The Corbyn thing: Tories rub their eyes in joy and disbelief. Labour “moderates” rub their brows in horror at the fear they might be out of Downing Street for . . . how long? . . . Let’s call it 15 years.
Neither may relish what’s now likely to happen. There are prices to pay in any democracy where the main opposition makes itself unelectable. Look back for why.
Margaret Thatcher resigned in November 1990. The final catalyst that upended her did not take place in parliament. It took place violently on the streets eight months earlier: the poll tax riots. Opposition to the poll tax was spearheaded outside parliament. It quit the democratic process. The marches were violent, and at their core were those who intended them to be. For in the riots’ heartland was Militant Tendency, an avowed Trotskyite faction of leftism that had previously taken control of Liverpool where it hoped to declare UDI from the UK . . . Ms Sturgeon without the votes.
With Britain’s left then split between Labour and the SDP, there was no prospect of Labour being elected or electable even when Neil Kinnock denounced Militant out of Labour in 1985. There was no electable opposition. Instead, opposition took to the anti-Thatcher streets, where it became a core cause of her demise. Eye-rubbing Tories today need to recall: those who forget history condemn us to seeing it likely repeated.
Such events in Britain were mild compared with the horrors visited on other mature democracies where there was no electable opposition to the government in power. Take postwar Germany; postwar Italy; postwar Japan.
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In 1966, Willy Brandt led his centre-left party into the Grand Coalition with its conservative opponents in Bonn. This little moment — not four years in West German politics — when there was no legitimate, electable opposition had a cathartic effect with unforeseen results. With no opposition to elect, a little-known group, the Baader-Meinhof gang, gained traction with disaffected youth. Disruption was frequent, the gang morphed into the Red Army Fraction. And it reached a zenith when it assassinated one of Germany’s greatest corporate leaders, Alfred Herrhausen, the still young boss of Deutsche Bank in 1989.
As for Italy, its politics after 1945 became a joke: nearly six dozen governments before a certain Mr Berlusconi came along. Yet these governments had one thing in common: every one was effectively Christian Democrat. For a simple reason: the only vote-winning opposition were the Eurocommunists led by Enrico Berlinguer.
Berlinguer wore tweed jackets, as a public personality he was reassuring. By all accounts he was (like Mr Corbyn) a nice man. But Berlinguer was a communist, and during the Cold War there was no possibility of his being elected prime minister . . . as, even without that label, it will be unlikely for Mr Corbyn here. In Italy, the result was horrific. Bar some jovial communist bosses in a few Don Camillo villages and towns, national power was a monopoly inside a single conservative establishment. In such safety, Italy’s corruption turned from being “the usual” to being rampant. Opposition became violent and non-parliamentary. Outrages multiplied. On March 16, 1978, the Red Brigades shot dead five bodyguards and kidnapped Aldo Moro, the former prime minister. Fifty-five days later Moro was found dead in Rome’s Via Caetani in the back of a Renault 4.
Japan knows youth violence, though as yet without quite such horror. But the decline of its formidable business export machine can be laid straight at the door of monopoly LDP government from 1955 until (with two brief exceptions) today. Through the decades after Japan’s industrial sun rose over our consumer economies, there was/is no electable opposition. With the same result: backhander commerce flourished unchecked. The cosiness that exists between Japan’s monopoly government and the corporatist business successors of the zaibatsu has killed long-run virility in Japan’s political economy.
Where there is no electable opposition, indigenous, corrupt, complacent laziness becomes the norm at the top. At the bottom, non-parliamentary bomb-throwers are indigenous too. These are not Islamists. These are not insurgent separatists like the IRA. These are not from foreign or incomer stock. They are about home-bred frustration. For there is nobody likely to form a government in their name.
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An unelectable opposition under Jeremy Corbyn would be a vast chance for Britain’s Tories. Sure. But may they use it well. Democracy doesn’t function without electable opposition to elected power . . . however lovely that power, untrammelled, may feel today.
Melanie Phillips is away
(Andrew Knight is a former editor of The Economist)