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Here's What Would Happen if Jeremy Corbyn Was Prime Minister

It's 2020 and the Labour-left is in charge. Britain's establishment is not happy.
Simon Childs
London, GB

Jeremy Corbyn (right) with his friend and fellow Labour left-winger, John McDonnell. Photo by Jack Pasco

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's 11:30PM on the May 7, 2020. You sip on a tin of Skol, munch a slice of margarita pizza—all other toppings have been discontinued in the dead ruins of austerity Britain—as David Dimbleby squints at you through your laptop on a faltering stream of BBC Election 2020 brought to you by Greggs. He seems somewhat dulled now—less sharp than he used to be, but with enough lovable charm to anchor the show as a legacy personality. The decrepit town crier of Westminster, ringing in the new government.

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He's grilling a disbelieving Michael Gove, who is insisting that the exit poll, released 25 minutes ago and predicting a narrow victory for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, is completely wrong. Exit polls are always bang-on, but in a moment of hubris Gove nonetheless promises to do a naked dance to the Jam's "Eton Rifles" if it is correct—a promise that he will later have to fulfill in front of an audience of millions.

After a short round of negotiations with the SNP, the Green Party and Plaid Cymru, Jeremy Corbyn makes his first speech outside Downing Street as the Prime Minister of a coalition government with a slim majority.

For this scenario to happen, certain truisms of British politics would have been squashed, at least temporarily.

In political terms, the need for Labour to be "pragmatic" and "realistic"—taken to mean: do the same as the Tories—would have been reversed. A massive civil-war that broke out in the Labour Party following Corbyn's leadership election victory would have been won by the left. The party's right wing would have been purged, leaving to join lobbying firms and consultancies, or would have gulag-ed themselves to join the Lib Dems in Siberia. In the ruins, Corbyn would have turned the Labour Party into less a political party for Britain's conscientious businesspeople and celebrities, and more of a social movement—a cross section of trade unions and activists, all funded by Church fete raffles.

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In the build up to the election, that movement would have grown and subsequently shifted opinion to the left. On numerous policy issues, Corbyn's ideas already align with those of the general public. As James Meadway points out, George Osborne's summer budget will drag vast swathes of the population into the gloom of serious cuts to their benefits and services. By making millions of households poorer in his attempt to redefine the welfare state, Osborne could become the conductor, hurrying angry, flustered people onboard the Corbyn train.

If he were to be elected, Corbyn would then need to reverse austerity to remain in power. Anti-austerity public opinion and a newly democratized Labour Party wouldn't allow him to do anything else; he would have to stick to his promises, and this could make things tricky.

Complaints from business, Conservatives and the Westminster bubble's New Labour zombies that Corbyn's policies are unrealistic because they haven't been properly costed and worked out are disingenuous. If they are unrealistic, it's mainly because the people who make these kind of complaints will try everything to block Corbyn from achieving what he sets out to do.

Jeremy again (Photo by Matthew Francey)

For all the talk of being an extreme leftist, Corbyn's election manifesto is revolution-lite. His mooted £10 minimum wage would get rid of the worst poverty, but it wouldn't completely rebalance the economy in favor of the poor. He wants to close the budget deficit, but by investing not cutting, which makes more economic sense in conventional terms. He wants to tax the rich more, close loopholes for corporations and reverse £93 billion [$145 billion] of corporate tax relief. He would abolish tuition fees, re-nationalize the railways, and introduce a rent cap. All of this is perfectly plausible in an equal world.

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But his vision is of an "economy that works for all"—an economy that would have the very small number of oligarchs that the economy currently works for waking up in cold sweats. Moneyweek, "The UK's best-selling financial magazine," is already warning that "Corbynomics is no joke—we must nip it in the bud."

The housing market was jittery before the election because of the mere possibility of Ed Miliband introducing a mansion tax. Following Cameron's victory in May of 2015, capitalists breathed a sigh of relief and share prices rocketed across the board. After a Corbyn victory, they would slump as investors looked on in horror at the prospect of being made to pay slightly more tax.

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Corbyn's plan to allow the poor to breathe would have monopoly men catching the first flight to tax havens. If jobs went with them, Corbyn would be under pressure to appease big business. Maybe even a couple of low profile privatizations would keep them sweet?

As big money fled and the economy faltered, Corbyn would look for easy wins. He would curse his decision—taken for the sake of party unity—to campaign in the successful referendum campaign to stay in the EU. The hated Brussels bureaucrats would see that populist ideas from Corbyn's brightest young SPADS struck out. Anti-poverty campaigner and tax-expert Richard Murphy, for instance, has already warned that a tax on luxury goods would not be allowed under EU law. How many policies would have to be consigned to the dustbin?

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His attempt to take the NHS—now a husk of its former self, with outsourcing companies providing a safety net for those who can't afford expensive private insurance—back into public ownership would see Britain sued for hundreds of millions of pounds by an alliance of private health companies, thanks to TTIP.

As further popular policies were scuppered, something much more serious than mere public opinion or trans-national agreements would turn against him. In the 1970s, MI5 hatched a plot called Clockwork Orange to smear Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, led by members of the intelligence services who thought he was a communist. If you think the British intelligence services would be chill about the union being broken up thanks to a new Scottish indyref being signed into the coalition agreement, or the plan to step down from the world stage heralded by the scrapping of Trident and stop bombing people, you've got another thing coming.

Of course, if you try to tar someone as a communist these days, you just look silly. However, it probably wouldn't take them too long to find some mud that would stick. Security service leaks would start to appear in the establishment press, casting doubts over Corbyn's commitment to patriotism—patriotism here meaning "hatred of Muslims."

Perhaps Israel would "mow the lawn" in Gaza once again. Corbyn's condemnation of the massacre would see him an outsider to the international "anti-terrorist" hegemony now commanded by US President Donald Trump. Corbyn has already been grilled for calling Hamas and Hezbollah his "friends" at a meeting. He'll rue the day he didn't greet them as "a shower of towel-head bastards," as his critics seem to demand. As he found himself unable to live down his new image as a friend of the world's worst pariahs, George Galloway would make an ill-advised attempt to defend him, saluting Jeremy's "strength, courage, and indefatigability."

Besieged by the establishment, his popularity dented by allegations that he's in league with terrorists, this would be the moment Corbyn most badly needed the social movement that catapulted him to power to rally around him in support.

And then he'd have a choice to make. The optimism for a new, kinder Britain following his win would dissipate before too long, unless he could bring about real change for the worst off. That change could only happen in confrontation with the establishment, and they don't fuck about. He'd have to square up to this, otherwise we'd be looking at the great revolt of 2021 being put down by the Labour Party's riot-police using the same water cannons that Theresa May finally approved for use during the inner-city riots of 2018. It may be less a question for Corbyn himself, and more one for the social movements that he'll rely on.

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