If you remove Corbyn from the equation (I appreciate he's a very divisive figure), and simply judge Labour on the merits of its 2019 manifesto, it had a lot going for it, and represented a massively better deal for 'normal people' than the Tories' offering, and I think the evidence of that is pretty clear from the last four years. I honestly think the 2019 general election may have been the last time the UK had the chance to vote for a genuinely transformative political party that would have worked on their behalf to make their lives better, instead it got Johnson and his cronies, who 'got Brexit done' (their one big selling point) so well that it's blown a permanent 4-6% hole in the UK's economy. (That's many tens of billions pounds per year lost, every year, in perpetuity, from the UK's coffers.)
We now know, with absolute certainty (thanks to the enquiry) that the government's handling of Covid was disastrous on almost every conceivable level, it's all there in black and white. 'Corbyn would have been worse' isn't an answer, we had to the Tories and they were shit, and I find it hard to believe Corbyn would have been partying in Number 10 during the depths of the crisis, or finding himself at parties he didn't realise were parties (remember that's the line Johnson used), whilst the people of Britain sacrificed so much, and died in far bigger numbers than they should have done.
(As an aside, 'no one cares about the parties' isn't an answer either, in all the polling, that is still one of the biggest hate-points people have for the Tories, because Covid was so
personal for so many people. It's hard to overstate how much Johnson's antics over Covid has mortally wounded the Conservative Party.)
On nationalisation, the railways are slowly being renationalised by stealth anyway, Thames Water is likely going to go under at some point without massive state intervention, as the foreign vultures have extracted as much money from it as possible and saddled it with huge amounts of debt, as the rivers and lakes under its remit overflow with literal shit.
We also need to remember that whilst the 2019 election was something of a wipeout in seats in the House of Commons terms for Labour, in terms of votes cast it was nowhere near as biblical as the MP count would suggest, thanks to our abominable FPTP electoral system. (New Labour not getting rid of that during their time in power is a shocking dereliction of duty IMO.)
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A lot of people liked what Corbyn was selling, but I readily concede not enough to come close to winning an election, and certainly not in the relatively small number of seats that actually decide general elections in the UK. And now we have a very 'safe' centrist offering from Starmer, still far preferable to the Tories, but not in the same league as the positive change that Corbyn's Labour would have introduced.
And what did the Tories gift us in the wake of Johnson? We had the comical Liz Truss premiership, a woman whose name is the setup, delivery and punchline of a joke all by itself, and finally gave the 'hard right free marketers' a chance to show us what they were made of, and the free markets took one look, decided she was batshit crazy and promptly put the UK into the financial loony bin, from which it is still trying to fully remove itself. (Although she did, very conveniently for Labour, single-handedly destroy the Tories being able to claim to be the party of economic competence.)
Now it's Sunak, who is a pretty dismal politician and hamstrung by the various crackpot factions within his party, yet another Prime Minister no one voted for, and currently looks set to only succeed on one of his big five policy points, that to halve inflation, which is up there with promising that the month of July will follow the month of June, such is its inevitability.
So yeah, against that backdrop, I'd have very much liked to see a Labour government in 2019.
