Britain now contains two one-party states: Nationalist Scotland and Tory England. I don’t want to sound paranoid. They are not bad places by the standards of a wicked world.

Both have the rule of law and judges who can challenge over-mighty and incompetent executives. Both have freedom of the press. Despite attempts by the SNP to intimidate BBC Scotland and by the Conservatives to restrict the funding of the whole of the BBC, both still have free broadcasters. Both have trial by jury, the Human Rights Act and all the other protections of a liberal democracy. The nationalist elite in Edinburgh and Tory elite in Westminster are not monoliths, in any case. They have divisions, which the skilful can exploit to further their own and, on occasion, the public interest.

Comparisons between Britain and genuine dictatorships are insulting to oppressed peoples in all respects except one. The Labour party’s collapse means there is no effective opposition. Without opposition, the fear of rulers that the electorate will throw them out, the strongest restraint a democracy imposes on its governments, vanishes. Scottish Nationalists and English Conservatives know that Labour cannot threaten them, however dishonestly or incompetently they behave.

It is said that as the civilisation of the Easter Islanders declined under the pressure of European disease and ecological degradation, the inhabitants went berserk. They learned to loathe everything about a once revered culture that had now failed them. They tore down the giant “moai” stone faces. They fought civil wars between the “long ear” and “short ear” clans and engaged in cannibalism “on a grand scale”.

In the Labour party, long decline has tipped over into the berserker of the Corbyn collapse. Everything about Labour’s past – its time in government, its strategies for forming another government – has become loathsome. Admittedly, Momentum militants have not yet baked and eaten members of the parliamentary Labour party but far-left circles ring to the sound of knives being sharpened and dinnertime cannot be far away.

The suicide of the opposition is allowing some of the worst politicians I have seen in my lifetime to escape punishment. In any functioning democracy, Chris Grayling would not have served in David Cameron’s two administrations. The anti-EU campaign would not talk of him as a big beast, worthy to stand alongside such statesmen as Nigel Farage and George Galloway. The opposition would have driven Grayling from office years ago. We would remember him as a thug and a bungler – assuming, that is, we remembered him at all.

A measure of a politician’s success is how much of his or her work survives. By this measure, failing Grayling is top of the flops. He has a reverse Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to base metal. The court of appeal spelt out the consequences for the vulnerable last week as it struck down yet another Grayling initiative. When parliament restricted access to legal aid, it specifically exempted the victims of domestic violence from austerity. It went out of its way to define abuse widely to ensure that the courts could help women leave dangerous men, receive some financial security and protect their children. Legal aid would not only go to women whose partners beat and raped them, it said, but to women who had been threatened or denied the freedom to leave their home or have access to money.

The reasons for the exemption were equally obvious. Without legal aid, women would be forced to represent themselves in court. They would be cross-examined by the men who abused them. Most would rather miss the chance to have their rights upheld than face that prospect.

But the then justice secretary was not content with the law as it stood. The appeal judges said the restrictions Grayling’s department imposed meant that, to cite one instance, a woman whose husband and father of her children had raped and strangled her could not receive help. The court of appeal was having none of it and struck down Grayling’s restrictions. A welcome intervention, no doubt. But it did not help the thousands of abused women Grayling stopped receiving access to justice.

Justice secretary Michael Gove, who has overturned a number of Chris Grayling’s more absurd measures. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters

What else do you expect from a Tory, I can hear leftwing readers cry. But Grayling did not become the tacit ally of thugs and rapists because he was a Tory. He did it because he was Grayling. His most effective opponents have not been from the official opposition but from the Conservative party. Theresa May has been a quiet feminist at the Home Office. Her Modern Slavery Act was a great liberal measure, which brought relief to trafficked women and Filipino maids kept in bondage by Mayfair’s Saudi petro-barons. Since taking over as justice secretary last year, Michael Gove has overturned Grayling’s ban on prisoners receiving books, a measure that managed to be petty, cruel and incomprehensible all at the same time. He cancelled Grayling’s plans to build American-style mega jails, to charge for criminal court cases and rewrite legal aid contracts.

Liberals and leftwingers now praise Gove as a prison reformer. And indeed his declaration: “I believe in redemption and I think that the purpose of our prison system and our criminal law is to keep people safe by making people better” was well said. I could mock and wonder how long Govemania will last now that Gove is aligning in the anti-European movement with the worst people in Britain – Galloway, Farage and, indeed, Grayling himself. But the liberal love being showered on Gove, the delight that has accompanied the reversal of so much of Grayling’s bad work, isn’t foolish but a realistic appreciation of the state of Britain.

If change for the better is to come in England, it will only come if Conservatives are willing to take on other Conservatives. Or if the courts assert their authority. If the SNP is forced to use its tax-raising powers to limit cuts to public services in Scotland, it will only do so if leftwing Nationalists make that prize hypocrite Nicola Sturgeon live up to her anti-austerity rhetoric. Labour can force nothing and do nothing. No one is frightened of it.

Last week, I had to shake myself when Jeremy Corbyn, in a rare moment of clarity, managed to spit out a half-truth – “We are now at risk of having a zombie democracy roaming around a one-party state.” He was nearly right. We are not “at risk” of seeing one-party states in England and Scotland. They are already here. And unless Labour changes, they will stay that way for as far ahead as anyone can see.