Can the radical left win power in the UK? The world is watching

From this point in the coverage of an election, everything shrinks into minutiae. Whose campaign bus is hurtling into what marginal? Which niche of voters is being wooed by the small print on that policy? Whose poll lead is getting squeezed? What fun it is to play trivial pursuits! Yet it jars a little in this election, because this one bears such significance. Not just for the next five years, not only over Brexit and not solely in the UK. This election puts Britain at the frontline of the international political battle of our time. The votes we cast on 12 December will shape the answer to two questions of far-reaching importance.

The first is whether the new hard right can be beaten: whether our democracies can put a halt to the forces represented here by Boris Johnson, or around the world by Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini and Narendra Modi, to name just a few. If we cannot block these nationalist hardmen democratically, then they will deform democracy until it is unrecognisable and illegitimate.

The second big question is if the new left is yet capable of winning power. The generation radicalised by the banking crisis of 2008 – and which camped on Wall Street and outside St Paul’s cathedral, before marching against austerity and climate chaos – now provides much of the energy for Labour, the US Democratic party and the European left. Post-crash politics has gone mainstream; it is yet to be seen whether it can go into government.

Since the summer, the UK has been governed by a prime minister who in the referendum of 2016 told 350 million lies to the public, and who after entering No 10 tried unlawfully to shut down parliament. He has bullied when he should have united, fibbed when he should have been straight, and he has undermined an already shaky constitutional settlement.

Just like Trump, he exercises power by outraging democratic norms. The links between the two are underlined by yesterday’s leak from Jeremy Corbyn of trade talks between Whitehall and Washington. Those papers illustrate just what Jacob Rees-Mogg, Steve Baker and the rest of the hard-right headbangers behind Johnson mean by our “global opportunities” – bargaining away workers’ rights, food labelling and drug prices. Ministers may