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.

Andrew Stuttaford is a contributing editor of National Review.