Jeremy Corbyn: If I Were PM…

The cash, roughly £500 billion a year (back-of-a-beer-mat maths), would bankroll an NHS so lavish it’d offer free acupuncture, vegan smoothies, and robotic nurses programmed to sing The Internationale. Tuition fees? Gone. Student loans? Burned in a ceremonial bonfire on Trafalgar Square. We’d launch a National People’s Pie Service, dishing out free Greggs pasties to every citizen, because no one should go hungry while the elite sip champagne.The cash, roughly £500 billion a year (back-of-a-beer-mat maths), would bankroll an NHS so lavish it’d offer free acupuncture, vegan smoothies, and robotic nurses programmed to sing “The Internationale.” Tuition fees? Gone. Student loans? Burned in a ceremonial bonfire on Trafalgar Square. We’d launch a National People’s Pie Service, dishing out free Greggs pasties to every citizen, because no one should go hungry while the elite sip champagne.

Nationalisation? Oh, we’re going big. Rail, water, energy, Royal Mail—publicly owned by Monday. But why stop there? I’d nationalise Greggs, Costa, and every artisanal coffee shop charging £5 for a flat white. Starbucks would become Starbuckets, serving free tea to pensioners. Energy firms would be reborn as People’s Power Co-ops, with every household getting a wind turbine and a manual on how to worship it. My National Investment Bank would funnel billions into building life-size replicas of Stonehenge, but solar-powered, to generate clean energy and confuse tourists. Workers would run the show—every factory, shop, and pub with a People’s Soviet, elected by whoever shows up with the best placard.

Housing’s a mess, so I’d build a million council homes a year, each with a mandatory red front door and a bust of Karl Marx in the garden. Private landlords? They’d face a ‘rent or be sent to a re-education yurt’ ultimatum. Empty mansions owned by oligarchs would be seized and turned into communal squats for poets and buskers. A land value tax would hit speculators so hard they’d sell their estates to fund my new Ministry of Allotments, ensuring every Brit gets a patch to grow organic kale. Grenfell? Never again—every tower block would be clad in ethically sourced, rainbow-coloured hemp.

Welfare? Universal Credit’s out, replaced by a Universal Basic Income so generous you could buy a unicycle and still afford rent. I’d trial it nationwide, funded by melting down the Crown Jewels. Benefits sanctions? Banned. Disability assessments? Conducted by kindly grandmas with biscuits, not soulless bureaucrats. The minimum wage would rocket to £50 an hour—yes, even for dog walkers—and zero-hours contracts would be outlawed, replaced by mandatory four-day weeks with Fridays reserved for community folk dancing. Trade unions would rule, with every workplace legally required to blast Solidarity Forever at 9 a.m.

Education’s getting a socialist glow-up. Free childcare, free schools, free universities, free everything—funded by taxing anyone who says ‘aspiration’ unironically. Class sizes would shrink to five, with lessons on Marxist dialectics starting at nursery. Ofsted? Scrapped. Schools would be judged by how many pupils can recite Das Kapital while juggling. My National Education Service would offer free courses in everything from guerrilla gardening to revolutionary poetry, with museums turned into 24/7 People’s Learning Hubs, entry via a heartfelt rendition of Jerusalem.

Foreign policy? No more kowtowing to Uncle Sam. I’d pull Britain out of NATO and replace Trident with a fleet of solar-powered peace canoes. Arms sales? Stopped. Saudi Arabia can buy their tanks from someone else. Palestine would be recognised by teatime, with Israel’s ambassador sent home in a biodegradable dinghy. The UN would be relocated to Islington, and I’d personally chair a Global South Jamboree to rewrite international law over falafel. At home, every looted artefact in the British Museum would be returned, with a grovelling apology carved into Stonehenge. Empire’s legacy? Taught in schools with a syllabus called ‘Oops, We Nicked Your Stuff.’

The climate crisis demands action, so I’d ban cars, planes, and anything that farts carbon. Everyone gets a free bicycle, painted red, with a basket for carrying manifestos. HS2? Cancelled. Instead, we’d build a nationwide network of steam-powered trams, decorated with murals of Che Guevara. Farmers would be paid to grow only lentils and wildflowers, with meat outlawed to save the planet (tofu ration cards for all). Single-use plastics? Gone. Every town would get a People’s Park, with mandatory tree-hugging sessions at dawn.

Inequality’s not just cash—it’s power. The BBC would be renamed the Bolshevik Broadcasting Collective, with me hosting a weekly folk music show. Media barons like Murdoch would be exiled to a remote Scottish island to knit their own newspapers. Political reform? Voting age down to 12, proportional representation, and the House of Lords replaced by a People’s Assembly of Vegans, Miners, and Bus Drivers. The monarchy? Put to a referendum, with voters choosing between King Charles or a democratically elected corgi.

Justice would be radical. The hostile environment for migrants? Dismantled. I’d open the borders, with a welcome pack of tea and a union membership form. Prisons would become communes, with inmates retrained as yoga instructors. The Chagos Islanders would get their islands back, plus a complimentary cruise ship. Windrush victims? Compensated with a personal apology from me, delivered by carrier pigeon.

Funding this? Easy. Tax the rich until they cry, then tax them again. Corporate tax at 90%, with Amazon’s and Google’s UK operations nationalised for fun. Military budget? Slashed to fund free sandals for all. Every penny would be accounted for in a 1,000-page People’s Budget, read aloud in town squares by poets. Trust issues? Sorted. I’d govern from a double-decker bus, touring Britain to hear your gripes over a pint of oat milk. Citizens’ assemblies would meet in every pub, with policies voted on via interpretive dance.

This isn’t just a plan—it’s a revolution wrapped in a cozy cardigan. It’s for the worker, the dreamer, the allotment warrior. If I were PM, Britain would be a kale-growing, bike-riding, folk-singing paradise.

Who’s with me? Let’s storm the barricades—or at least the local co-op.

Jeremy Corbyn is the nation’s most stubbornly unrepentant socialist, a lifelong backbencher turned allotment revolutionary who once led the Labour Party, accidentally sparked a mass youth movement, and somehow made beige an ideology. Known for his love of jam-making, poetry anthologies, and global peace with conditions, he now divides his time between campaigning for rail nationalisation, critiquing NATO with a highlighter, and hosting community film nights on the perils of capitalism. He remains the only politician whose manifesto included both free broadband and moral clarity, and he has never knowingly passed a statue without offering it a pamphlet.

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For this segment, The London Review of Books hands the keys to Number 10 to a rotating cast of guest contributors and asks: what would you do if you were Prime Minister—with a crushing Commons majority, no Lords to block you, and the civil service too stunned to resist? The answers range from the utopian to the unhinged, offering insight into the dreams, schemes, and nightmares that might unfold if politics were no obstacle and consequence merely theoretical.