Survation were one of the only polling companies to predict the 2017 General Election result with any degree of accuracy, and they've just released a poll giving Labour a 6 point lead over the Tories (44% - 38%).
Of course all poll results should be taken with a bucket of salt, but since Survation did such a good job of calling the 2017 election, this one is at least worth a bit of consideration.
Such a significant poll lead for Labour is obviously good news for anyone who opposes the Tory government, their economically ruinous obsession with hard-right austerity dogma, their callous contempt for people they consider to be below them in the social pecking order (especially disabled people, students from non-privileged backgrounds, trainee nurses, and the working poor), and their ideological obsession with flogging off, or simply giving away public infrastructure to corporate interests, dodgy unaccountable pseudo-charities, and foreign governments.
The electoral calculus website suggests that a 44% - 38% general election result would mean Labour end up as the biggest party, just a few seats short of an overall majority (321), with the Tories losing somewhere in the region of 54 seats in the process. The Tory losses would include big hitters like the Home Secretary Amber Rudd, the former Tory leadership candidate Stephen Crabb, the former education secretary (who wanted to force privatise every state school in England) Nicky Morgan, and David Cameron's barbaric former DWP henchman Iain Duncan Smith.
Nobody with a shred of basic human empathy for disabled people, or those who have fallen on hard times, could possibly shed a tear over Iain Duncan Smith's ejection from parliament, but the problem is that the Tories have clearly demonstrated their intent to put their own party political interest above the national interest, so an election is highly unlikely to happen any time soon.
One Tory minister, speaking to the Times on condition of anonymity, demonstrated the sickening scale of Tory self interest when they admitted that if they tried to reverse Theresa May's shambolic handling of the Brexit negotiations they would "destroy the party", but if they allow her to continue marching us towards the Brexit cliff edge they would "destroy the country" .
Given the willingness of Tory politicians to sacrifice the nation in order to serve the interests of their own political party, the prospects of another General Election any time soon seem remarkably slim because they'll just cling grimly to power, no matter what the cost to the rest of us.
On the plus side, this 6 point Labour lead suggests that although the Labour surge has slowed since the election furore has died down, there's no sign whatever of any kind of public opinion swing back towards the hapless Tories.
Another positive to consider is that Labour went into the 2017 General Election trailing the Tories by double digits (some polling companies put them as far as 24/25 points behind!) but they ended up just two points behind (42% - 40%), which was the biggest and fastest UK election turnaround since opinion polling became a thing.
If the next election (whenever it comes) plays out anything like the last one, Labour's momentum (fuelled by a huge membership of 600,000 odd people, and a seasoned social media campaign team) could conceivably turn a six point lead into a double digit one, which would win a clear Labour majority for Jeremy Corbyn to work with.
Another factor is the influence that such brazenly self-serving display of Tory power-clinging will have on the public mood. The longer the Tories insist on maintaining Theresa May as their hapless and incompetent political bullet shield of a leader in order to cling onto power at the national expense, the more pissed off people are going to get with them.
Of course the right-wing press and the majority of the mainstream media won't frame the situation like this (as it is), so it's up to the rest of us to make it clear that the directionless and divided Tories are only clinging onto power because they care more about the fortunes of their own political party, than about the fortunes of the nation as a whole.
The Tories are hanging onto a rising political balloon. They know that if they let go any time soon, they're likely to break their political legs in the fall, but they also know that if they hang on much longer, their fall will become politically unsurvivable.
The bigger the Labour poll leads get, the more likely the Tories are to cling selfishly to the limited power they have, and the more voters are going to turn their backs on such brazen self-serving Tory opportunism, meaning a bigger defeat when they finally do let go.
They're in a horrible political predicament, and after seven long years of watching them ideologically vandalise the economy, lie with impunity (thanks to the complicity and collusion of their chums in the mainstream media), brazenly gamble national stability for short-term party political advantage, flog off the national silver to their mates, and treat the lives of our most vulnerable citizens with callous contempt, this political trainwreck really couldn't be happening to a more deserving bunch.
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