When Rupert Murdoch's Sun calls for a vote for Labour, then even most Tories must believe that the game is up and they have no hope of winning the election. Even the most pessimistic Labour supporters and the most optimistic Tories are indeed beginning to draw this conclusion.
There is every sign opinion polls, by-election results, the obvious unpopularity of Tory ministers, and the way in which the final days of the parliament collapsed under accusations of sleaze that voters in Britain will elect a Labour government with a substantial majority.
This the first Labour government in 18 years was supposed never to happen. According to the politicians and media commentators, Labour's base had been so eroded by the decline of the working class on the one hand and the advent of Thatcherite individualism on the other that Labour could never form a majority government again.
These same people still deny that Labour's increased support represents any real shift to the left. Instead they explain the current change in Labour's fortunes by Tony Blair having moved Labour's policies, rather than the ideas of large numbers of people having changed. On this reckoning Labour's popularity is based not on the desire for change but on a supposed inherent conservatism among the British electorate.
So Blair is popular, we are told, because he plans to do very little different from what the Tories have done in the past few years. However, this begs the question, why are people so keen to get rid of the Tories in the first place if they agree with the policies the Tories are pursuing?
The answer should be blindingly obvious government policies are so unpopular that most people voting Labour will in fact do so because they expect something different.
This is even true of the Sun's about turn in backing Blair to form a government. Most commentators regard this as a decisive blow against the Tories. But as the polling expert John Curtice has pointed out, it is likely this would make little or no difference to the election result, since the change in editorial policy represents the Sun catching up with the views of its readers, not the other way round.
Blair is riding a huge wave of revulsion against Tory policies which has kept him massively ahead in the polls. But those poll leads were already very high long before Blair became leader and they had been clearly going up (see graph). There is no evidence that Labour's popularity would have been less if John Smith had continued to be the leader.
So the great contradiction at the heart of Labour's success is that Blair and his coterie believe they are winning votes by adopting Tory policies, while the mass of Labour voters believe they are voting against Tory policies. Even much of the supposedly middle class, middle England support which Labour has been garnering has been on the basis of the need to spend more on education and the NHS, or of doing more to protect the old and poor, or of ending the worst excesses of the deregulated market. Gordon Brown's and Tony Blair's pledges to hold down taxes even for the super-rich and to freeze public spending are in direct opposition to such aspirations.
Since the double crisis over pit closures and sterling's exit from the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System at the end of 1992, there has been increasing opposition to Tory policies. Opinion polls have repeatedly shown big majorities for 'old Labour' policies such as renationalising the privatised utilities, imposing a wealth tax on the very rich, spending more on health, education and welfare.
These policies are popular because they appear to address the problems which people face: the gap between rich and poor which has widened under the Tories, the decline of public services, the introduction of the market into areas such as health and education.
The trajectory of New Labour's policies has been in the opposite direction. The windfall tax on the privatised companies' huge profits is one of Labour's most popular policies, according to the party's own polling. But Gordon Brown is now talking about setting its level so low that he expects to raise only £3 billion from the tax.
There could hardly be a greater contrast between the politics of the ruling elite and their hangers on (which includes the ideologues of New Labour) and the popular aspirations for change which are so apparent among many working people. This contradiction has meant that alongside Labour's popularity in the polls have gone a mounting distrust of Blair and New Labour and an enthusiasm for socialist politics much greater than could have been expected so close to an election.
The campaign around the 500 sacked Liverpool dockers is an example of this. Every week thousands of pounds are collected from trade union branches and rank and file trade unionists for this strike which has never had the official backing of the dockers' TGWU union.
Tens of thousands have lobbied and demonstrated against council spending cuts around the country in the past two months. In Scotland these protests have been on a much bigger scale, as thousands struck and hundreds of thousands demonstrated against Labour council cuts.
These are symptoms of a changing mood at the bottom of society which is also expressing itself in an increased support for socialist ideas which provide an alternative to the market. Socialist Worker rallies in major towns and cities up and down the country have been bigger than for many years and are attracting a serious working class audience. Sales of Socialist Worker outside workplaces and in shopping centres are also much higher than for years.
None of this is reflected in official politics. Debates there range from incredulity that Labour can be so far ahead in the polls to how best pensions and welfare can be cut. At no point is any connection made between the two.
So the mood of anger and the desire for change are clearly reflected in support for struggles and for socialist ideas, but have little public expression in wider society as a whole. Because there is no such clear expression, the ideas come out in different ways. As well as left wing views there can be bitterness, cynicism, a sense that all politicians are the same, and a sense that nothing can be done to change anything.
Such ideas will only be shifted on a large scale when struggles take on sufficient size and political weight to begin to change the political agenda and even to alter the balance of class forces.
Even on the left, it is commonly felt that we are still a very long way from such a situation in Britain. There may be factory occupations, strikes and militant demonstrations in France, Belgium and Germany, the argument runs, but we will not see such activity in Britain.
Yet we are already beginning to see exactly this sort of activity in Scotland, where a combination of deep cuts plus a level of radicalisation round the question of a Scottish parliament has pushed many into action. It is only a matter of time before such struggles and much greater ones also take place throughout Britain.
There are two major reasons why they have not happened so far. One is that the attacks which workers face in Europe have been deeper, more wide ranging and more generalised than anything faced in Britain so far. Attacks on the British welfare state have been extremely unpleasant, especially for those living on benefits. But the Tories have not yet been confident to attack workers' living standards outright.
This will have to change, whoever is in government. The great unspoken question in this election is what will happen to the massive public sector deficit which the Tories have built up. Attempts to cut this back, which will follow fairly quickly after the election, will mean much more serious cuts and wage freezes of a similar level to those in Europe. There is no fundamental reason why the reaction of British workers should be different from those in continental Europe.
The other reason why struggles have often been held back in Britain is paradoxically that the relative weight of the unions has meant a strong trade union bureaucracy compared to say France which has been able to ensure that anger has not burst out into strikes in the months preceding the election. The trade union bureaucracy will continue to play this role under a Labour government but it also has expectations which Blair will be unlikely to fulfil.
We can expect extremely stormy times ahead under a Labour government. The increasing anger and bitterness already felt before the election have given an opportunity for socialists to grow. Those opportunities will be there under a Labour government, but we need to build the influence of Socialist Worker and of socialist ideas if we are to build a mass alternative to the policies of Blair's Labour.