Japan is not a one party state, and putting it with China is disingenuous at best. Saying things like that just make you look like a prat

There’s a continuum between “hypothetically there is competition but the competition almost never wins” (Japan, at one time I would have said Mexico), “politics is a cruel simulation of democracy which is manipulated so you know the competition never wins” (Singapore, but most of the world’s leaders are jealous) and “It isn’t even fair to call that a political party in the electoral sense” (China).

Contrast that to the U.S. where a party has only held the presidency for at most three terms since 1948 and that just once and where there is usually divided government, as much as Democrats and Republicans can claim the other side wins all the time, no party is so perpetually out of power that it can evade all blame for the way things are. Looking at Europe and sideways at the U.S. it seems almost like center left parties are doomed to be in some quantum superposition of Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbin. By simply framing themselves as the surviving defenders of the welfare state, the far right wins.

The way elections work in the UK are skewed towards the Conservative party for geographical and political reasons. You can hardly blame Blair for that, especially considering Blair's three victories and 13 years of Labour majority is the best result Labour got in its entire history.

Corbyn? Maybe. He was always too divisive to be PM. Then again, maybe Labour needed a bit of correction after "New Labour".

Comparisons with China are ridiculous in any case.

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I don't know the details of the situation in France exactly, but Macron is doing what he feels is needed. Maybe he's right, maybe not, but you can't forever hold of unpopular but needed reforms out of fear of populist parties that merely tell people what they want to hear.