Mass poll shows Labour wipeout across country
· Eight cabinet ministers to lose seats · Tories would win majority of 146 Gordon Brown is set to lead Labour into an election bloodbath so crushing it could take his party a decade to recover, according to the largest ever poll of marginal seats which predicts a landslide victory for David Cameron. Eight cabinet ministers, including the Home Secretary and the Justice Secretary, would be swept away in the rout as the Tories marched into Downing Street with a majority of 146, says the poll, conducted for PoliticsHome.com and exclusively revealed to The Observer. Seats that have been Labour since the First World War would fall. The sheer scale of the humiliation is almost as bad as that endured by the Tories in 1997, suggesting it could take Labour a similar time to claw its way back to power. The party would be virtually extinguished in southern England and left with only its hardcore redoubts in northern England, the Welsh valleys and deprived inner-city areas. The stark findings from the survey of almost 35,000 voters across 238 seats, published on the PoliticsHome website today, are likely to fuel the stalled insurrection against Brown. A third of potential Labour voters in marginal seats would be more likely to back the party if he were replaced. snip http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/sep/21/labour.polls

If, as seems likely, Labour is trashed throughout the kingdom - including Scotland and Wales, where the Nationalists now provide an alternative socialist home for the leftie voter to go to - I don't see how they will ever "be back". Laus Deo. Of course, they have to get that thrashing first, and the election is still a long way off ... or orf. It will be interesting to see if there is any kind of "Brown Bounce" after the Labour Conference. And even more interesting to find out what happens in the next Scottish by-election, which the government is postponing for as long as it can. If Labour loses its Scottish Fiefdoms, it will be that much harder for it to recover a majority in the House of Commons.

I'm sure that during the time that Lloyd George was PM nobody suspected how long the Liberals (now LibDem) would be in the wilderness. So, anything can happen in politics. The thing about Labour is that it has abandoned it's traditional voters and prinicples. It is no longer the same Labour Party, and many of it's long term supporters are recognising that. The Conservatives, while going through a rather lame period, are still pretty much as they always were, with only a few small changes. Tony Blair carried the Labour Party for a while, but he is gone and neither Brown or any of the other Labour MPs posess the same skills. I did not agree with Blair's policies, but had to admire the way he could make an old banger look like a rolls royce. Arthur Daley was nothing compared to Tony Blair. So, the future of the Labour Party could indeed mean a century in the wilderness. At this stage, nobody can be sure. If the LibDems want to be taken seriously they must stop talking about how they can form the next opposition and talk about forming the next government. Why should anyone believe in a party that doesn't believe in itself? At present, the Tories do seem the most likely to win the next general election.

I expect that the Labour party will react to their forthcoming electoral thrashing by moving significantly to the left. They will, imo, elect a much more left wing leader and start talking about socialism again. Perhaps they'll even re-introduce Clause IV, or something like it.