WHAT do you do if the British electorate fail to back you at a general election?
You change the rules, of course, to better the odds.
And how do you do that?
It’s very simple, really; you give EU citizens in this country the right to vote, you enfranchise 16 and 17-year-olds and you introduce proportional representation.
This is the Labour leader’s new wheeze and one that smacks of desperation.
First, our citizens living in the EU have never been allowed to vote there, so why should theirs be allowed to here.
Second, those under 18 are not adults under the law and should instead be concentrating on their education and growing up.
And, worryingly, we’d simply politicise schools even more than some are now.
Third, first-past-the-post has served our country well, giving, on most occasions, Parties of whatever hue a mandate to govern.
Admittedly, it is hard for other political persuasions to get elected, but that’s because voters don’t want them.
The Lib Dems are a case in point, but then they are not ‘liberal’.
Anyway, what’s next, I wonder.
The Labour leader has not yet said he’d extend the vote to new immigrants, but watch this space.
I would not put anything past him.
To date, the main political Parties have played by and respected the tried and tested rules.
I did not agree with Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, but to their great credit they did not tinker with our electoral system.
To win, Mr Blair realised his Party had to change, and it did, very successfully.
So, it worries and saddens me that the current Labour leader has no qualms about resorting to underhand tactics to get his Party over the line.
That’s not how we do politics in this country.