Monday 06 February 2017 5:00 am

Jeremy Corbyn is wrong: The system isn’t rigged

Editor in Chief

Jeremy Corbyn began the new year embarking on something of a rebrand, with aides describing how the Labour leader would move to emulate Donald Trump.

This wasn't about any policy shifts, rather the strategy was to borrow from the US President's playbook of straight-talking, honest-tweeting, anti-establishment positioning.

It's an approach that sees Corbyn and his top team attacking what they describe as a rigged economy and a rigged political system. In Corbyn-speak, the sinister forces behind this apparent manipulation are described as “the people who run Britain” and “the powerful”.

These new rhetorical flourishes can be heard whenever a member of Corbyn's (dwindling) team of loyal shadow ministers appears on Question Time or makes a speech. It's supposed to present Labour as some kind of insurgent force, committed to bringing down the pillars that uphold a cosy, corrupt elite.

The problem is this tactic represents a blunt and misleading approach to a complex range of issues. It isn't the first time a political party has favoured simplicity over nuance, but for Corbyn's Labour it feels more like a retreat to easy rabble-rousing rather than a coherent new proposition based on sensible policy analysis.

Yes, certain sectors of our economy are mired in the bog of corporatism, stagnating in a lack of competition and a web of complexity (one thinks of the energy market and rail travel as examples that Labour rightly highlight) but the solution is not to try and convince the electorate that a handful of individuals (“the people who run Britain”) are colluding to keep them downtrodden, screw the poor and – in Corbyn's words – “line the pockets of their friends” while they're at it.

This caricature of 'us versus them' – the people versus a rotten establishment – doesn't work in a country that saw hundreds of thousands of new businesses launch last year, and in which the incumbent government enjoys a record poll lead.

Sectors of the UK economy may have their problems (some of which require government attention, many more of which are exacerbated by it) but the biggest attempt to rig the system that anyone's proposing is Corbyn's own idea of borrowing £500bn to build a state-run bank and direct economic activity from Whitehall.