It's too easily countered though.
Cameron won the last election on two simple points:
- Spending is irresponsible
- Labour want to spend
If May has the sense to push that line (and I'm not convinced she does) then it's game over for Corbyn because he can't run on ant platform that doesn't involve massive spending.
Well, that's where the branding comes in. The economic case for Brexit was shaky in the eyes of a large majority of consulted experts, but pointing out the irresponsibility of risking economic damage to pursue excessively vague notions of sovereignty held no water with 52% of the voters that took part in the referendum. Because the misty-eyed notions of sovereignty and Britain punching above its weight on the world stage, free from Brussels and their meddling, free from Eastern European immigrants and their lack of vowels, free from obligations and their concurrent commitments....those notions held weight. Because they were sold well. Their logical premises were often (not always, but often) faulty, but they were sold expertly well.
I don't think Corbyn will stand a chance if he fights a simple one-two approach like the one you've outlined on the premise of refuting the argument, because truth be told he can't - Labour intend to spend, no doubt about it. Which is why he needs to pivot around those accusations to other key buzzwords.
Spending is irresponsible, so Labour want to spend, comes the accusation. Fine. Ignore it, downplay it, lie about it in a way that makes it lose visibility, *drive it off screens*. Instead, pivot around and single-mindedly, relentlessly attack the Tories on the NHS (for example). Lay it on thick - the Tories want to introduce American-style privatization, they want to strip you of the right to free healthcare your parents and grand-parents enjoyed, they want to let you collapse and die in the your cities, towns and villages while wealthy, drunken toffs sneeringly trample you with their horses on the way to their latest fox hunt.
Labour want to keep the NHS free at the point of use always and forever - not only that, they want to fund it, make it better than ever, hire more nurses, more doctors, shorten waiting times, improve response times, improve social care services, and give back to Britain's people what the Tories have been working hard to take away and give to the ultra-rich, to the 1%.
This approach chimes with what the public largely think about the NHS - the BSA survey for 2016 revealed that roughly 63% of people were still satisfied with the NHS overall, with one of the biggest reasons being its status as free at the point of use, and with one of their biggest concerns (in the top three) actually being the lack of funding it was getting. No one wants more privatization, even if it might help improve service delivery, if it impinges on the former - so lie, and lay it on thick. The NHS is being starved - the Tories are starving it so they can sell it off to their rich pals, and then they have the cheek to blame Labour for wanting to reverse that?!? The cads.
Done. Then move on to education, another weak area for May.
Use the Brexit strategy - obfuscate, deride, and then sensationalize everything you can possibly sensationalize while making your own message snappy, memorable and connected to a vague ideal that people want to hold. Brand like you've never branded before. Believe what you say, say it loud, and keep saying it regardless of whether people point out that you're wrong or ill-founded. Drown them out.
The problem with Ed Miliband is that he didn't lay it on thick enough - to a large extent, he was still hampered by his status as a relative insider, his privileged socio-economic background, his status as a New Labour man (even though he was further left than many of his peers), his reliance on policy details as opposed to broad-strokes rhetoric and his reluctance to go all in like, say, Farage did when he decided to influence the public in the build-up to Brexit. So Cameron was able to corner him and beat him using the fairly solid approach of calling Labour irresponsible at a time when the relatively moderate coalition government had tempered people's fears about the Conservatives undoing all the advances New Labour had made over the previous decade in their rush to fight the deficit.
Now, make no mistake, Corbyn faces a massively uphill battle to do even as well as Ed did - there is too much against him, and too much by way of momentum for May. But if he wants to have a chance of succeeding, he needs to learn from Brexit. Corner May on Brexit itself - insist you're going to make a clean break with no unnecessary compromises, much like May. Commit to Brexit, 100%. Then move on to reversing the Tories' (well-thought out) attempts to seize a lot of Labour's ideological space by reverting to a form of One-Nation Toryism - outflank them and hit them in areas where the public still harbor an instinctual distrust of the Tories (education, the NHS and so on) while avoiding your own weaknesses like the f*cking plague (foreign policy, the defense of the realm and so on). Shout loud, and shout longer.
