By Graham Smith

It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking 13.

Polling day was approaching.  Somehow the world had been on fast-forward for 48 mind-bending months and now 3^rd May 2029 was set to become a pivotal moment in British political history.

The 3^rd May 2029 would see a general election, local council elections and the election of a South West Peninsula Mayor all due to be held on the same day.

Cornwall’s four Labour MPs had long ago abandoned hope of re-election and were planning new lives outside of politics.  Many of Cornwall’s 87 councillors were also set to retire.

According to the opinion polls, the general election and local elections were going to be a close contest between Nigel Farage’s far-Right Reform UK party and the relatively new Left-of-centre party, called “Imagine,” founded by Jeremy Corbyn a few years earlier.

By the standards of most social democratic political parties in north west Europe, Imagine’s policies were fairly mainstream.   But what had surprised everyone was how many people, particularly the young, had flocked to its banner.  From nowhere, it had become Britain's largest individual-based political party.  The question was whether those membership figures would translate into votes.

Its manifesto had been admirably clear and fully costed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.  It was a near carbon copy of the 126-page 2017 Labour Party manifesto, titled “For The Many, Not The Few.” (download it here:  Labour-Party-Manifesto-2017 )

Taxes would rise in a major redistribution of wealth from the few to the many.  There would be a new tax on land, replacing council tax, as the main mechanism for funding local government.

Mr Corbyn himself, only a few weeks away from his 80^th birthday, had become a totemic figure and Imagine – effectively a loose coalition of wildly argumentative groups - was fighting the election without a defined leader.

If Imagine won, no-one knew who would become Prime Minister.

Labour looked set to come third, the Conservative Party fourth and the Liberal Democrats fifth.

The Green Party had decided to focus on only a handful of target seats and was urging its supporters to back Imagine.

Pundits speculated endlessly about whether Imagine would be able to form a coalition with Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens or whether Reform UK and the Conservatives would prevail.

Some Liberal Democrats had said they would prefer to join a Right-of-centre coalition than a Left-of-centre coalition.

The arithmetic of Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system for general elections – winner takes all – had been made even more random by the participation, for the first time, of 16 and 17-year-olds.

At the Newquay Boardmasters’ festival, the chanting of “Oh!  Jeremy Corbyn!” had become an annual ritual.

Young people were overwhelmingly in support of Imagine while pensioners were overwhelmingly in support of Reform UK.

The launch of Imagine three years earlier had seen an explosion of interest in politics across the country.

In Cornwall, Imagine was contesting all 87 divisions in the council elections.  Imagine was also the clear favourite to win the mayoral election, which was using a voting system of proportional representation.

Imagine’s Cornwall Council manifesto bore a remarkable similarity to a 23-page document, never previously published, which had been produced by local Labour activists in 2019.

This manifesto had been inspired during the early part of Mr Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party but was dropped following the purge of Lefty radicals prior to the 2021 local elections.

Essentially just a collection of creative ideas stemming from a 150-strong conference at Heartlands in March 2019, the document was certainly imaginative.

On the economy, it sought to develop the “pasty pound” and retain as much public spending as possible within Cornwall.  This had been based on what was in 2019 known as the “Preston model” of a local, circular economy.

There had been much talk of a “Green economy” to develop Cornwall’s potential wealth of renewable energy sources.  While the Labour government of the previous four years had talked at length about this, its investment had gone to Scotland and Wales and not to Cornwall.

Perhaps surprisingly, the 2019 policy document took very seriously some of the law and order issues which had typically and previously been the preserve of the Right.  Among the ideas it sought to develop was the construction of a new remand centre in Cornwall, particularly for women who otherwise had to be transported away from their families to Bristol.

The document had even suggested the possibility of Cornwall becoming a pilot area for the decriminalisation of cannabis and using one of the council farms for the commercial growing of hemp.

In March 2019, arguments in favour of a tourism tax were considered far too radical.  But by May 2029, the idea was mainstream and was being promoted by all political parties except Reform UK.

Some of Imagine’s older activists were veterans of the campaign, ten years earlier, to save the National Health Service and prevent its privatisation.  In 2017, those activists had been labelled “hard Left” by Cornwall’s then-Tory MPs.

Imagine was pledged to refocus NHS spending on local facilities, such as GP surgeries and minor injury units, reversing the concentration of healthcare on the Royal Cornwall hospital site in Truro.

The March 2019 rag-bag of ideas had called for the abolition of Healthwatch Cornwall on the grounds that it was ineffective.  By 2029 it had already been abolished and replaced by something which looked remarkably similar to the old, but relatively democratic, Community Health Councils.

Imagine was going to renationalise South West Water and Western Power.

The Right To Buy council houses, abolished in Scotland in 2016, would also be abolished throughout England.

University tuition fees would be scrapped.

Fiscal devolution meant that future VAT receipts, and National Insurance contributions, would be retained by the South West Peninsula Mayoral authority.

Property developers were going to be required to fit as standard solar panels on the rooves of all new homes.

Many pundits observed that an Imagine-led government would take Britain back to the 1970s, but they were divided over whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing.  It rather depended on whether you thought free education and healthcare, secure housing and employment, and full trade union rights were concepts worth voting for.

Unfortunately there was nothing that could be done about the England men’s football team, although Imagine’s policy of putting clubs in the hands of their supporters bode well for re-invigorating grassroots’ interest and ending the dominance of US and Arab billionaires.

The 7^th November 2028 had seen the election of a new President of the United States, subject to continuing legal challenge from the defeated former President Trump, aged 83.

Meanwhile there was more distressing news from Palestine (continued page 94…)

grahamsmith@cornwallreports.co.uk