LABOUR leadership candidates Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper see themselves as the voices of modern Britain, so they hark back to the Victorian era for their economic model.

Kendall accuses Jeremy Corbyn, who says that Labour “shouldn’t shy away from public participation, public investment in industry and public control of the railways,” of backing “a throwback to the past.”

Cooper sniffs that Labour doesn’t need to “return to the days of British Leyland,” which was created by Harold Wilson’s Labour government because the private owners of its constituent companies had made a pig’s ear of running them.

She mutters vaguely about embracing the future — “this is not the time to be reactionary and cling to the past.”

Unlike herself and Kendall, who are welded unshakably to private ownership of the “means of production, distribution and exchange,” as described in Labour’s old clause four, Corbyn is positively disposed to public ownership.

He is, according to the billionaire media, an unreconstructed Stalinist, Trotskyist or virtually any –ist that sounds threateningly foreign.

Corbyn makes public ownership sound a reasonable proposition rather than the savage Bolshevik war cry for class conflict and blood flowing through our streets that Tory press barons just know it is.

So when he suggests at one crowded rally after another that public ownership of our railways might offer a better return than privatisation, fragmentation and higher state subsidies than existed under public ownership, people are inclined to think he makes sense.

To the chagrin of the media barons, most people backed public ownership of rail and utilities even before Corbyn’s views were given unprecedentedly wide coverage.

So the Islington North MP was able to tap into a vein of public opinion of around 65 per cent that, strangely enough, was ignored totally by the leaders of all major parliamentary parties.

But he should beware, says Establishment psephologist and YouGov president Peter Kellner, because, “at one level Jeremy Corbyn is going with the grain of public opinion.

“The trouble is that, if people think he’s doing it as a left-wing ideological move, it wouldn’t be as popular as if, say, David Cameron did it.”

This intriguing picture of Labour members scratching their heads wondering before voting whether Corbyn backs an eminently reasonable position because it makes sense or, more sinisterly, because it meshes with a left-wing ideology exists only in Kellner’s imagination.

But he and other pro-capitalist ideologues won’t rest until that seed is planted and nurtured in Labour members’ consciousness.

What irks Kellner, Tory media moguls and the parliamentary elite is that Corbyn has shattered unacknowledged but generally effective censorship.

Returning rail to public ownership may well have overwhelming backing across Britain, but the case for it is made by no mainstream party so it must be extremist and outlandish.

Tony Benn used to observe on a regular basis that public opinion was to the left of the Labour Party. His view has been vindicated by developments in the Corbyn campaign.

Like Benn, Corbyn eschews personal attacks and, in common with the late great sage, he has been the victim recently of some vile calumnies.

This will continue unabated throughout the leadership campaign.

His detractors will examine every word he says to try to misrepresent his views as destructive or unbalanced, simply because the partisans of privilege and exploitation know no other way to behave.

The more shrill and demented that the attacks become the closer it is that Corbyn is to victory.