IT beggars belief that Jeremy Corbyn’s political stance can be dismissed as outdated by his detractors.

The overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to his public appearances provide evidence that something new and exciting is happening.

Listening to his three rivals or the gaggle of New Labour former leaders dredged up from justified obscurity, you would think that Corbyn belonged to another historical era.

Yet, if he does, why are people attending his rallies in their tens of thousands and signing up as Labour members or supporters in their hundreds of thousands?

The Islington North MP eschews personal abuse and name-calling, preferring to concentrate on policy issues.

As he makes clear in today’s Morning Star, he believes that government has a strategic role in the economy and that its goals should include full employment, a realistic living wage, planned investment in modern, environmentally sustainable sectors, satisfying people’s housing needs and encouraging human solidarity at home and abroad.

That vision has captured public imagination but is dismissed by New Labour opponents as unrealistic, unachievable and starry-eyed.

Despite their calls to “accept” the electorate’s judgement in May — meaning to swallow the austerity agenda — their dire warnings of Labour being unelectable if Corbyn wins sit uneasily alongside their own inability to enthuse voters.

Andy Burnham has at least indicated that he would not boycott a Corbyn-led shadow cabinet, but he counsels against the “real danger” of returning to the mid-1980s.

Labour’s problems didn’t begin with the 1983 election. It lost office in 1979 when prime minister Jim Callaghan imposed Tory-style neoliberal policies, attacking low-paid public-service workers.

By 1983, Labour had to contend not only with the Tories and Liberals but with its own right-wing SDP breakaway, of which Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee was a member.

She maintains a constant barrage of criticism against Corbyn and backs Yvette Cooper as the best bet to beat him.
Cooper claims feminist credentials, urging that the family be made the centre of economic policy, whatever that means.

She opposes public ownership of gas and electricity industries since this would simply mean transferring control from “a group of old white men in an energy company to a group of old white men in Whitehall.”

The shadow home secretary berates the spectre of Labour being led by two white men, but her faux-radicalism is exposed by the memory that, when Diane Abbott stood for leader, Cooper plumped for a white man instead.

Liz Kendall insists that a Corbyn victory would amount to Labour submitting “our resignation letter to the British people as a serious party of government.”

The shadow health minister asserts that “our values and principles are needed more than ever before” but is unwilling to move beyond the pro-austerity position that consigned the party to two election defeats.

Her only enthusiasm for public expenditure is on nuclear weapons and military spending of 2 per cent of GDP.

Former ministers who put the boot into Corbyn act as though they believe they retain credibility.

But these are the people who, through their overseas wars, expenses scandals and offering themselves to the highest corporate bidders, have alienated voters.

They will doubtless press ahead with Project Fear as their last remaining weapon, given the toxicity of their records.

Even if opinion polls are vindicated and Corbyn romps home, the ghosts of yesteryear will work to undermine him.

But the tidal wave of support for his anti-austerity stance can overwhelm petty manoeuvres and encourage a mass united alternative to neoliberal orthodoxy.