Comrade Corbyn’s palace coup

May had resigned immediately after the defeat, of course, and went on to have a successful career playing Lynda Snell, the do-gooding busybody in the popular Radio 4 soap The Archers.

Amber Rudd’s defeat in Hastings and Rye had left the way open for Jacob Rees-Mogg as stop-gap Conservative Party leader, and Corbyn had to admit that, for a reactionary running dog of the capitalist class, he had proved impressive.

‘Rudd’s defeat had left the way open for Jacob Rees-Mogg as stop-gap Conservative Party leader’

REUTERS

When did Corbyn’s difficulties start? If he was honest with himself, he knew he shouldn’t have appointed Diane Abbott as minister for leaving the EU, but he owed her for decades of love and support, and he assumed that the civil servants would protect her from the chief EU negotiator, Michel Barnier.

When she said she had agreed to Barnier’s demand for an £86.4bn compensation package, Corbyn had been taken aback, but he had loyally defended her in the Commons.

It was only after the money had been paid that it became clear Barnier had been asking for only £46.8bn, and Diane had got her sums wrong. It had been typical of the reactionary Tory press to have caused quite so much fuss about a mistake that anyone could have made.

He wished Diane hadn’t agreed to start paying into the EU budget again after 2021, but she said that Monsieur Barnier had put some very good arguments as to why we should, although she couldn’t recall the exact details.

The rest of the Brexit negotiations went well, though. Tony Benn had always told Corbyn that the Common Market was “a bankers’ ramp”, which is why he had secretly voted “leave” in the 2016 referendum. But by 2019 he felt that any deal was better than no deal, even a deal in which he reversed the referendum result by stealth.

Free movement of peoples had been a small price to pay for staying in the single market after all, and the European Court of Justice had done a grand job extending the “super-rights” of EU citizens in the UK and overseeing British domestic legislation too.

Giving back Gibraltar to the Spanish after centuries of evil imperialism was a welcome adjunct to the deal, and when Brexit took place in June 2019 no one noticed anything different because to all intents and purposes Britain still was in the EU — except without having any MEPs or people in the commission.

The mothballing of all four Trident nuclear submarines had led to the resignation of the chiefs of staff in 2019, but no one seemed to have missed the so-called “single most effective deterrent mankind had ever devised”. With any luck, when they went out on patrol again, Corbyn thought to himself, the half-decade in dock would have so ruined their systems they would have to be scrapped.

“Fight all the cuts,” he recalled saying all those years ago. “Except those in the armed forces where we want to see a few more cuts.” He had been as good as his word right across the board.

The Royal Navy was now merely a coastal defence force and the Ministry of Peace had managed to all but abolish the Royal Air Force and army. The ending of the arms trade that the Greens’ Caroline Lucas had proposed had led to the loss of more than 100,000 jobs, but the cabinet had applauded her progressivism.

HIGHER TAXES
“I see that your government bonds have just attained junk status, prime minister,” said the King, adopting what Corbyn suspected was a slightly more carping tone. “How did that happen? We’re going the way of Venezuela!”

Corbyn, who was inspecting the King’s asparagus, had sworn to himself long ago never to call Charles Windsor “His Majesty” and he resolutely stuck to it.

“Well, first may I say that Hugo Chavez was a great Venezuelan and a great internationalist,” he retorted. “And the past five years of civil war and starvation there cannot be put down to his far-sighted policies.”

His own far-sighted idea had been to tax the rich until the pips squeaked — it had been why he and his chancellor, John McDonnell, had entered politics, after all. But that turned out to be difficult once the rich had left the country.

May had promised to reduce corporation tax to 17% — an outrageous bribe that had brought inward investment flooding into Britain. Corbyn wasn’t going to let this country become an offshore tax haven for the rich.

Looking back, though, he and John probably ought not to have raised corporation tax to 33% so soon. Who knew that inward investment could dry up overnight? Benn hadn’t warned him about that.

Once John had introduced the “François Hollande tax” in his emergency budget, taxing incomes of more than £123,000 at 75p in the pound, there had been an exodus akin to the Huguenot migration of the 17th century — except in reverse.

Introducing the maximum wage of £330,000 was another game-changer that exposed the moral bankruptcy of the rich and greedy. Even those who didn’t earn that much — but aspired to do so one day — joined the rats fleeing the country.

Of course, the capitalists were always going to foment an uproar. But Corbyn was surprised that capital, companies and talented individuals could vote with their feet so quickly. Anyway, good riddance.

John’s response had been to tax whoever was left even more, until Britain returned to the golden days of Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey in the 1970s when the undeserving, morally compromised rich were paying 83% on earned and 98% on unearned income.

It had been fun for a time to hear them squealing through their lackeys in the Tory media, but it turned out that tax revenue went down rather than up. That awful man Lord Lawson argued in The Sunday Times that the economist Arthur Laffer and his notorious curve had been vindicated: the higher the tax, the lower the revenue. What rubbish.

McDonnell told him that Tory stay- behind saboteurs in the Treasury were to blame. They would be hunted down and rooted out.

In the meantime, though, the top 1% of earners were no longer contributing 27% of the tax revenue as they had under May, but less than 20%. This meant a huge gap opened up in the public finances, just as the coalition had to find the cash to pay for its reforms turning Britain into a country for the many, not the few.

Typically, the Tory press jeered that Labour had made hugely expensive promises in its manifesto on the assumption that it was going to lose the election and wouldn’t have to fund any of them. Had those reptiles even been to a food bank or talked to a rough sleeper?

The teething problems of the social justice programme were painful memories now. Eleven universities went into liquidation because Treasury mandarins said they couldn’t cover the shortfall in funding after the abolition of tuition fees. The nationalisation of nine water companies cost billions more than Seumas had said it would.

The abolition of zero-hours contracts was blamed by the Tories for rising unemployment and a jump in benefits that cost even more than the extra £37bn pumped into the NHS.

Restoring the pensioner triple lock had been a big vote winner in 2017, especially when coupled with the Tories’ spectacularly mistimed dementia tax, but the value of pensions was collapsing owing to the equity markets’ free fall.

McDonnell celebrated the expulsion of the “great vampire squid” when Goldman Sachs closed its operations in the City in July 2020, citing “a worse business environment to operate in than Guatemala”, but the FTSE 250 took further tumbles on the news of the true costs of the reversal of Royal Mail privatisation and hidden costs of free infant childcare.

Rees-Mogg, in his ponderous way, learnt to torment the government with Rudd’s warning that there was “no magic money tree”.

This made Corbyn more determined than ever to transform Britain once and for all by fulfilling his manifesto pledge of setting up a £250bn national transformation fund. Centralised control of the commanding heights of the economy had been at the core of the progressive agenda since he was a boy.

He was prepared by now for the capitalists’ reaction: a run on the pound. But it was frankly a shock to find that the collapse of sterling could not be halted by John’s exchange controls, reintroduced for the first time since the Margaret Thatcher-Geoffrey Howe junta of 1979.

How gleeful were the enemy to point out the modern digital economy had heights that moved around so swiftly that one could no longer command them. The national transformation fund had indeed transformed the economy, they said — into a basket case.

Rees-Mogg jeered that water, energy and rail nationalisation had not brought the people’s paradise Corbyn had hoped for, but merely added to a sclerotic government’s costs and workload. Once ministers and civil servants were responsible for track upgrades, burst water mains, electricity grids and even train timetables, the government was landed with political responsibility when anything went wrong, which occurred with growing frequency. In retrospect, had he been wise to support the rail strike? And the power workers’ strike. And the fire brigades’ strike. And the passport controllers’ work-to-rule. And the nurses’ strike. And the rest.

SECURITY RISKS
Corbyn wondered whether the asperity in the King’s voice might be in part due to the cabinet decision to make the Windsor family pay for Prince Philip’s funeral in 2020. Gerry Adams had been particularly vociferous about that point in cabinet and so had the minister for peace, Lady Nugee (who preferred to be known as Emily Thornberry).

All progressive circles had applauded the decision, and republicanism had jumped to an impressive 7% in the opinion polls, yet it had caused more of a backlash in parliament than even the mass deselection of Blairite MPs.

The cabinet hadn’t dared to make the family pay again after the death of the Queen seven months later. But the coronation of May 2021 proved to be a turning point for the Corbyn ministry.

The prime minister decided to boycott the reactionary proceedings, leaving his cabinet to form a sub-committee under Nugee that took the democratic decision not to invite the aristocracy, the military, the peerage and David Dimbleby to the ceremony and to abolish the old liturgy.

Instead a “people’s crowning event” was thrown open to non-conformist ministers, local government councillors, community stakeholders, NHS regional tier-level managers, university lecturers and trade union officials. Many failed to turn up because it was held on the same day as the FA Cup final.

“In retrospect, prime minister,” King Charles wondered, “do you think that it was a mistake to have referred to Raul Castro as your ‘lifelong comrade and friend’ during the state visit you organised for him? The Queen much enjoyed dancing the mambo with him — but really!”

“Considering the people I’ve called my friends in my time,” Corbyn bantered back, “I think Raul was the least of my problems.”

The visits to Downing Street of Khaled Mashal, the head of Hamas, and Hassan Nasrallah, the general secretary of Hezbollah, had reignited the old slurs about Labour’s anti-semitism but did useful work in bolstering the Islamic vote in the 2020 local elections, which were otherwise uniformly disastrous.

Breaking off diplomatic relations with Israel was going to happen anyhow. Mashal and Nasrallah were old friends of Jeremy’s, and if you can’t have friends round to No 10 when you’re prime minister, what’s the point?

The fuss made by MI5, MI6, GCHQ and Special Branch was all cleared up by Seumas who made a few well-aimed threats in that specially sinister voice of his. With the abolition of the security services on the long-term agenda, he intimated, did they really want to collect their pensions early?

Although the terrorist attacks on the UK had not abated — young Islamists were so alienated from society by the Prevent programme that they had not learnt to differentiate between the coalition and the Conservatives — the problem clearly lay with the security services who had followed and bugged Corbyn in the early years of struggle, and now needed to be taught a lesson.

Looking back, Corbyn wondered whether all these problems would have arisen if he had handled Scotland differently from the start. He probably shouldn’t have appointed Angus Robertson, the SNP leader in the Commons, as deputy prime minister, giving him a choice position to influence Labour policy, but that’s what the Scots demanded and without them it would have been a hung parliament.

It meant that for the three years before Scotland went independent in its June 2021 referendum the SNP had been able to squeeze ever-larger concessions out of the rest of the UK, a fact that had gone down very badly south of the border. The whip hand that Nicola Sturgeon had wielded over him had been resented right across the coalition.

That wouldn’t have mattered if Ruth Davidson hadn’t moved south after independence, winning the Twickenham by-election and the leadership of the Conservative Party. At the dispatch box she harried and ridiculed Corbyn at every prime minister’s questions, and he hated it.

Facing the third female Tory leader to Labour’s none — and a lesbian too — his options for a personal counterattack were severely limited.

CABINET FEUDS
“I am concerned at the proliferation of food banks, prime minister,” the King continued, dipping a radish into the jar of homemade hummus Corbyn had brought with him. “They seem to be needed everywhere since the McDonnell Depression. Is there anything you can do about it?”

It was true, Corbyn thought, yet Andrew Fisher, the hard-left head of the No 10 policy unit, had told him only that morning that “less is more” and it was important for the radicalisation of the urban proletariat to undergo hardships that would bring about the collapse of capitalism under the crushing weight of its own internal contradictions. The more food banks, Andrew seemed to be saying, the better.

The battle between the Stalinists and Trotskyites in the cabinet had long been troubling for Corbyn, but Andrew somehow managed to straddle both groups. As usual, what he advised made sense. The prime minister was indeed supremely blessed by history to be in a place and time where, with one last great heave, the dictatorship of the proletariat might be achieved.

All that was needed, as his five-year term in the bourgeois parliament came to an end, was to continue to rule through emergency legislation and not hold the next general election. The precedent of 1940 could be invoked when general elections were postponed for five years.

The leaders of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War coalition and Momentum, Len McCluskey of Unite and Jayne Fisher, the Sinn Feiner in the prime minister’s private office, and other similarly sage counsellors all agreed with this radical step. After all, if the people rejected socialism, they needed to be re-educated in its values.

“So Mr Corbyn,” continued King Charles. “After five years of misery, bankruptcy, international capitulation, anti-Americanism, Brexit chaos, gesture politics, virtue signalling, political correctness and covert anti-semitism, I believe you’ve come to Buckingham Palace to tender your resignation?”

“No, Charles Windsor,” Corbyn replied, in words he had taken a lifetime practising. “I have actually come here to demand yours.”