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Jeremy Corbyn is even more vehemently uninterested in the West, in Britain’s alliances in Europe and the United States, in British influence and British power

Not coincidentally, the Labour Party is now led by a man with similarly parochial views. Jeremy Corbyn has some different alliances. He has appeared on PressTV and Iranian state television. and his ties are to Hamas and Hezbollah, not China. But he is even more vehemently uninterested in the West, in Britain’s alliances in Europe and the United States, in British influence and British power. Given his rejection this week of the parliamentary Labour Party’s demand for his resignation, it’s worth asking whether he still cares much about parliamentary democracy at all. His vision of Britain, to the extent that he has articulated one, is of a radically isolationist country ashamed of its history.

The question, of course, is whether Britain can keep its own democracy and its own rule of law intact if none of its leaders still actively promote those things abroad. The British political system is already heavily influenced by the foreign and offshore cash that now flows through London. Groups such as Conservative Friends of Russia and Conservative Friends of the Chinese, both of which have many prominent parliamentarians as members, already lobby openly on behalf of those countries inside the U.K. political system.

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I hope very much to be proved wrong. But I am afraid that without the anchor of Europe, the regular meetings with allies, the sheer weight of Germany, France and the rest, the British political class will prove even easier to buy off than ever before. Excuses will be made for Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. Justifications will be given for Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. Foreigners will have an ever greater say in the laws and decisions made inside Britain, too. This is how the world works: If you are no longer trying to set the rules of the game, you have to assume that others will set them instead.

Washington Post

Anne Applebaum is Director of the Global Transitions Program at the Legatum Institute in London.