t or won’t? Either way, I hope his optimism trumps my pessimism.