Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn should forget railways if he wants Labour to be a success

Jeremy Corbyn’s first policy pronouncement as Labour leader hasn’t been all that surprising: he wants a ‘People’s Railway’ that will bring the railways back into public ownership line by line. He will have noticed the excited noises that party members made at hustings whenever he mentioned rail renationalisation – and the impatient sighs from the same audience when his rivals for the leadership were cool on the issue.

But as Peter Kellner explains today, even though this individual measure is popular, unless Corbyn is able to deal with the public’s fundamental lack of trust in Labour over the economy, he could promise voters every single retail offer they’ve ever dreamed of and they still wouldn’t back his party. This was what lulled Labour into a false sense of security earlier this year: voters liked the party’s retail offers, but still said they preferred the Tories on the economy and on leadership. So to do the same thing as the Miliband administration did, which was to dangle nice-looking things at voters in order to distract them from their worries about the economy, would be rather foolish.

Of course, this is just the first pronouncement from Jeremy Corbyn – and as his supporters always say, rather furiously, it is too early to say what his leadership will look like, really. But given most accept that the party didn’t act early enough to stop a Tory narrative about Labour’s overspending taking hold after the 2010 election, Corbyn should be wary of missing his opportunity to have a go at countering a similar narrative that the Tories are constructing now.

His supporters believe that he should seek to persuade voters who are largely supportive of austerity that it is in fact bad. This will arguably take more time than just rehabilitating Labour’s image as a party that cares about cutting the deficit – if it is indeed possible.

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