The Right needs a new language to sell capitalism to the aspirational classes of 2018

I have some bad news for you, my dear readers. Corbynomics is actually popular – shockingly so to those of us who haven’t drunk the kool-aid. It’s not that the electorate has suddenly caught Marxism: the vast majority of voters still support a mixed economy, want to earn and own more, and distrust Jeremy Corbyn himself.

Yet many of his policies resonate, appealing even to some Tory voters and across acquisitive Middle England. Populism is often Left-wing and always popular. Some of this support is frothy: a proper campaign by a proper Tory party would change minds by marshalling fresh arguments that voters actually relate to.

But Matthew Goodwin, a brilliant young Brexit Britain expert at the University of Kent, has collated all of the recent psephological evidence, and it is disastrous for supporters of free-markets such as myself. Take Labour’s idiotic proposal to confiscate 10 per cent of the equity of all but the smallest firms, transferring the shares into a staff fund that would pay up to £500 in dividends to each worker and the remainder to the state.

No fewer than 54 per cent believe it to be a good idea, against just 29 per cent who don’t – and among Tories, it’s 39 per cent for and 27 per cent against. Of course, nobody has campaigned against this idea, or explained why it would lead to job losses, lower wages, reduced investment, and huge cuts to pension pots. But for now it’s highly popular, as is Corbyn’s proposal to tax second homes more, a move which will do nothing to make property affordable for the young.

There is also public support for compelling firms to include workers on their boards, even though such policies never work. As to nationalisation, most back the idea that Royal Mail, the water and energy firms, the railways and even buses should be run by the public sector, despite the state’s abject record of failure when it was directly in charge.