If Britain is now on a track that may see its democracy endangered, an outbreak of carelessness, complacency and quite astounding stupidity in the summer of 2015 will bear much of the blame. In the general election held in May that year, David Cameron, a Conservative who had led a coalition government for five years, won the Tories a surprising absolute majority. It was not large, but it meant he could not use the excuse of coalition to renege on his promise of a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.
That was a drama for later. What mattered that summer was that Labour leader Ed Miliband had stood down. His successor was a bolt from the red: Jeremy Corbyn, an extreme (in all senses of the word) representative of what Orwell called that “dreary tribe of…sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Naturally, the bearded Corbyn has been spotted in sandals, and drinks very little or, possibly, no alcohol (“my secret is apple juice or coconut water”).
But back to Miliband: the most interesting thing about him is that he was ruthless enough to beat his brother David, a former foreign minister and the favorite for the job, in the previous contest for the Labour leadership. Nevertheless, he was a consequential leader in two key respects. The first was the mere fact of his election. ‘Red Ed’s’ Caining of his more Blairite brother accelerated Labour’s move away from the legacy of its electorally most successful prime minister.
The second was yet another change (there have been many) in the rules for choosing Labour’s leader. The story is too ornate to go into here, but it would be a shame not to mention that a brawl in a House of Commons bar serves as its prologue. Its conclusion was the replacement of Labour’s electoral college with a “one member, one vote” electorate. This was made up of party members, members of affiliated trade unions who registered as supporters and a new category of ‘supporting members’ who could effectively buy a vote in exchange for a payment of three pounds—the price, one Labour mp noted, of the ‘meal deal’ at one British supermarket chain. The sole recognition that the UK is a parliamentary democracy was the requirement that this ‘selectorate’ could only choose a candidate nominated by at least 15 percent of Labour’s parliamentary party—a hurdle supposed to weed out the wild men, a category into which Corbyn most certainly fell.
He was a thirty-two-year parliamentary veteran who few Labour parliamentarians seemed to like—and even fewer agreed with. Over the years, he had defied his party whips more than four hundred times. He had been the most rebellious Labour MP throughout the three Blair governments. His views may have been poisonous, but he stood by them.
When Corbyn announced he was going to run for the leadership, Britain’s bookies rated him a 100-to-1 outsider. Between them, Blairites, post-Blairites and the soft left accounted for the vast majority of the parliamentary Labour Party. Corbyn should not have been able to find that 15 percent. He had demonstrated the lack of regard he felt for parliament for decades, perhaps most notoriously by inviting two convicted Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists for a meeting there shortly after the murderous IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, an attempted assassination of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and much of her cabinet. Over three decades later, he used the Palace of Westminster to host “our friends from Hezbollah.” “Unfortunately,” the Israelis—dark stars of Corbyn’s demonology—had stopped “friends from Hamas” from making the trek to London.
As his fellow MPs knew, Corbyn, an apologist for Castro, Chavez and other tyrants, has never had much affection for parliamentary democracy. However good a constituency MP he was (very), however grandfatherly he might now look, however (usually) mild his demeanor, Corbyn’s politics were still characterized by an adolescent’s anger, an adolescent’s certainty of his own rectitude and convictions disturbingly unchanged since his brief stint at the equivalent of a community college in the early 1970s.
Sure enough, the early indications were that Corbyn would fall some way short of securing the necessary nominations, despite the arrival of a number of new Hard-Left Labour MPs into parliament (more evidence that the Blairite tide had receded). However, partly thanks to social media pressure—a vital element in Corbyn’s rise and subsequent ascendancy—some MPs ‘lent’ Corbyn their nominations. Others did likewise in the hope of earning credibility with the Left, others because they wanted to drag the debate leftwards, and still others out of misplaced charity.
Some of those lenders might have been lulled both by the passing of time—the Hard Left’s last serious attempt to take over Labour had been over thirty years ago—and a sentimental attachment to the purs et durs. The comrades might be misguided relics from (it was believed with a confidence born during the Blair years) another age, but their hearts were supposedly in the right place.
Besides, even if he made it to the finals, there was no way that Corbyn could become leader. Really? The social media activity and unmistakable signs of enthusiasm for him at the grassroots level foreshadowed what was coming—and some in the party were already beginning to fret about the unpredictability of the new electoral system. Despite that—and despite Corbyn’s record—enough Labour MPs lent Corbyn their nominations to secure him a place (just) on the ballot paper.
Margaret Beckett, a former foreign minister (and more), subsequently described those MPs who, like herself, had lent their nominations to Corbyn as “morons.” A year later, she was one of those Labour MPs who cast a vote of no confidence in Corbyn’s leadership. Too late.
When the nominations closed, there were four candidates; a keeper of Blair’s extinguished flame, someone somewhat to the left of her, someone quite a bit further left still, and, then, in the depths of left field, Corbyn. Within days, it became evident that those early stirrings on social media and within the constituencies had meant something. The delirious reception Corbyn was receiving on the stump—something that was never to fade, something his opponents could never match—was amplified on social media and echoed in the polls. Increasing numbers of people were joining the party or paying their three pounds. They were not doing so to throw their support behind the hapless Blairite (she ended up with a paltry 4.5 percent of the poll)..
Traditionally the trade unions, a force for hard-nosed restraint—it’s complicated—might have been expected to pump the brakes. Not this time. Instead, many, including Unite, the largest, (and, not only that, the largest Labour donor) stepped on the gas. Its boss, Len McCluskey, endorsed Corbyn. Back in the 1980s, McCluskey had been a supporter of Militant, a Trotskyite group looking to infiltrate the Labour Party, but he never joined them. As he told the Liverpool Echo in 2009:
I decided that Militant was too sectarian from a political standpoint to be effective. But I believe that on the chief issues they were right.
He was playing a longer, smarter game. In 2010, McCluskey was a crucial figure in Miliband’s leadership victory, but soon ‘Red Len’ was attacking ‘Red Ed’ from the left: the game had much further to go, and, so in 2015, realized McCluskey, did Jeremy Corbyn.
By the time the polls closed, there was no doubt over the result. Corbyn won with 59.5 percent of the vote. Many Labour Party staffers, Blairite or something close to it, attending the announcement wore black, in mourning, they thought, for Labour. However, it was their Labour in the coffin—not the same thing at all.
And for all the talk that it was the hundred thousand or so “three pounders” that had handed Labour to Corbyn (84 percent voted for him), Corbyn also won a clear majority of trade union votes and a comfortable plurality (49.6 percent) of party members.
Many Conservatives were delighted: Labour was finished, a suicide. They ought to have smirked less and understood more. The excitement generated by the Corbyn campaign (excitement that translated into action: over a quarter of a million people voted for him) had not only pulled in over 100,000 three pounders (perhaps twenty times what had been originally expected), but also some 180,000 people had joined the party itself, roughly doubling its size. The Conservatives had around 130,000 members at that time. That gap continued to grow. By January 2018, Labour’s membership had grown to 552,000, while by March this year the Tories had shrunk to 118,000.
To be sure, Corbyn’s surge fed on itself in a way that transformed his rallies into a phenomenon that was cultural as well as political, lit celebrations not only of the would-be Labour leader, but also of those who would vote for him. This may have been one of those spasms of collective hysteria to which allegedly reserved Britons occasionally succumb, but ominously for the Conservatives, those include not only the keening for Diana but also the remarkable wave of public feeling that preceded and then accompanied Tony Blair’s first electoral landslide.
Corbyn’s behavior in the aftermath of his triumph only reinforced Tory confidence—and the gloom emanating from Labour’s ancien régime. Rather than attempt some sort of reconciliation with the parliamentary party, he appointed one of its most left-wing and least clubbable members: his old friend and comrade John McDonnell, the man who headed his campaign, as shadow chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister), the second most important job on the Labour front bench.
McDonnell is far cleverer, but less diplomatic than his leader. Despite Corbyn’s undisguised appreciation (let’s leave it at that) of those who use force for the right cause, and despite the way that those who oppose him have long found themselves at the wrong end of unpleasant treatment (not least, these days, online), he has, by eschewing overtly violent language, preserved a convenient distance from his rougher supporters. McDonnell is not so fastidious. He has in the past called for the lynching of a Conservative minister (he was angry, he said), and joked about the assassination of Thatcher. He often seems more enthused by “direct action” (“what we used to call insurrection”) than navigating the pathways of parliamentary democracy. As for his intriguing relationship with Irish Republicanism, well, “it’s about time we started honoring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of [hunger striker] Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table.” McDonnell’s democratic credentials were not enhanced by a 2006 listing of his “most significant” intellectual influences: Marx (whom Corbyn has dubbed a “great economist”), Lenin and Trotsky.
Seumas Milne, the journalist Corbyn appointed as his communications director, and, in many respects ideological enforcer, is an apologist of sorts for the old Soviet empire and something of a Stalin man: he has argued that the Father of Nations’ misdeeds have been overstated, or at least misrepresented. Meanwhile it emerged that Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s newly-minted head of policy, had (ahead of the 2015 election) urged voters in one constituency to opt for the (anarchist) Class War Party rather than Labour. Fisher was suspended, but with Corbyn giving him his full support, swiftly returned to work.
Margaret Beckett has reproached Corbyn’s inner circle for operating “as if they are not part of the Labour Party.” Winning a general election, she fretted, just didn’t seem to matter to them.
Once again, the ‘moron’ missed the point. Corbyn and his clique are playing that long game. The first step is taking over the Labour Party, half of the duopoly (nationalist complications in the Celtic fringe aside) that has largely driven British politics since 1945. The UK’s combination of “first past the post” voting with a purely parliamentary system (there’s no room for a Macron) hugely favors the existing party structure. There’s been a trickle of moderate Labour MPs leaving parliament since Corbyn’s victory. Some appear to have abandoned electoral politics altogether. Understandably so: The lessons of history are clear—the likelihood of a new party making a breakthrough is close to zero.
Corbyn’s team must know that Labour, as the only ‘real’ alternative to the Conservatives, will someday surely win a general election. If by then the Corbynistas dominate the party, the country will be theirs to rule as they see fit. They have thus concentrated on gaining control of Labour’s institutional structure. Sometimes this is just a matter of placing the right apparatchik in the right job, but sometimes it takes votes. Underlining the extent to which Labour belongs to Corbyn, his candidate (a former Unite official) has been elected as the new general secretary, and Team Corbyn has won majorities on the National Executive Committee (the party’s governing body), as well—God is in the details—as on the more obscure Conference Arrangements Committee (which helps shape the annual party conference).
And Labour’s MPs? Finally stung into action by what they saw as Corbyn’s failure to fight hard enough for the UK’s continued membership of the EU during the June 2016 referendum, they passed an overwhelming, if nonbinding, motion of no confidence in their leader. Corbyn ignored it, maintaining that his mandate derived from his party, not his MPs. A little later, he saw off a formal challenge to his leadership with a larger share of the vote than in 2015, proof—as if any were needed—that his party is not going to unseat him any time soon. Since then, some Corbynskeptic MPs have decided that they love Big Brother after all—a turnaround made easier by fear of unemployment, hope of advancement and Labour’s unexpectedly strong showing in the election the Tories called (and then nearly threw away last year).
But, to the left, many MPs remain—not unreasonably—suspect. In September 2017, there was a reduction in the percentage of the parliamentary party required to nominate a leadership candidate from that awkward 15 percent to 10 percent. Pressure on Corbynskeptic MPs has revved up at the constituency level, not least due to Momentum, a far-left group that emerged from Corbyn’s 2015 campaign with the aim of bolstering his leadership—Red Guards with a whiff of the Praetorian and a hint of the Alinsky about them. Now some 40,000 strong, Momentum has developed into a significant force in a party (its founder, Jon Lansman, was elected onto the National Executive Committee in January) it seems intent on radicalizing still further. Its members include skilled social media warriors but also those prepared to devote the time and, maybe, the venom it takes (there are persistent accusations of intimidation and bullying, online and, occasionally, off), to steer constituency parties—many of which are already more left-leaning than their MP—closer to the new orthodoxy, in some cases by picking Momentum-approved candidates for local elections and, of course, parliament.
More moderate Labour MPs must worry that ‘deselection‘ (as their party’s candidate for the next election) looms, leaving them facing the prospect of unemployment. Deselection is a powerful threat—that’s why Unite’s McCluskey, irritated by Labour MPs objecting to the undeniable strain of anti-Semitism (oh yes, there’s that too) running through some of the Corbynista left—recently wrote that he understood the “growing demand for mandatory reselection,” not the first time that he has mentioned this cudgel. Making every Labour MP go through this process would be an effective way of either purging rebels or bringing them to heel. For now, Corbyn’s political secretary is studying the party’s rulebook with a view to investigating how ‘party democracy’ can be improved. Mandatory selection might easily turn out to be one of her recommendations: MPs, said Corbyn in January this year, “should all be accountable all the time,” an innocuous statement except when it is not.
For their part, Conservatives went into 2017 feeling optimistic about their chances against a party that had so firmly turned its back on what was reckoned to be the center ground. The shock vote for Brexit had unquestionably thrown the Tory Party into disarray in June 2016 (Prime Minister Cameron had announced that he was stepping down), but Labour’s predicament appeared to be even worse. Within days of the referendum much of the shadow cabinet (and a slew of more junior shadow ministers) resigned, and then came that vote of no confidence.
Home Secretary (interior minister) Theresa May, wrongly seen as competent—but rightly regarded as the only realistic candidate after Boris Johnson sank without trace—speedily succeeded David Cameron as Tory leader and prime minister. When, in April 2017, she called a snap general election, the Conservatives were very comfortably ahead in the polls. The only question appeared to be by how much May could build on Cameron’s modest majority.
In the event, she wiped it out. May fought a campaign that was not only tin-eared and technically incompetent (there is this thing called social media, Theresa) but also actively self-destructive. For a party to issue a manifesto proposing a policy—quickly, accurately and lethally labeled a dementia tax—that targeted the savings of some of its most loyal supporters was… unwise. May managed to hang on in office thanks to an arrangement with Ulster’s Democratic Unionist Party, but she surrendered the political initiative to Labour, an initiative that, despite falling short of expectations in this year’s local elections, it essentially still enjoys.
There were scraps of comfort for the Tories: their slice of the vote was the highest since the election held in the afterglow of the Falklands War. However, the increase (over 9 percent) in Labour’s share was the party’s best since the 1945 landslide that tossed Winston Churchill out of office—suggesting that there was more to their success than May’s blunders. With hindsight, the way Corbyn had swept to the Labour leadership was a warning that was ignored. At the time his victory was widely regarded as a temporary aberration rather than understood for what it was: an indication of a wider, deeper discontent.
That misreading led the Tories (and many in Labour too) to assume that Corbyn’s party was unelectable, a calculation that rested firstly on presumptions about the electorate that proved to be false. Corbyn’s terrorist associations were ancient history to many voters, even if they knew about them in the first place. His fondness for foreign despots also mattered less than it should. To borrow from Neville Chamberlain’s infamous formulation, Brits showed little interest in the politics of “far away” countries involving “people of whom [they] know nothing.” Cuba? Nice beaches. In the early stages of the 2017 election, Unite (who else?) lent Andrew Murray, its chief of staff, to help toughen up Labour’s faltering campaign (which he duly did). A former journalist for the communist Morning Star (where Corbyn has been a frequent contributor), Murray had only just switched from the Communist Party to Labour. As if that was not enough, and adding some variety to by now routine attitudes to the Soviet past among some of Corbyn’s closest associates, Murray had expressed “solidarity” with “Peoples’ Korea.” Despite a brief media furor, none of this seemed to bother the voters either. This February Corbyn recruited Murray, who remains with Unite, as a part-time consultant.
Closer to home, the Conservatives (and, to be fair, Labour moderates) had failed to grasp that the political center was defined in one way in Westminster and in quite another in the country at large. The Conservatives were correct, on policy grounds, to attack Labour’s plans for the reversal of some of the privatizations of the past decades, but they were wrong to think that those plans would be viewed as extreme. According to a YouGov poll taken in the middle of the campaign, some two-thirds of respondents wanted to see the renationalization of the Royal Mail (post office), while 60 percent (including 44 percent of Tory supporters) favored the renationalization of the railway companies. Labour’s proposed tax increases on the top 5 percent played well too.
Where the real center of British politics now lies is hard to say, but, very broadly speaking, it has been moving to the left for a long time, not least under Blair (more radical than often realized)—a direction the Tories have been unable to reverse. Quite why this should be is complicated, but the growing diversity of the electorate is a part of it (the Conservatives have struggled to win over ethnic minorities, securing only an estimated 17 percent of their vote in 2017, and, a scandal this year over immigration is likely to make that task even more arduous). To go all Gramsci, the cultural hegemony of (various varieties of) the Left has also weighed heavily. That is true of the entertainment sector, broadcast media (the fundamentally center-left BBC remains the dominant news provider), the law, the National Health Service (and the perennial debate that surrounds it), education (approximately 8 percent of school teachers voted Conservative, and, as for the universities, well…) and in plenty of other areas besides.
The Tories had to contend with more immediate vulnerabilities too. Voters were weary of austerity (Labour promised much more spending, but tax increases would be focused on, of course, other people—the ‘rich’ and corporations, principally). Years of wage stagnation had also soured the mood. But the Conservatives’ most alarming weakness was generational. According to YouGov, they trounced Labour among the over fifties (with the size of their majority increasing with the age of the voter), but fell far short with everyone else. The younger the voter the worse the Tories did, partly because that’s almost always the case, partly because Britain’s cultural and demographic change is more pronounced in younger age cohorts, and partly because of the unlikely aura of cool surrounding Labour’s eccentric and seemingly benign grandpa, a performer so good, when it suits him, at concealing his inner steel—he divorced his second wife largely over her insistence on an ideologically inappropriate school for their son—that a swordstick would be impressed.
More substantively, high house prices, rising rents and stagnant wages are preventing many younger Britons from buying their own home (the added indebtedness caused by still bitterly resented university tuition fees, introduced at the end of the century and substantially hiked since, doesn’t help either: in its manifesto Labour undertook to scrap them). Home ownership rates are at their lowest level (around 63 percent) for thirty years, and it is the younger generation who have borne the brunt of that decline. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, home ownership rates for those between the age of 25–34 fell from 55 percent in 1996 to 34 percent in 2016.
“I want,” said Mrs. Thatcher in 1983, “a capital-owning democracy. Housing is the start. If you’re a man or woman of property, you’ve got something.” Her political logic was impeccable, and, for a long time, it worked. It could do so again, but there is no easy fix to the current mess. Instead, Generation Rent is left with its nose pressed against realtors’ windows—windows it must be tempted to smash. Without capital, the young won’t rally behind capitalism. Labour meanwhile promised a major boost to homebuilding and, regardless of how counterproductive they have historically been, tougher controls on landlords.
Then there’s Brexit. The majority of Cameron’s cabinet (including May) campaigned, with varying degrees of enthusiasm against it. But it was Cameron who called the referendum and most Conservatives voted for the break with Brussels. In the eyes of the electorate, Brexit is the Tories’ baby, and, after the referendum, the party hierarchy adopted it. “Brexit means Brexit,” proclaimed May. This brought the Conservatives some gains outside their traditional comfort zone, but protest votes by embittered Tory Remainers almost certainly cost them a greater number of seats within their affluent heartland, territory where people did not feel ‘left behind’ and were anxious about what Brexit could mean for business. Identification of the Conservatives as the Brexit party also widened the generation chasm, reinforcing the perception among younger voters, who generally supported Remain, that the Tories were the party of the past, Little Englanders and worse.
None of this accounts for the sudden collapse in Conservative support in the final weeks before the 2017 vote—that was due to the Tories’ self-inflicted wounds and an increasingly impressive Labour campaign—but it helps explain why it fell as far and as fast as it did.
The problem for the Conservatives in 2018 is that not much has changed. Their apparent reprieve in this year’s local elections will probably only be a temporary embarrassment for Corbyn. If May is lucky, it could transform a war of movement into one of attrition (at the time of writing, Corbyn’s personal approval ratings—never high—have slipped below May’s uninspiring tally), but the two sides remain dangerously closely matched: a Labour victory could be just one recession away (the next election is due in 2022). The current recovery, however lackluster, has already lasted a reasonably long time, something that ought to mean that a downturn is on the way—a downturn that would be accelerated, deepened and prolonged by a botched Brexit.
Anything written today about the form that Brexit eventually takes will be rapidly overtaken by events. Nevertheless, as matters now stand, the most straightforward solution, the more or less off-the-shelf ‘Norway option’ (leaving the EU, but remaining within the ‘Single Market’), a solution seemingly acceptable to Brussels, has been rejected by the British government, and, tellingly, not solely because of Brexit hardliners. May is still hunting a dream, a middle way that she likes (and can sell both to her parliamentary colleagues and the EU) between two election-losing alternatives, a highly disruptive ‘hard’ Brexit or one so ‘soft’ that trying to force it through splits her party, alienates former Labour Leavers—or both. Raising the stakes still further, if the EU rejects May’s final proposal, the UK will crash out of the union, resulting in a chaotic, hardest-of-all Brexits, a finale more electorally poisonous than all the rest.
Corbyn will try to sit tight, doing his best—it’s getting trickier—to maintain the artful ambiguity that has served him so well on Brexit. Whatever Remainer platitudes Labour’s ‘absolute boy’ may have muttered during the referendum, he has been a Brexiteer for decades, principally—whatever he may say about the matter—because he sees it as an obstacle to building a properly socialist state. But he is also well aware that some 70 percent of Labour voters wanted to stay in the EU, and that his party has, on balance, benefited from being viewed as the party of Remain.
In February, Corbyn recommended that the UK should enter into a customs union with the EU—something the Conservatives have, for what may be a very temporary now, rejected—but quit the Single Market. Politically that could achieve what Corbyn wants. It sends a useful signal to Remainers, leaves the Tories stuck in their Brexit mare’s nest and, should such a deal actually be struck, it would not block his designs on the economy. Corbyn is also under some pressure to help efforts to stay in the Single Market. In the implausible event he agreed, it would in all probability only be as a device to harass the Tories and only if there was no chance that his assistance would make a material difference. The (more or less) economically liberal discipline underpinning the Single Market cannot ultimately be reconciled with his longer-term vision for Britain.
Masterly inactivity comes with another advantage for Corbyn. It is presently envisaged that the UK’s formal departure from the EU in March 2019 will be followed by a transition period until December 2020. That date ensures that Brexit will still be fresh in the memories of many Remainers when they vote in the next general election, currently scheduled for May 2022. They will be angrier still if there is a recession between now and then. Rightly or wrongly, a downturn is, even if only partly, bound to be blamed on Brexit. Another risk for the Conservatives is that with Brexit a definitively done deal by the end of the transition period (even, if as is now being suggested, transitional customs arrangements are kept going past 2020) some Leavers who left Labour over Brexit may well feel that it is safe to return to the fold—especially if a recession has rekindled old class loyalties.
Away from the Brexit morass, the Conservatives still lack an adequate response to the challenges posed or exploited by Corbyn in 2017. A new leader might help, if only cosmetically, if someone suitable can be found. So far May has held on to her job for the same reason that she won it—the lack of a viable alternative. If she’s still heading the Tory ticket in 2022, it’s hard to see how the Conservatives can prevail even if they can organize (low bar) a somewhat less dreadful campaign than last time. They will have been in power for twelve years—an eon in an age of restless electorates. Keeping May at the top will be brutal confirmation that they are out of people as well as ideas.
The ideas they do have, criticized in one instance (but it applies more widely) as trying to beat Corbyn with Miliband, are likely to be expensive and hard to pay for. And that is without taking account, say, of the sharply rising cost of caring for a growing population of the old and the very old (the dementia tax was a bad answer to a good question). The electorate may have had enough of austerity, but the nation’s debt burden remains high (at around 87 percent of gdp), and increasing spending, even if interest rates stay low, is not a solution without political problems of its own.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives show few signs of knowing how to reverse the decline in the numbers of their ageing, shrinking party (one recent plan, a discount card for younger Tories with a chain of chicken restaurants, came to nothing). In 2017, the far larger—and energized—Labour Party was able to combine social media with boots on the ground to good effect. The Tories may be able to up their online game next time round, but, to quote Momentum’s Lansman, “elections are not won by air wars alone.” He’s right, but the way things are going, the main evidence of the Conservative Party’s presence on the sidewalks will be the whir of a walker’s wheels. Quite a few of those who voted for the party in 2017 won’t even survive long enough to manage that. Theoretically, the middle-aged of today—the old codgers of tomorrow—will replace them, growing more Conservative as they age. Theoretically.
It could be that the more people see of Corbyn, the more relaxed they will become about him. The Tories’ best hope may be that the opposite occurs. The longer that Corbyn (a potential prime minister now, not a no hoper) stays in close focus, the greater the chance that voters will come to understand that the extremist of yesteryear is the extremist of today and the extremist of tomorrow. They may not care that Corbyn palled around with Irish Republicans decades ago, but they didn’t like it when he equivocated over the Russian poison attack in March, in a manner hard, incidentally, to square with the exaggerated reputation for integrity that he enjoys. More generally, Corbyn’s underlying beliefs are quite some way to the left of many Labour voters (let alone voters merely looking in Labour’s direction), if not of his party. That will become ever clearer as time goes by. And the nervous will not be reassured by the high visibility of Corbyn’s more aggressive supporters. If his advisors are smart, Corbyn will campaign in 2022 on, by his standards, a moderate program. After all, if his MPs are either onside or under control—and, increasingly, they will be—he can do what he wants after he gets into power.
Britain has often been described as an elective dictatorship. It is a democracy with dismayingly few guardrails. The constitution is unwritten, legal protections are not as good as they might be, and departure from the EU will, for good and ill, remove another set of constraints on British governments’ freedom of maneuver. Prime Minister Corbyn will exploit this to the full. The red flag will not be flying over Buckingham Palace, but a Corbyn government will do everything it can to push through an agenda far more radical than anything contained in its election manifesto, with, perhaps, the run on the pound that will accompany its election as the excuse: capital controls would not be a surprise. ‘Emergency’ tax increases would not be a surprise. That will just be the beginning.
Such a government will use the institutions of the state to entrench its own position. What the Corbynistas have done to Labour, Labour will do to Britain. The return of state control over more and more of the economy—all duly approved by parliament—will give them many of the levers it will need to do just that (and, another instrument of power, the jobs to dole out to the faithful).
Over time, Labour’s opponents will be marginalized and targeted in ways that will begin, but not end, with the petty. Dissent will become more difficult. The UK is already too keen on criminalizing speech or an ‘inappropriate’ tweet. There will be worse, much worse, to come under a government led by a man who is visibly irritated by much of the press and has shown every sign of wanting to do something to rein it in. Momentum and other activist groups will also be on the beat to cow troublemakers into line.
If Labour wins, British democracy will not be what it was, the British economy will not be what it was and Britain’s alliances will not be what they were. It is ideologically consistent, although not forgivable, that Corbyn had a soft spot for the Soviet bloc, for Castro and for Chavez. But how to explain, say, the approach, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes merely helpful, taken by Corbyn (once an rt regular) to Vladimir Putin, no leftist? Then there were the friendly gestures towards the Iranian theocracy and, even, attempts to draw a form of moral equivalence between ISIS and the United States. It is not, it seems, just capitalism that Corbyn objects to, but the West in general, the United States in particular, and, of course, always, always Israel. Under the circumstances, the durability of Labour’s 2017 manifesto commitment to NATO, an organization Corbyn has always regarded with disdain, cannot be taken for granted. That is even more the case with the commitment to the renewal of Trident, Britain’s nuclear deterrent, a commitment passed without Corbyn’s support. Trident would not survive for long if Corbyn, a lifelong unilateral disarmer, ever made it to Number 10. NATO, an even touchier topic, might be a different matter. Rather than taking the highly perilous political risk of quitting outright, Labour would probably just allow Britain’s participation in the alliance to wither on the vine.
If I had to guess, helped by the miseries that are likely to dog the Conservatives over the next few years, Corbyn’s Labour will win the next election and either form (or, if it lacks an absolute majority) dominate the next government. If it does not, it will try again the next time round.
It only has to win once.
