There's a common trend among political commentators from Milo Yiannopoulos to Owen Jones that the voting public don't tend to think in terms of left and right anymore, so fighting for the centre ground makes little sense.
However, I do believe that people care about whether a political party is authoritarian or libertarian.
Labour have a problem here, that the Tories avoid. Labour leaders are often asked by the right wing press whether they consider themselves to be socialist. There's no good way to answer this. If they deny being socialist, they are accused of being dishonest or selling out their principles. However, admitting to being a socialist poses a serious problem.
Once you have a label such as "socialist" (or, God forbid, "communist"), you are boxed in. It's low hanging fruit then to point at Venezuela or the Soviet Union and ask the public: "is this what you want in Number 10?!"
The Conservatives avoid this because there's not really any ideology called "conservatism". You can claim to be conservative whilst having plenty of room for manoeuvre. Being a conservative lacks any content.
There's no disastrous conservative regime you can point out to the electorate. However, when the Labour leader is cast as a socialist, there is an instant connection made to authoritarianism. And since the public think in terms of an authoritarian/libertarian spectrum, this is bad news.
The Conservative Party may be objectively more authoritarian than Labour, yet they manage to avoid being perceived as such.
To remedy this, Labour need some flagship libertarian policies. For instance, they could promise the complete legalisation of recreational cannabis. The individual policy itself is unlikely to shift votes. Supporters of the policy will likely be young and already inclined to vote Labour (especially with Corbyn in charge). Those opposed to the policy are unlikely to be so against it that they abandon Labour altogether. It is likely that they simply think it goes too far. Perhaps they'd prefer decriminalisation or legalisation for medicinal cannabis only. The point is, it shouldn't cost that many votes.
What it will do, however, is overcome the perception that a Labour Prime Minister will lead a dictatorship style government. It will instead create the perception of Labour as the party of freedom, leaving very few positives for the Tories to claim for themselves.
