Elected: David Thomas envisualises a future where Jeremy Corbyn has taken the reigns of power following a second banking crash in 2016

The night sky over London was thick with choking black smoke, but in the hellish glow of the flames rising from a myriad burning buildings, the rioters, looters and demonstrators fighting on the city streets could just make out the United Nations helicopter taking Jeremy Corbyn away from 10 Downing Street to his retirement cottage in Ireland.

Not for him the Prime Minister’s Jaguar in which his hated Mrs Thatcher had departed on the night she, too, was deposed. All Government cars had long since been sold in a desperate bid to pay off the £3 trillion National Debt, after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank had refused to hand a bankrupt, basket-case Britain any more emergency loans.

In any case, the streets weren’t safe enough for a Prime Minister to drive along. Not since the police, furious at being unpaid for months, had gone on an indefinite strike.

People who saw Mr Corbyn as he said goodbye to his staff were shocked by his frailty. The strain of his thousand days in power had all but broken this 73-year-old man, the oldest Prime Minister since Churchill. His hands were trembling, his back bent. The look on his face was not one of anger or bitterness, instead he seemed baffled, bewildered and bemused. ‘I almost pity the old Commie,’ one American member of the UN peacekeeping force said. ‘He just can’t work out what went wrong.’

It had all seemed so different on that glorious day in May 2020 when Corbyn had stood on the doorstep of No 10 – by himself because his hatred of ‘all that personal stuff’ was so intense that he refused to be photographed with his third wife Laura Alvarez – and told the wildly cheering crowd: ‘This is a new dawn for the people of Britain.’

Corbyn’s chief of staff Owen Jones – a princeling of the Far Left elite as the son of two members of Militant Tendency and the grandson of a Communist – declared that the people had taken back their country. The Red Flag was hung from the windows of No 10. Russell Brand kept his garbled verbosity in check for once and simply tweeted: ‘YEEESSSSSS!!!!’

But perhaps the revellers should have paid more attention to the reason for Corbyn’s success. For it was the failure of even the mighty Chinese Communist Party to buck the laws of economics that had led to the China Crisis of 2016. The world’s second largest economy imploded, taking the rest of the world with it.

By the time the 2020 General Election came, the worst of the depression was over. But after four years of austerity and unemployment the electorate didn’t see it that way.

Voters believed Corbyn when he told them that their troubles were the fault of the super-rich, who grew ever wealthier while ordinary people were trapped in poverty.

The young in particular, galvanised by a brilliant social media campaign, had responded to this silver-bearded revolutionary who promised them free university education, no student debt and guaranteed jobs.

Money woes: In this imagined future, Britain is £3trillion in debt, and the price of bread has rocketed to £5 a loaf

An astonishing 83 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds turned out and gave him their vote. They, and the support of the 52 MPs from the Scottish National Party, were enough to get Corbyn into power.

And even if their elders were shocked when this passionate, lifelong republican point-blank refused to go to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, his young supporters were thrilled by such a visible symbol that things had changed. Here, at last, was a politician who was going to keep his promises.

‘This is quantitative easing for the people, not the bankers!’ he had declaimed to cheering fans, waving ‘Jez we can!’ banners.

And what promises they had been. Corbyn pledged to clamp down on once-legal tax avoidance as well as illegal tax evasion, claiming that a staggering £120 billion a year could be raised just by forcing the rich to pay their due.

He would renationalise the railways, scrap Britain’s nuclear deterrent and do away with independent schools and the state system’s academies in favour of a centrally controlled National Education Service.

Even more eye-catching was Corbyn’s scheme for a National Investment Bank to back a massive programme of public works and house building, funded by the simple expedient of ordering the Bank of England to print more money.

‘This is quantitative easing for the people, not the bankers!’ he had declaimed to cheering fans, waving ‘Jez we can!’ banners.

A plan to impose rent controls on private landlords had proved hugely popular, as was a total ban on fracking. And the same women who had once thronged Mumsnet to say how sexy they found Corbyn’s passionate commitment to his beliefs were delighted by his promise of a ‘gender-balanced Cabinet’. But as with all revolutions, there were casualties. The Labour establishment had persuaded themselves that somehow Corbyn could be controlled.

They hoped that wise heads such as the veteran party fixer Tom Watson or Corbyn’s rival for the leadership, Andy Burnham, would be the stabilising forces in the new Labour Cabinet and rein in some of the Corbynistas’ wilder fantasies. But that was to reckon without the Hard Left’s ruthlessness at eliminating opponents.

Riots: The street of Britain in 2023 are no longer safe since the police, furious at being unpaid for months, had gone on an indefinite strike (Pictured: clashes in Athens earlier this year)

The tide of extremist party members who had joined Labour to make Corbyn leader swept away anyone and everyone who had any link with the hated Blairite past.

One moderate, centre-left MP after another was deselected by constituency activists. Night after the night the TV news showed them making the slow walk from their front doors to the cameras at their gates, waiting for their confessions of failure.

In the run-up to the 2020 Election, Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, had issued warnings that no Government, of any party, could buck the markets. Printing money to fund otherwise unaffordable policies ‘had the same effects in every country that’s tried it, from Argentina to Zimbabwe’.

‘If you drastically increase the amount of money in the system, you drastically reduce its value. So you need more money to buy the same goods. That causes hyper-inflation. And with that comes disaster’.

Within days of becoming Prime Minister, Corbyn took his revenge. He stripped the Bank of its political independence, renamed it The People’s Bank and sacked Carney.

As he strode through Heathrow’s Terminal Five on the way to the plane returning him to his native Canada, Carney was confronted by a BBC reporter who asked: ‘How do respond to the Prime Minister’s comments that it’s the people, not the financial markets who control the UK economy?’

Carney gave a wry smile and said: ‘Well, I guess we’ll just have to see what the markets have to say about that.’

They soon spoke, loud and clear. The seizure of the Bank told Britain’s creditors that their money was no longer safe. The pound plummeted in value. There was a global sell-off of Treasury ‘gilts’, the Government bonds that finance the UK’s National Debt. The Government found that, instead of paying interest rates of less than two per cent, it was suddenly contending with Greek-style borrowing costs of ten per cent or more. Pundits spoke of a ‘Wonga economy’ as debt repayments alone became the Government’s single biggest expenditure.

Broken friendships: American President Donald Trump says he can no longer rely on Britain as a reliable ally

Within weeks of the Election money was flooding out of Britain as the billionaires who had seen London as a safe haven realised that it had suddenly become a much more dangerous place.

The capital’s property prices started tumbling as the lavish mansions of Russian oligarchs, and the overpriced apartments bought off-plan by Far Eastern investors, deluged the market.

British Airways reported record ticket sales on first-class flights out of London. And none at all coming back. One Direction went off on a US tour and never returned.

‘We will use these empty, unwanted homes for social housing,’ Corbyn said. That earned him plaudits with the public, who had yet to appreciate how the collapse of the London luxury property market would have an impact on the value of ordinary homes across the country. But the rest of the world was less impressed.

The IMF called for drastic cuts in Government spending. The Germans made it plain that Britain could not escape the medicine taken by other EU nations that had found themselves in crisis. London would have to take its orders from Berlin, just as Athens had done. Corbyn simply refused. In an emergency Budget, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Diane Abbott, revoked the tax exemptions given to foreign residents in the UK, announced a Capital Levy and Land Tax and raised the top rate of Income Tax to 95 per cent on incomes over a million pounds.

‘For too long,’ Corbyn said, ‘the poor have borne the brunt of the cuts. Now let’s have some austerity for the rich.’

Corbyn also attempted to reintroduce exchange controls, limiting the amount of money anyone could take out of the country. But in a world of instant electronic transfers, money was simply too mobile to be kept in any one place.

And now it really began to move. In a throwback to the 1970s – the last time the Labour Left tried to defy economic reality – the rich proved why sky-high tax rates raise rock-bottom revenues.

Faced with giving 95 per cent of their money to Chancellor Abbott, they simply left the country and paid nothing at all.

Removed: Andy Burnham was swept away by those extremists who hated Labour's Blairite past

British Airways reported record ticket sales on first-class flights out of London. And none at all coming back. One Direction went off on a US tour and never returned. Multi-millionaire comedians who had once cheered Labour couldn’t see the joke when confronted with a Labour Prime Minister who actually meant what he said about soaking the rich. The summer transfer window saw the Premier League’s biggest stars departing en masse. One club after another came up for sale as its Arab or American owners ran for the exit. A multi-billion pound league became a two-bob back-water with second-rate players, poverty-stricken clubs and half-empty stadiums.

The windows of Bond Street’s designer fashion stores were boarded up. The office-blocks of the City and Canary Wharf emptied as the banks that Corbyn hated so much left London, taking their high-spending, tax-paying employees with them.

It became a bitter joke that Corbyn, who loved immigrants and asylum seekers so much, had solved the immigration crisis at a stroke. He’d made Britain a country no sane immigrant would ever go near.

The Government’s debt payments were rocketing as the economy was contracting. Tax revenues were way down, unemployment and the cost of welfare way up.

Inflation approached 25 per cent. It was a perfect storm of financial catastrophe. But that wasn’t Corbyn’s only problem.

Ever since the darkest days of the Second World War, Britain and America had been bound by the Special Relationship. But to Corbyn, the US was not our closest friend but our most wicked enemy. And the feeling soon became mutual.

With Corbyn abandoning the nuclear deterrent and slashing defence spending, US President Donald Trump announced that America could no longer regard Britain as a reliable ally.

Corbyn did not have time to leave Nato of his own will. When he sold our nuclear submarines to President Putin at a cut-price rate, Trump called for the UK’s expulsion from Nato and imposed an embargo on the import of British goods.

Corbyn was entirely unrepentant, and his defiance delighted his supporters. He made a grovelling apology for the ‘illegal’ Iraq War, promised that British soldiers would never again go to war in support of American imperialism and called for the prosecution of the ‘war criminal’ Tony Blair.

Tragedy: One Direction - who have now been together for 13 years - flew to America and never returned

His fans loved the contrast between the billionaire Trump and Comrade Corbyn, happily digging the vegetable beds at his allotment.But Corbyn’s foreign policy did not sit so well with the public. Protesting that he had never been guilty of anti-Semitism, the Prime Minister declared that Israel was the chief obstacle to peace in the Middle East, and described Islamic State as a partner in the peace process. He was photographed shaking hands at No 10 with the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist organisations.

‘Let’s be thankful for small mercies, at least Her Majesty won’t have to dine with these ghastly people,’ sighed one Palace official. Corbyn had, of course, abolished all state banquets.

As the third year of the Corbyn administration dawned, public unease was rapidly turning to outright opposition. His allies in the public sector unions were disgusted when their members’ salaries were cut by a quarter, then half, then two-thirds as the Treasury ran out of money to pay them.

‘Give him enough rope and he will hang himself,’ a Blairite had said when Corbyn was elected Labour leader. That was true enough. The only problem was that he had hung the country too.

A loaf of bread passed the £5 barrier. Blackouts became increasingly common. The nation’s few remaining factories fell idle. Hospitals could no longer afford to pay for basic medicines.

Declaring a ‘siege economy’, and ‘socialism in one country’, an increasingly exhausted Corbyn made desperate pleas for the people to rally against the forces of capitalism. But the introduction of food rationing was the final straw.

The disorder that had played out on the streets of Athens a decade earlier were now replayed on a vastly bigger scale. As riots became commonplace, families lived under self-imposed curfew.

Meanwhile, the media reporting the growing opposition to the Government, and the whispers of a ‘no confidence’ vote in the House of Commons, were accused of treachery. The Far Left had always believed that their inability to win elections was due to the machinations of Right-wing press barons who poisoned the people’s minds against them.

They needed little excuse to censor the press and broadcasters in the interest of ‘fair, honest and truthful reporting’. A blogger who wrote that Britain was descending to the level of Zimbabwe was prosecuted for libelling the memory of President Robert Mugabe.

Ironically, it was Corbyn’s better nature that finally defeated him. He lacked the Stalinist zeal to force the people into submission. Like his hero Tony Benn, he still believed in Parliament and refused to give in to radical Ministers who called for its abolition, or, at least, the banning of the Conservative Party.

And thus, on the day it was announced that international peacekeepers would have to be brought in to help bring order back to Britain, the Leader of the Opposition, Boris Johnson, was able to call a vote of no confidence, secure the necessary two-thirds majority and force a General Election.