We should trust reasoned democracy, not the EU, to keep Corbyn out of power

Making voters see the perils of the Labour leader beats relying on EU oligarchs to clip his wings

Could the EU prevent a government led by Jeremy Corbyn? Since our confusing general election result last month, I find significant numbers of people asking this question. Such people do not like Mr Corbyn. Indeed, they regard a government led by him as the worst of all the imaginable possibilities facing our country. It spooks them because, before June 8, they had considered it all but unimaginable. They tend to think that if the EU could keep Mr Corbyn out, perhaps we had better stay in.

They are not wrong to raise this question. In the now largely forgotten days when most Conservatives were strongly pro-european, the threat of the hard Left helped explain why.

During the Cold War, hard-left parties were usually disloyal to Western democracies. The substantial French and Italian Communist parties, for example, were mostly under Moscow’s control. The founders of the European Economic Community (as it then was) sought to frustrate this. Over here, individuals in the Labour Party and sections of the Labour movement were subverted by Communists. As late as the miners’ strike of 1984-85, Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers negotiated secret money from the Soviet Union and Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya to try to keep the dispute going.

“The enemy within” was not Mrs Thatcher’s phrase for the miners: it specifically referred to hard-left leaders in trade unions and local government (including one John Mcdonnell, then of the GLC).

In a Britain dominated by strikes, “Europe” beckoned. The EEC was scarcely a paragon of free-market virtue, but it seemed to offer relative industrial peace. Right-wing Labour supporters thought it could marginalise the extremists. A lot of Tories thought decent, free, bourgeois Britain was finished. Perhaps Brussels could rescue it.

Similarly, but the other way round, the wreckers were usually antieec. Mr Corbyn’s mentor and hero, Tony Benn, saw the community as a “bankers’ ramp” and a way of breaking the organised working classes.

Mr Corbyn himself was voting against pro-european legislation in Parliament when Boris Johnson was still in his Bullingdon Club finery at Oxford.

So it was no accident when, on Thursday night, Mr Corbyn removed three MPS from his shadow team (and a fourth resigned) after they had voted for Britain to stay in the single market.

He has ducked and weaved a bit on this subject, but essentially, he has stayed true to his Eurosceptic faith.

If Mr Corbyn had campaigned wholeheartedly for a Remain vote last year, Leave could not have won.

As one who agrees that a Corbynled government would be a virtually unmitigated disaster, should I not face the present danger? Shouldn’t I renounce Euroscepticism in favour of safety? Shouldn’t I tell Jean-claude Juncker how sorry I am if I ever suggested that he was rude, arrogant or enjoyed a glass of wine, and beg, at this, the eleventh hour, to remain under the protection of his adoptive Brussels and his native Luxembourg?

I don’t suppose that EU membership could literally, directly prevent a Corbyn-led party winning a general election: its conquest of our system is not that complete. But it probably is true that a Corbyn government could be much more easily beaten down with Britain in the EU than outside it. His socialism-in-one-country would quickly fall foul of single market rules and be squashed by the commission (Brussels) and the European Court of Justice (Luxembourg). His wings would be clipped. His government would become one of impotent protest, like that of Syriza in Greece.

There is a better way of looking at all this, though. In the first place, it is a necessary feature of a free country that any party can, in principle, win, and is then entitled to govern. If the British people ever really want Mr Corbyn to be prime minister, they must have him. They should not be impeded by a foreign bureaucracy or countermanded by a foreign court.

Some Tory voters seem to think it is (or should be) virtually unconstitutional for there to be a Labour government. The opposite is the case. I don’t much share the current nostalgia for Clement Attlee’s Labour government in 1945. Its nationalisations were much more extreme and its taxes much higher than any now proposed even by Mr Corbyn. But the fact that it could peacefully take power, chucking out the leader who had just won us the war, was a magnificent vindication of the freedom of the ballot box.

I admit the fundamental difference between Attlee and Mr Corbyn. The former was patriotic, and the latter detests his country’s history and achievements; but that is something voters must be free to work out for themselves. (I believe they will, and that this is why Mr Corbyn is unlikely ever to be prime minister.)

What all we anti-corbynites need to be working out is not how to frustrate a popular wish to elect him, but to understand why that wish has grown. Surely it is because our governments, supplied for nearly 30 years by parties of more or less interchangeable centrism, have not done well. The fact that they have unthinkingly agreed on the big things, such as EU membership, has made growing numbers feel excluded.

After the invention of the euro, most of the EU did indeed become the bankers’ ramp that the Bennites feared. In its southern member states, an entire generation lost opportunity and jobs to save the vision of the central bankers and the architects of European integration. Across the whole Western world, the Great Moderation nearly killed us, so it is not surprising we are fed up with the Great Moderates.

After he had famously proclaimed “the end of history” in 1989, the historian Francis Fukuyama felt misunderstood by those who thought he was hymning the triumph of American democracy. He wrote: “I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than does the contemporary United States. The EU’S attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a ‘post-historical’ world.” He failed to mention that the EU transcends democracy, too. Loving Mr Corbyn is an understandable reaction to such a complacent philosophy.

The amazing success of Theresa May when she became Prime Minister last year was that she grasped the message from the referendum result that the Conservatives should cease to be the party of the status quo. The bitter failure of the election campaign was that she seemed to forget this and make herself the “no change” candidate against batty, bearded Jezza.

Somewhere inside the Conservative psyche, there is an element that confuses the electorate with the mob. If it is really the way you feel, you should indeed try to stay inside the EU, because its entire structure is designed to favour a “wise” elite and keep the grubby crowds at bay.

If you believe in parliamentary democracy, however, you will believe that voters will listen to reason, if only you bestir yourself to trust them. Then Jeremy Corbyn will lose.