Can a political party win too much power? In many ways, it’s a strange fear to raise about Labour, yet the Conservatives have been doing it for weeks now. For only two periods in Labour’s 124-year history has it had huge parliamentary majorities: from 1945 to 1950 and 1997 to 2005. And even those two governments still faced hostile newspapers, sceptical civil servants, suspicious big business, millions of instinctively rightwing voters in the most prosperous regions and the pro-Tory bias of much of the establishment.

For the Conservatives to warn about the dangerous monopoly power of a Labour “supermajority”, having sought and enjoyed such power much more often themselves, is shameless even by their standards. For many Labour politicians, activists and supporters, meanwhile, the possibility that the party could enter an era of rare dominance next week is – though they dare not say it yet – very exciting. If the polls are right, the 2024 election and the Starmer supremacy that may follow could become legends that Labour lives off for decades.

And yet, however emotionally satisfying and politically promising it may be for some, a giant Labour majority would also bring new tensions and contradictions to our politics, both across society and inside the party itself.

The most obvious contradiction is the likely mismatch between Labour’s share of the vote, which polls at present predict will be about 40%, no more than Jeremy Corbyn achieved in his 2017 election defeat, and the much greater proportion of seats Starmer’s party is likely to win. Such mismatches are a constant feature of our flawed electoral system, but this time the........

© The Guardian