BLUE Labour’s arguments that Jeremy Corbyn is unfit to lead the party include claims that he is too old, lacks economic knowledge and would not attract voters.

Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall may have attended Oxbridge but they seem to lack knowledge of Labour’s history. In the general election of 1931, Labour was reduced to 51 seats. George Lansbury, at the age of 71, was elected leader — and was very successful.

Born in 1859 and raised in poverty in east London, Lansbury was so often out of work that, in his 20s in 1884, he, his wife Bessie and their children emigrated to Australia. He found little employment, although he was paid to help prepare the Brisbane cricket pitch for a test match against England. Eventually they returned to England. By this time, Lansbury had taken to politics and he became a socialist, read Marx — despite his lack of education — and became a long-serving local councillor.

He was a socialist evangelist. When not working, he travelled all over Britain attracting large audiences. He admired Keir Hardie and often spoke in Scotland. A report of a talk in Paisley reveals his idealism: “The idea of the socialist is not pulling down but building up: we want men and women all over the world to join hands together until we have built a new society, a new order which will bring the best means for a new life.”

Paisley invited him to stand as their parliamentary candidate. However, his heart was set on Bow in east London and in December 1910 he was elected to the House of Commons.

He was also a strong and broad-minded Christian, an outspoken critic of Britain’s involvement in WWI and condemned the support given by many churches. In his popular book Your Part in Poverty, published in 1917, he continued that the war had reinforced poverty and that opposing poverty and inequality was central to Christianity as well as socialism.

By this time he had lost his parliamentary seat, but not his zeal for socialism. He was involved in the launching of the Daily Herald and later edited it. In 1921 he served a term in prison for, as a councillor, refusing to hand public money to a central committee which mainly benefited the rich. In 1922 he was back in the Commons and in Labour’s minority government of 1929 he was one of its few ministerial successes.

During 1929 an economic depression in the US soon reached Britain as it cut loans to and trade with it. Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald and a few other Labour MPs sided with the Tories and Liberals to form a National Party intent on cutting state expenditure. In the election of 1931, the National government had 521 seats and Labour 52.

Lansbury became Labour leader and, despite his age, displayed fight and energy. Within his small party he organised a telling opposition with himself the leading speaker in the Commons. He attacked government policy for protecting the rich and punishing the poor. Some support was won back and in a by-election a pacifist Labour candidate overturned a National majority of 14,000.

In 1933 over 200 seats were gained in local elections and a year later the London City Council was won for the first time. Lansbury toured to give speeches which were well-received. But in 1933 his beloved Bessie died. Then his politically active son Edgar died from cancer (Edgar’s daughter, Angela, is now famous as a film and TV star). Lansbury himself suffered a broken thigh which had a long-lasting effect. In 1935, with the party having to decide its future policy towards the threat of Germany, he resigned. He was delighted when Clem Attlee, whom he had taken under his wing, succeeded him. Attlee was public school and Oxbridge, but he had opted to work with voluntary bodies in London’s East End and to be a councillor. The same Attlee was to be prime minister in 1945.

Labour’s Michael Foot concluded: “The rebuilding of the party after the 1931 catastrophe was heroic: a combined feat of idealism and pragmatism and George Lansbury was its embodiment.”

More surprisingly, AJ Cummins of the anti-Labour News Chronicle, who had predicted that Lansbury’s lack of experience and limited intellectual abilities would lead to disaster, subsequently acknowledged: “His genuine moral sense, his passionate sincerity ... has done more than any other person to create a new opposition to Toryism.”

While leader and throughout his political life, Lansbury had two outstanding features. First, he held that material inequality should be abolished and that people should respect each other. Second, that these principles or objectives had to be applied to our own lifestyles. Lansbury always lived alongside those in need. He did not seek friends among the powerful but among ordinary people. In his last years he wrote of his friends: “None of us will get rich. When I die I shall leave no property, no money, but we shall be able to say that with thousands of other men and women we have striven to lift up the poor and oppressed and to bring help to those in need.”

Corbyn is no twin of Lansbury, but like him he is on the side of the poor and appeals to ordinary people. My parents spoke of Lansbury as “Good Old George.” I have voted for Good Old Jeremy.

• Bob Holman is the author of Good Old George: The Life of George Lansbury (Lion, 1996).